A Grammer of Gameplay - Koster

[Sheaf]

Originally Posted by Gnome Eater

That's exactly what I said. They continued making good games and selling well, while Ion Storm games all sucked major dick even with all the hyping John Romero did about Dai Katana. Dai Katana had shitty gameplay, shitty story, shitty bugs, the game flat out sucked dick and was more hyped than any title except perhaps Duke Nuke 'em forever.

You obviously missed my point. Quake1 was so successful that id could have sold Duck Hunt and made millions. Unfortunately, they basically just repackaged Quake1 with a better engine, better graphics, worse level design, and worse gameplay, calling it Quake2.

[Eomer]

He's a hack who just happened to work at one time with a bunch of wunderkinds, and he got married to a big tittie chick Quake player.

Did he marry Case? Can't remember. Either way, he just recently got married to an 18 year old from Romania, I believe. That he'd been dating for several years prior to her 18th birthday. No, I am not making this up. No, I don't know if this makes him cooler or even more pathetic. I'm leaning towards pathetic, but I haven't seen any pics of her.

And I haven't seen much mention of him getting the boot from Midway, where he'd gone to work for a year or two on I believe a Gauntlet game. Seriously, the guy is a joke.

[Frax]

This book is sure to sell at least five or six copies, but most likely will end up as a texbook in some game theory class in some colleges, there by ensuring the doom of all future MMO development.

[Venjenz]

Originally Posted by Sheaf

Before you spout off nonsense as though you actually know anything, you might want to learn how to spell American Mcgee's name. Or at least mention Tom Hall, one the four founders of id who was a key part of making those games.

Sorry about the spelling of Mcgee's name. I have a friend with the spelling I used, and it was stuck in my brain.

Tom Hall left id over creative differences before Doom was built. He was on the losing side of an argument with Carmack and Romero about the complexity of the game. He wanted complex, they wanted simple. They won, he left.

Originally Posted by Sheaf

Trying to spout off "facts" about level design doesn't change the fact that Romero was a big part of the heart and soul of every single great game id made.

When a company has 10 employees, then they all will be part of the heart and soul. My facts just show that while Romero gets a lot of press because he's a ham, Carmack and Abrash are the brains behind the engine, Adrian Carmack is the guy behind the art, and Romero was about 20% of the level design with 3 other people, and all final decisions at id went through John Carmack.

Originally Posted by Sheaf

The point here is not how many copies of Quake 2, Quake 3, and Doom 3 that id sold. By that point, they were guaranteed to sell a lot even if it was a text adventure just from the franchise name that Romero helped build. The games after Romero was fired by the egotistical, nearly autistic Carmack lacked fun. Period. They had a great engine and good graphics. They just lacked gameplay.

Quake II is a great game. Doom III would have been utterly fantastic if they had gone away from the "fighting in a broom closet" model and actually used some of the wide open spaces that made early id games so fun. In general though, I thought Doom 3 and its expansion were hellah fun.

Originally Posted by Sheaf

Stop jumping on the internet bandwagon of hating on Romero when you know absolutely nothing about what went on at id.

Actually, I have sat and talked with Mike Abrash. Very little of the conversation had to do with Romero, but I did ask what the deal was back in the Quake days, and the story is as it was. He got a lot of press, it inflated his already giant ego, and he clashed with Carmack over too much stuff. He got shown the door. Pretty simple.

And it isn't an internet bandwagon thing. I remember hoping that Dai Katana would be great, and then paid very close attention to the entire development cycle, including all the hirings, firings, and ego clashes at Ion Storm. That's Romero's modus operandi and always has been. Deus Ex was a great game, but isn't it odd that Deus Ex had no involvement from Romero? One of the things that hurt Romero the worst back then was the release of Half Life and Unreal. Unreal took the engine competition up a notch, and Half Life took level design and story flow to a new level. I am not saying that id kept up, because their work post-Hlaf Life hasn't been exactly engrossing, but Ion Storm had nothing close, and Romero knew it.

Originally Posted by Sheaf

Oh, and trying to break down an FPS to just an engine, artwork and level design would is pure idiocy. That's the polish that goes on AFTER the actual gameplay.

And since you seem to come across as some authority on all things id, then you should know how anything gets "finalized" in the Carmack world. Artwork finalization all goes through Adrian Carmack. Everything else goes through John Carmack. It always has. I am not saying Romero added nothing, nor am I saying that his input had no bearing on the success of id. But id is Carmack's world. The success of both guys after their divorce is telling.

