Is being like hong good or bad? I don’t know! :P
The question is, Tim, did you have the same feeling in parts of recognized linear fps “classics” like Half Life 2?
I don’t remember. Perhaps the fidelity of the surrounding area wasn’t as high back then. The universe never clicked with me anyway. Why do you ask?
I vaguely remember feeling this way with Metro 2033. My memory of it has faded though.
WarrenM
1863
Well, I think it comes down to WHY you got lost and how long it takes you to get back on track. If the level is well designed with landmarks and contrasted lighting and things like that you SHOULD be able to get back on track without a huge hassle.
If it’s cut’n’paste geometry through endless hallways and rooms then that’s just going to be frustrating, I agree.
I’m not asking for side quests and full on extra buildings or something. Just give me a few rooms that are open for no real reason. Just there to give me some sense for the place I’m in being a real building. Have a hallway that leads to a room that has a goodie in it for me to find - just have it shoot off the main path. I go down there, get the goodie, realize I can’t go any further, so I hoof it back to the main path and carry on.
That’s all I mean. I don’t want an open world in my corridor shooter or anything like that. :)
Because Rage is the same type of game. Essentially, i wanted to see if you were being a hypocrite XD.
If you had the same complaint in HL2, then no problem. It would be an issue of the player wanting game type A and the game being type B.
If you loved HL2 and now are complaining of why Rage don’t let you explore, i would have to ask you why exploring is a requisite in FPS 1 but not in FPS 2.
But i agree that Rage goes into “teasing” the player with some areas that look like they are more open, but they really aren’t.
Right. You kind of answered it in your next sentence. id simply built a world I want to explore.
(Next time they’ll get us to shut up by making their game an endless string of sewers, caves, and industrial complexes! That’ll teach us.)
Well, i suppose that’s a “good” complaint. Damn you id, you did a good work making the world, but it was so good that now i want to explore it and you won’t let me!
Speaking seriously, I think they had issues with the content creation pace with the Megatextures. At least, that’s my supposition, because the game doesn’t have a lot of content. Repeating levels for the side missions, really?? So I don’t know if they would be capable of making a more open world, with the scope and detail of a Bethesda game.
Surely that’s not unlikely for Doom 4/Quake 5…
I wonder how well it’s sold. It’s at 14th on Steam right now… Perhaps Naeblis will put this in context when the sales numbers are published for the month.
Not very well
The three games uses Steamworks, so the comparison is valid. Not only the numbers are far away from Deus Ex, they don’t even reach half of a new IP from a more unknown company like Dead Island.
Even as a id fanboy i have to say they are losing contact with the game industry and with the gamers if they thought it would be acceptable to launch the game as it was (talking about the pc version).
Hmm. That looks awful. I suppose the PC launch was blighted by the AMD situation though.
Yep. Let’s see if they have better luck in consoles. Which is heart breaking for me, I don’t want the game doing that much better in consoles with the pc version having abysmal sales, because the message received by id would be “we should make the games only for consoles”, but in the other hand those pc sales are so bad that if the console sales are not strong enough id can be in trouble, and that would be bad for every version of their next games, pc included.
So, why the game didn’t do it better? Let’s see:
-id publicly stating the game was a console port, they did say the would be the same except with better resolution and AA. PC gamers have exigencies about their version being good on its own, we want games developed for pc gamers, for computers.
-Not only the graphics were from the console version, they did a poor job adapting the game to pc, they didn’t even tweak the difficulties or truly adapted the interface. Even the mouse had a weird acceleration in the menus.
-Of course, the AMD drivers issue. It turned off the game to looots of people. They really don’t know how much damage it did. I say this because it gave a general bad vibe to the game launch on pc, making people skip the game… even if they had a nvidia card.
-In more general terms: They showed the game too early, in 2007, the hype died on the way around 2010. It recovered a bit in 2011 with the onslaught of trailers, but don’t think the “re-hype” marketing worked for everyone.
-I have seen a feeling around internet that id doesn’t matter anymore, for the simple fact that they haven’t made a game in ages. The very long development cycles somehow are making id not relevant in the eyes of the public.
Being more clear, i am happy with the game… because i got it from Amazon for a bit less of 30€. If i would have paid up 50€, or the >60€ which is the price here of a new console game, i would be much more pissed off.
For reference, i remember they sold 1.600.000 units of Doom 3, pc version.
id does take forever to release their games. Why is that? Is it about developing the tech or because they have a smaller team or what?
WarrenM
1873
id employs over 200 people according to Carmack’s QuakeCon speech so I don’t think it’s lack of people.
Juste
1874
This game actually picks up quite a bit when you get to the second town. The levels are really varied compared to the first half. I’m enjoying the game much more now. And dynamite arrows are the best thing ever.
Now it’s 200 people. But they started with much less, and only around half the development of Rage they started to hire more people, and mainly to create a separate group for Doom 4.
I think they did the game with 60 people. The others are the mobile group, the Doom 4 group (which is the biggest now, i suppose), and the Quake Live group.
And in an unrelated post: I am here waiting for the sdk, not because i want to edit the game, but because i want to extract the game file to pick the music tracks.
Gendal
1877
New engine development. Carmack keeps creating massively different development systems each cycle so not only does the engine need to be finished but the tools developed and the artists and level designers acclimatized. Compare this with Unreal which takes a more incremental approach.
He knows it’s an issue, which is why next time he swears they are going to reuse much more code. No more giant research projects that require most of it to be rebuilt like the megatextures did. Of course I think he said something similar after Doom 3 was released so uh…
WarrenM
1878
Rage didn’t use Radiant at all? I know Doom3 did … didn’t it?
Zylon
1879
Something I don’t see people mention much is that id Tech 5 is their first engine to really embrace rendering of large outdoor areas (later hacks to id Tech 4 notwithstanding). Clearly we’re seeing in Rage id trying to figure out what the heck to DO with large outdoor areas.
I wonder what, if any, procedural generation techniques were applied to creating and texturing Rage’s landscapes. Having unique hand-crafted texture data for an area the size of Fallout 3’s seems completely impractical. Hell, even the raw data storage requirements seem impractical. Maybe in the future we’ll see hybrid “virtual” megatexturing where broad details of the terrain are procedurally painted into the megatexture buffer on-demand, with hand-crafted textures being reserved for patching in unique detail where needed.
Sarkus
1880
Yep. And as a long-time RPG fan who also like story shooters, its fine with me. But I don’t see these as FPS “ruling the world” as much as its taking the first person perspective and high end visuals and attaching it to other genres. The line is vague, but to me Fallout 3 is still an RPG.
But the Half-Life 2 mention brings up a good point and also makes me wonder where Valve goes with that series. Keep in mind that we are now seven years past Half-Life 2’s release and four years since the cliffhanger at the end of Episode 2. Even by Valve standards its been a long time, and the expectations for this type of game have changed.
