Gez
Why don't I have a custom title by now?!
Posts: 9148
Registered: 07-07 |
I don't think Id Software is financially in danger, since they have ZeniMax behind them.
On innovation: Id ceased to be a pioneer a long while ago. Quake 3 Arena was their last groundbreaking game; and even then Quake 3 was merely an incremental update on the Quake engine rather than a revolution like previous engines were. The lighting system in Doom 3 (its main selling point, tech-wise) mostly resulted in everything being pitch dark so that the hardware of the time could handle what few lit pixels there were to compute. The megatexture stuff in Rage served mostly to show the complete disregard that chipset vendors had cultivated towards OpenGL over the last decade.
Id's pioneering days were firmly in the twentieth century. It's old. It's gone. It's prehistory. It dates back from before the Afghan War. Internet was still something that worked with screechy modems and was mostly found in universities; rather than something ubiquitous which replaced everything else except physical goods and transportation.
Note that Valve isn't much for pioneering either. Valve is wildly successful because it has managed to turn Steam into an attractive platform; but if you look at them purely as a game company, what have they done since Half-Life? Pretty much nothing. Valve's most popular titles (Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Portal, Left 4 Dead...) were only Valve's because they hired the entire teams behind these titles. That's flair for headhunting rather than innovation.
About Rage and Doom 4: I think it was for the good of Doom 4 that Rage happened first. It allowed to test the waters for the new technologies they wanted to use in Doom 4, and forced the chipset vendors to wake up and fix their support of the latest OpenGL specs. ATI and Intel, in particular, desperately needed that kick in the butt. Still need it, in fact. Remember the disastrous launch of Rage, with everyone posting screenshots and footage of grotesque glitches? Think about what this would have done to the Doom franchise if this had happened for Doom 4 instead... When Doom 4 finally happens, it should get a much smoother launch than poor Rage.
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02-01-13 14:43 
