id Software Bought By Bethesda Parent Company, ZeniMax [Breaking]

lol

That is all

Did someone say Wolfenstien Fallout?

Carmack seems happy, and why wouldn't he, he's just got a mega wad of cash for his company and still gets to run it.

Ok its annoying me now, what is that image a merge of? Clearly its old doom down the bottom but I dont know what the actual skeleton thing is from.

New Wolfenstein? Can't remember what it's called.

EDIT: Oh wait, it's Fallout 3.

Fallout 3, it's a feral ghoul.

I should really get around to buying that game now that I have a pc that can run it.

Yeah, I re-installed it after I got my new comp, but I havent' got around to playing it.

Fallout 3 > u

.....

It doesn't surprise me that franger still hasn't played THE BEST GAME FROM LAST YEAR.

/me looks at PC.
/me looks at Fallout 3.
/me kicks PC and plays Morrowind instead.

I'm unsure what the best game from last year was but it wasn't Fallout 3. I'll think about it today.

For me, it'd be /wrist. :D If you can play Oblivion, you should be able to play Fallout 3, no (same engine)?

Daggerfall >>>> Morrowind, they should do an updated version of that. Keep exactly the same mechanics, just update the graphics (and get rid of the bugs).

This might seem pretty straight forward but I'll say it anyway.

As games have become more complex they also have become more buggy, this is true by nature. What frustrates me is the mechanically broken nature of many games. With such infinitesimal integrations that occur there's bound to be a myriad of problems, many games of the past while simple worked wonderfully well and gave us many hours of enjoyment.

It seems as PC's became more powerful we learned we could do ever more sophisticated things with them, but we failed to bring the basic principals along. Complex game mechanics are awesome but something has been lost, whether it be design or system thinking. Back when the Doom's and wolfenstein's were released that had complex challenges too, but with much more restrictive hardware requirements.

I'm unsure what it is not being in the game industry myself or a coder even. I'll throw it out there and say I think the previous generation of developers were just plain better and I'd say that came down to passion. They had better process and actually wrote good code because they were passionate about what they were developing. They had this vast unlimited potential infront of them and really got into it.

Where did the passion go? I reckon it died with the introduction of venture capital, shareholders and marketing departments. When people who weren't game developers started calling the shots. Calling upon endless sequels, requiring better graphics, setting dates when releases must occur to keep share values high instead of gamers happy.

We as gamers are just the hungry salivating masses, the consumers who allow all this to happen. We as gamers also become part of the problem, amongst us are the fanboy's crying every time a game is delayed, gamer outcry on a delay can negatively affect share price and thus cause game companies to get nervous forcing a release of a buggy game. We have the pirates which I'd doubt any person on this forum is not guilty of at least at some point in time, we deny the developers the funds for example World of Goo, such a critically acclaimed game and the developer had to file for bankruptcy. We are the games media, where a title will get stunning reviews in every publication and forum, but the release title ends up a steaming pile of buggy shit, did people actually play Spore when they reviewed it.

We the gamer have a choice, we can vote with our wallets and our words. Choose wisely.

I think the increase in bugginess is purely because of complexity. I mean look at the size of old games, they were a few meg at most, now compare that to the gigabytes of data in more recent games. Thats a heck of a lot more code where problems can occur.

Don't get me wrong, i think that the quality of games generally has gone down but I blame that on the graphics hungry kiddies who think how pretty a game is is more important than gameplay.

Edit: We don't tolerate that shit here creationz

Lol Sorry Franger.

And u have a point where the increase in bugginess is because the increase in size and complexity but its also because of marketing, they come up with an idea for a game or a sequal and they just have to push it out as fast as possible to make the most money as possible which purely doesnt leave enough time for Debugging and testing.

Not to mention the fact that todays games are pretty much purely focused on graphics and less on gameplay and lifespan. most single player games found now days can be completed in 5 hours or less, not including the rare decent RPG that happens to come out like Fallout 3 etc, but again they just push it out so fast its a buggy work in progress when its released and they still need to release several patches which fix bugs that really should of been fixed pre-release.