Romero has great ideas. I don't deny it. So does American McGee. But running the whole show isn't their bag. Guys like Carmack playing boss to guys like romero is how shit gets done. Romero is not a leader, he's a creative individualist with the delsuion that he can coordinate as well as he thinks up cool levels and gameplay.

Originally Posted by Sheaf

It's easy to look back on Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom, and Quake and say, "Well, those games don't seem all that great." They were absolutely fucking revolutionary.

Every game id made that had Romero on the team was awesome. But understand what was revolutionary in each. Wolfenstein 3D gave us the 1st person perspective in 2.5D. Doom gave the enhanced lighting, walls at any angle, elevations and enhanced 2.5D. Quake was the first truly optimized 3D engine for the FPS. Yeah, the models improved and the looks improved. Why? Because the engine allowed the level design and textures to go where they hadn't gone before. Notice a pattern here? All roads in id success lead back to Carmack.

Nothing against John Romero. I have heard him speak before, and he has good ideas. If he could latch onto a good team and keep his ego from becoming the Mother Brain, great things would happen. But there lies Romero's issue. That ego is his Achilles Heel. It stops him from being part of what he once was, and how great the Doom games and the original Quake are versus how bad Dai Katana sucked rhino balls speaks volumes about Romero as teammate versus coach.

[painbringer]

Originally Posted by Sheaf

You obviously missed my point. Quake1 was so successful that id could have sold Duck Hunt and made millions. Unfortunately, they basically just repackaged Quake1 with a better engine, better graphics, worse level design, and worse gameplay, calling it Quake2.

... and the term for that is.. a sequel?

If they had reinvented it all, and made it into starcraft, I'd have been pissed that they called it Quake 2..

When i buy Heroes 5, I expect it to be somewhat like the previous games in the series... funny thing, that.



NEWSFLASH: Quake 2 was mostly an upgraded version of Quake 1 !!


When you have a market with 300 FPS games, 150 trying something new, and you are making a FPS.. not going for the safe bets to be innovative would be fuggin stupid.

[Sheaf]

The two John's of computer gaming (Carmack and Romero) are really not that dissimilar to the two Steve's of computers (Wozniak and Jobs).

Woz and Jobs were the co-founders and driving force behind Apple in the early days. Wozniak was similar to Carmack in that he was mainly responsible for thee code. Jobs was the wild and passionate partner. Woz basically left because of his plane crash, but Jobs was essentially ousted from the company in a manner similar to Romero.

So what happened next? Job started NeXT, which was instrumental in the creation of the web, since it was developed on a NeXT box. A little factoid: Most of the Doom code was done on a NeXT box as well. Still, NeXT was never able to break through to the consumer market and Jobs was labelled as a terrible leader. Jokes were made about how poor a leader Jobs was and how he was a no-talent hack who was lucky to be around Wozniak.

Then the unthinkable happened. Apple bought NeXT and made Jobs interim CEO. People are definitely singing a different tune about Jobs now. It's not widely known, but OS X is actually a direct derivative of NeXTSTEP.

Don't get me wrong. I think Apple wouldn't have existed without Woz and id wouldn't have existed without John Carmack. But I also think they were just as dependent upon Jobs and Romero, respectively.

John Carmack was and still is the best in the business at writing game engine code. But he doesn't like computer games and really has no passion for them. He just loves creating the engines. Romero loves games and is a talented programmer (although not on the level of Carmack).

I doubt Romero will ever make a comeback like Jobs did, but it doesn't change the fact that he was responsible for a huge portion of three of the greatest PC games of all time.

[Sheaf]

Originally Posted by Venjenz

Nothing against John Romero. I have heard him speak before, and he has good ideas. If he could latch onto a good team and keep his ego from becoming the Mother Brain, great things would happen. But there lies Romero's issue. That ego is his Achilles Heel. It stops him from being part of what he once was, and how great the Doom games and the original Quake are versus how bad Dai Katana sucked rhino balls speaks volumes about Romero as teammate versus coach.

I agree with a lot of that. Everyone who knows Romero and, more specifically, has played games with him, knows his ego is huge. But the post on page 1 basically labelled him as a terrible game designer, which is about as far from the truth as possible.

[Sheaf]

Originally Posted by painbringer

... and the term for that is.. a sequel?

If they had reinvented it all, and made it into starcraft, I'd have been pissed that they called it Quake 2..