Oh MC, I love you.

I'll say this once for people who play consoles like me.

PS1 and N64 were the best years of gaming. This is also true for PC during these years.

Games were actually about gaming, and not about graphics or hur dur crap.

This is one of the most annoying things about gaming these days. You can come out and go, but what about my HL2/Fallout 3/Whatever. The fact remains that games from back in those days were about making a gamer like the gameplay.

They didn't have the graphics to make everything pretty, so they pushed their best to make the game as entertaining as it could be. Final Fantasy 7 will always be a point in case with this arguement. They didn't have super hardcore psyhics engines. They didn't care. They made the game for the joy of gaming.

I miss those days.

I love u.. hahaha FF7 was the greatest game for me to date, i racked up the 99+ hours of gameplay and still hadnt done everything in the game haha... i miss those days

Franger: I'm not so sure the size of the game always indicates complexity, I'd say the graphic nature does. Any one with more insight than myself know the ratio of Game Code to Graphical Feature. I'd feel that textures, skins, movies and an increasing appetite for those things in hi res would be much more attributable to the vast increase in size.

Creationz/Seig: See that's what I was trying to push in the middle of my comment. As a game developer if you have an idea for a game and a team naturally comes on board due to being interested in the project, the quality has to go up. Personal pride in a project is worth way more than a paycheck/bonus.

It kinda shows in this deal with Bethesda, Carmack is saying he was clearly unhappy about being pushed around by a publisher. And reading Carmack's blog regarding the development surrounding wolf 3D for the iPhone, which works great by the way, this freedom of development where the people he worked with were quite keen, he even used code from an open source fan group remake project. It's that spirit that I think has truley been missing.

Rather than a bunch of guys going "this will be awesome", they constantly need to seek approval for things, run the gammut of bureaucratic red tape and consult marketing.

Holy crap Wolf 3D is on the iPhone.

Now I have to buy one.

I think ya all looking back at the past with rose-colored glasses. Games were way buggy back then, but you all just remember the good parts. I remember frequent hangs when playing Wolfenstein 3D and other stuff. It's very rare that I get a hang nowadays.

And you completely ignore all the advancements since then! For example, I remember thinking when playing Wing Commander 1 back in the day, this would be so much fun if I could play it multiplayer. But multiplayer was a pretty foreign concept back then. Later we were able to play C&C with LAN cables. Now multiplayer is an expectation of most games, and the internet has just made it a no-brainer.

Also, what about AI? In Wolfenstein 3D the AI was shockingly stupid, you shoot a gun, no one cares. I remember playing Quake 2 about 5 years ago and it was absurdly easy, you could circle-strafe all the enemies! Nowadays, from Half-life on, the AI will actually take cover, organise strategies, etc.

Also, before Wolfenstein 3D, what did we have? I remember Wing Commander, but everything else was pretty crap, text adventures, etc. I mean, don't get me wrong, platformers like Commander Keen and Duke Nukem were fun, but can you see yourself playing a platformer nowadays (unless it has some new game elements, like Braid, or the kyoot-ness like Little Big Planet?) How many new GENRES have sprung up since then? RTS's and FPS's were unheard of back then.

The thing is, there's been so many advancements, the bar has been set so high, that you need a corporation to satisfy these demands. You all are taking so much for granted which was barely a twinkle in a developer's eyes back in the day, the kind of stuff that just plainly wasn't feasible back then.

haha agree'd just the pure fact of getting Wolf 3d on something that i can carry in my pocket.... i need nothing more out of life... haha

I have mint condition Dagerfall, box and manual sitting on my shelf at home, just waiting to be played. I'm actually thinking of getting a first edtion "Dagerfall Chronicles" and getting it turned into a leather-bound hardcover.

I agree with everything MC said. Games have lost a lot of their soul and we as the consumers do hold a portion of the responsibility. EA holds the mojority of the other portion :P.