When i buy Heroes 5, I expect it to be somewhat like the previous games in the series... funny thing, that.



NEWSFLASH: Quake 2 was mostly an upgraded version of Quake 1 !!


When you have a market with 300 FPS games, 150 trying something new, and you are making a FPS.. not going for the safe bets to be innovative would be fuggin stupid.

By the way, you're in a thread discussing GAMEPLAY. I'm not talking about reinventing the genre or switching to another entirely, as per your example (FPS to RTS? wtf?)

I'm talking about innovations. Vehicles, locational damage, different health systems like Halo, Counter-Strike type teamplay, stealth-based missions, co-op, interactive environments, etc.

The most innovative thing id has done with gameplay since Romero got fired was to make Quake III Arena. Unfortunately for them, it had already been done with Rocket Arena, a mod for Quake1 that came out years before.

[Slide]

Originally Posted by Sheaf

Job started NeXT, which was instrumental in the creation of the internet, since it was developed on a NeXT box.

For fucksake, everyone knows Al Gore invented the Internet - or at least had as much to do with it as fucking NEXT.

Originally Posted by Sheaf

Then the unthinkable happened. Apple bought NeXT and made Jobs interim CEO. People are definitely singing a different tune about Jobs now. It's not widely known, but OS X is actually a direct derivative of NeXTSTEP.

No its not, the core of the OS is derived from Mach and the Userland is mainly *BSD. Aqua is built on top of that.

[Venjenz]

Originally Posted by Slide

For fucksake, everyone knows Al Gore invented the Internet - or at least had as much to do with it as fucking NEXT.

True dat.

I can't understand why folks don't accept that the Internet just sorta happened. I was playing Zork on a dialup BBS around 1980 (iirc?), and I was on BBS MUDs not too long after that. In reality, the Internet was "invented" the first time two BBS destinations got linked, which happened long before Al Gore was even on the map.

[Sheaf]

Originally Posted by Slide

No its not, the core of the OS is derived from Mach and the Userland is mainly *BSD. Aqua is built on top of that.

Uhh... try again. Let's go to Wikipedia under Mac OS X:

"Mac OS X is based on the Mach kernel and the BSD implementation of Unix, which were incorporated into NeXTSTEP."

"NeXT's OS—called OPENSTEP at the time—was selected to form the basis for Apple's next OS."

Or we could go to the entry on NeXTSTEP:

"On February 4, 1997 Apple Computer acquired NeXT for $427 million, using the OpenStep operating system as the basis for Mac OS X."

NeXT was doing work on the Mach kernel and a BSD derivative at the time. Do your homework NeXT time.

[Eomer]

I can't understand why folks don't accept that the Internet just sorta happened. I was playing Zork on a dialup BBS around 1980 (iirc?), and I was on BBS MUDs not too long after that. In reality, the Internet was "invented" the first time two BBS destinations got linked, which happened long before Al Gore was even on the map.

I'm no expert in the architecture or history of the internet, but it certainly didn't just "happen." The US government had (and still does) a large hand in it, including the military.

Comparing BBS's in the 80's to the internet is like saying that Doom games over modems or LANs really make this whole MMOG thing passe.

[Sheaf]

Bleh, that was my idiotic mistake. I meant the World Wide Web, not the internet. There is a big difference.

It was the WWW that was developed on a NeXT box.

[Vorph]

NeXT had nothing to do with the creation of the web; Tim Berners-Lee just happened to make a really bad choice for the OS he wrote the first web server on. Nobody connected to the internet had more than a handful of NeXTs and they didn't want any either, because at the time Sun and IBM were in the middle of their SPARCstation vs. RS/6000 war and just about giving away machines to the schools that pioneered the internet (I was at one of them back then).

A few years later, NCSA Mosaic and httpd were written and ported to just about every flavor of unix and it finally took off.


PS--What does any of this have to do with Raph Koster? It appears the thread really did end with the revelation that he is the MMOG world's Uwe Boll.

[Zehn - Vhex]

I don't know which is more fun...or rather a pleasant release of endorphins. Discussing whether or not Romero is a hack, or Neric pointing out that EverQuest sucked shit and 20 peoples vagina's bursting.

Next thing you know someone will post that Brad has even less of an idea of what makes a game fun then Romero and Koster combined and by tomorrow this thread will be at 20 pages. (at 40 posts per page of course, you default gimps are pansies. Pansies I say.)