I also agree that modern coders don't appear to be as good as the old ones. The limitations of old forced programers to be efficient and to release a quality product. Now, with the easy distribution and application of patches, bugs are allowed to slip through in the name of an on time release. The low cost of disk space and the ever increasing power of hardware makes it acceptable for applications to be bloated and hog resources.

As a developer, the rules of the game have changed. The reason why things were super-efficient back in the day was because the developer had access to the bare metal. But that's also a danger, because you can take out a whole system if the application is buggy. Operating Systems have evolved to prevent these problems.

If anything's changed, it's that games have become more complex, meaning you need larger teams to handle the project and there's plainly more things that can break.

I think you guys are just being nostalgic. You're comparing the culmination of 20 years of games, cherry-picking the best ones, and comparing them with the games that have come out over the last year. Look at Prototype, that's a kick-arse game that would've been inconceivable 5 years ago. Dawn of War 2 is also awesome in my opinion and beats the crap out of DoW 1 (though you might not like the multiplayer). The story in Mass Effect is also pretty awesome, and everything is voiced in the game! Name me one game created over 5 years ago where everything was voiced?

Look to the future man, stop being so hung-up on the past! :P

Okay, maybe Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island 3 (plus other adventure games), but I think voice acting is pretty much a given nowadays, nearly every game has it now.

MC: Textures and models and such are all still code, just of a different sort, but its still open to bugs. Heck in Dota right now there is an anti-maphack command you can enter, and when you type it in basically the game pauses for a moment, inserts a deliberately corrupted model in an area the players shouldn't be able to see leaves it there for a few seconds then removes it and unpauses the game, this means that anyone who is using a maphack at the time to reveal the entire map will have their computer render the corrupted model and hence crash their warcraft 3.

Belthor: Yes there were bugs back then, but I think they were fewer generally because of the smaller amount of code, I mean say roughly for games that are 100meg there will be 10 bugs in it, assuming a completly linear scale (which is ridiculous I know but just to give an idea) you could say then that theres roughly 1 bug per 10meg, so a game thats under 10 meg might not even have a bug in it. Also because those games back then were so much simpler I think that when bugs did occur they were often less destructive to the game and sometimes you could keep going.

Final Fantasy X? That was over 8 years ago and it was fully voiced. Sorry, I'd like to comment more, but I'm at work lol.

I'll post something when I get home.

Yeah, I'd agree with that. In my opinion, code quality has improved, so the bugs/line ratio has decreased, but the number of lines has increased exponentially, meaning more bugs.

You see super-efficient code and think it's awesome. I've got the scars of experience, and you don't get super-efficient code without it being hard to maintain and prone to produce bugs. You only go to that trouble when you have to. And there's more to developing than just making one algorithm super-efficient. Software Architecture is like a Pyramid, the more code, the bigger the base (ie the process, architecture, QA, etc).

Actually Kirit and I were discussing this a quite a few weeks ago just in reference to code in general and saying how the old idea of crazy code monkeys are no longer wanted. The old idea used to be that the crazy good often mentally unstable programmers were hired for things to come in, told what the end result should be, work like crazy (using cowboy coding methodology basically) doing their own stuff which would often be poorly documented and difficult to maintain. These days people hired often aren't even code specialists, its more important to get people in who follow design principles and document everything clearly so that its easier to hand over to the next person who steps into the position.

I'm not sure on the code quality thing though, its probably less bugs per lines used, but I think its not as high a level of quality that the gurus of old days could produce

Belthor: You make a valid point regarding developers being distanced from the machine. They have a two layers of extraction from the bare metal, the operating system and further the game engine. The operating system has always been there, in one shape or another, and quite possibly things have gotten harder, but then as you pointed out less risky for them.

By the way I love platform games, incredibly so, in the last year I have played, New Super Mario Bros, Yoshi's Island DS, Little Big Planet, Braid, Super Paper Mario and the Metal Slug Series. Bionic Commando: Rearmed was released in May but haven't played that yet.

You make the point that dev's have access to so much more today, I don't doubt this I simply claim that this has caused them to become lazy, if not lazy the corporate machine will direct them to make their game fit a pre existing engine to save cash.

I don't think this is rose coloured glasses, about a year ago I was playing emulated commodore 64 games on the projector at LS. And more recently spent a few hours on a game called Paradroid. Look at the wealth of old school remakes on the iPhone Store. Scorched Earth, Archon, Wolf 3D, I'm amazed operation wolf hasn't made a comeback. The reason these old games were awesome and plentiful was cause they were so fun to play. I don't remember Wolf 3D being buggy, in fact I can't remember a time when it crashed, is this my memory failing me, maybe but I don't think so.

New Genre's would be Rhythm Games, such as Guitar Hero.

I've started to vote more with my wallet over the years. I've skipped AAA titles where post release reviews have found the game to be incomplete. I've since left the must buy on day one bandwagon and have become a more cautious consumer. That may not always be the case, I still find Valve and Blizzard games to be of high quality on release with excellent support. They listen to their communities. But I digress...

Maybe I need to shine the spotlight closer on PC games in making my point, though a buggy console game is by far worse than a buggy PC one. As with consoles you have a known hardware platform.

Even after reading these posts I'm still going to say game developers of old were more talented. More complexity simply requires better design, what's the point of the most complex game ever if it crashes and no one wants to play it. I think more coin needs to be devoted to development then have in previous years gone into graphics and visuals.

Franger: I get that textures are still 1's and 0's but I'm comparing super high res textures vs game engine. I'd be keen to know the answer.

Yeah, I was more just pointing out it's easy to just assume that everything in the past was better and everything today is rubbish.

I'm not saying there haven't been good games in the past, but there are LOTS of past games which I wouldn't touch nowadays. I mean, Tie Fighter was good, but would I really want to play it now? To me, Wolf 3D is a gimmick, would I really want to play it on an iPhone for more than 5 minutes? And would I really want to play the original C&C or Warcraft, when there are so many better RTS's around?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think there's also a lot more games nowadays than there were in the past. At least, I find I've got a pile 10-20 games high which I still need to get through, but maybe I'm just old now without enough free time (and that's just on PC, I'm not even talking consoles)...

One game I would like to see a remake of (or even just play the original deluxe edition) is Jone's in the Fast Lane, that game was fun! :D And I hope the Monkey Island thing kicks off, would love to see a new Full Throttle game. :D

Just the other day I commented that Jones in the Fast lane needed a remake. Although you'd have to imagine that the Sims/second life may be as close as you'll get.

My hope is that a bunch of these games made for the iPhone can be brought over to the PC. I would love to play Archon again.

As someone who recently tried to play the original Warcraft in a fit of story related nostalgia, I can tell you that No, you DO NOT want to play that. The units are hard to identify from each other and the background and the interface lacks the most basic capabilities that we take for granted today. You know, that ones that make it playable.

I find you get that if you play most 'older' games. You find yourself wanting to do something you take for granted in modern games, but it's not there. I was playing the original Fallout recently and there were a shitload of tiny things that just annoyed me about its interface.

With Warcraft, the biggest problem was the inability to select more than four units at once. I think WCII upped this to eight units, but one of the big selling points of C&C was the ability to select an unlimited number of units.

JitFL is ageless.

Pffft, you don't need any other units than spearmen/archers, just spam them and clog them all over every bridge

Bought it on Wii VC because I had a feeling it would still be playable after all this time. And it's much like I remember it from the past except with a crapper controller (says something when one of those dodgy as hell SpectaVideo sticks is better than the wiimote).

To be honest it is a rarity since I agree 95% of all of this _is_ rose-coloured glasses. Hell, I can admit all of my favourite games from late 80s-early 90s have aged like ass.

Wizard of Wor FTW!