Should Id Fire Tim Willits?

Dragonsbrethren said:

I phrased my other post poorly, I was pretty much trying to say the same thing Carn did better. You don't buy Modern Warfare 3 for major innovative changes, you buy it for a new campaign and the little things it does better in multiplayer. There was an article on PC Gamer a while back about "improving" the COD series and it was basically turning it into a whole new game. Long-time fans of a series rarely want to see that.

Pretty much, however sometimes the change is the worse, look at Battlefield 3. Anything before it was fun and had it's own identity, they shamelessly chased call of duty this time, it has a COD campaign, 5 of the 8 stock maps were COD-like (Corridors, Corridors, Corridors...), they removed everything that made Battlefield work. Oh how about ripping COD elite off? $60 for 5 pieces of DLC if you aren't happy EA says fuck off.

Sometimes, things should'nt be changed.

alterworldruler said:

Pretty much, however sometimes the change is the worse, look at Battlefield 3. Anything before it was fun and had it's own identity, they shamelessly chased call of duty this time, it has a COD campaign, 5 of the 8 stock maps were COD-like (Corridors, Corridors, Corridors...), they removed everything that made Battlefield work. Oh how about ripping COD elite off? $60 for 5 pieces of DLC if you aren't happy EA says fuck off.

Sometimes, things should'nt be changed.

There's one major aspect I feel this way about regarding Bioshock Infinite (despite it being a truly great game so far): they switched to that fucking infuriating two-weapon system. The game did NOT need that, the previous two had it right by allowing the player to carry all the weapons at once. Every time I play a game that has the two guns rule, I want to go back in time and stomp on the balls of which ever game designer working on Halo thought this was a good idea.

Caffeine Freak said:

There's one major aspect I feel this way about regarding Bioshock Infinite (despite it being a truly great game so far): they switched to that fucking infuriating two-weapon system. The game did NOT need that, the previous two had it right by allowing the player to carry all the weapons at once. Every time I play a game that has the two guns rule, I want to go back in time and stomp on the balls of which ever game designer working on Halo thought this was a good idea.

Oh wow. That's almost enough to make me not want to play it.

In a more realistic shooter, or other kind of game, it makes sense and can even be a challenging mechanic to work around (in a good way). But in a "fantasy" shooter it's utterly stupid, and forced.

DoomUK said:

In a more realistic shooter, or other kind of game, it makes sense and can even be a challenging mechanic to work around (in a good way). But in a "fantasy" shooter it's utterly stupid, and forced.

Indeed -it can be a good challenge if it's done properly. If the player has to evaluate the weapons to decide which is the most suitable for the job in hand, and there are definite pros and cons to each weapon it becomes a tactical decision and becomes part of how you plan your execution of a particular part of the game.

From what I have seen in reviews, this is not the case with Bioshock Infinite. A number of reviewers have said that there are some "must have" weapons that, once you have them, you just keep them and never need to use anything else. So, you just end up carrying the same weapons throughout most of the game and ignore the rest. Of course, I haven't played the game myself so I can't say whether I felt the same way about it.

Considering all the management issues Id is going thorough and the poor decisions taken throughout Doom 4's develpoment, I think everyone except Carmack should be fired. Everyone except him is expendable. If he leaves the company has no chance.

DooM_RO said:

Considering all the management issues Id is going thorough and the poor decisions taken throughout Doom 4's develpoment, I think everyone except Carmack should be fired. Everyone except him is expendable. If he leaves the company has no chance.

Right, let's fire everybody but the lead tech guy in a company with 100+ employees. Brilliant decision. THEN the game will get done.

DooM_RO said:

Considering all the management issues Id is going thorough and the poor decisions taken throughout Doom 4's develpoment, I think everyone except Carmack should be fired. Everyone except him is expendable. If he leaves the company has no chance.

To be honest, during Rage development, it was mostly Carmack's fault that the game was delayed over and over and over again because of engine rewrites. Carmack may be a legend, but anyone can see the toll that the megatexture project has taken on the company, and any sensible person can see that the underwhelming results just aren't worth it. Though in general I think they need to get out of their "I make games that feel like they were designed in the 90s" attitude, the truth is, they've got more (and better) talent working there now than they ever have, and ultimately Carmack's tinkering is what fucks everything up. Well, I make a reservation on that comment about their talent because several of their best guys actually left during Rage (art director Kenneth Scott immediately comes to mind; he's literally the best in the industry for sci-fi, in my opinion, and now he's working on Halo).

I can't help but be reminded of Daikatana's development when I read about the ridiculous "ok guys, back to the drawing board!" episodes id has made for themselves over the last decade.

Mogul said:

To be honest, during Rage development, it was mostly Carmack's fault that the game was delayed over and over and over again because of engine rewrites.

That may have been the case during the development of Doom and Quake, but Carmack has had the tech ready to go early on for id's last two (or three) AAA games. id Tech 4 was fully functional in 2001, and id Tech 5 was ready by around 2007/08, when they first demoed it. Rage required a shit ton of optimization, partly because early in it's development, artists were going crazy with how much creative freedom they had, having no performance constraints to consider with texture memory. This meant a lot of going through the game and trimming texture assets later on, when they were absolutely determined to fit the game onto 2 DVDs.

I've read at least one article or interview (or maybe even a Carmack keynote? it's been a long time) that details a pretty tumultuous dev period for Rage that included a ton of reworking on the engine that added tons of time when the game should have been done much sooner. It would be pretty unfair and callous just to dismiss Carmack, but he's the man at the top and he's the chief software engineer -- he's ultimately responsible on principle alone, not to mention the technical issues that I'm alluding to.

I need to track down whatever it was that gave me that impression.

Carmack isn't innocent either as said by ^^^. Sometimes you just need to be done with something.

Didn't Tim Willits get discovered by id because of his Doom mapping prowess? He's probably lurking in this thread, weeping softly.

SandGator said:

Didn't Tim Willits get discovered by id because of his Doom mapping prowess? He's probably lurking in this thread, weeping softly.

Quake mapping more probably. His Doom maps are competently done, but nothing especially remarkable.

Didn't he have maps in episode 4 of The Ultimate Doom? Didn't that come before Quake?

Tim Willits got into id because of his Doom maps. He was involved in Quake's development.

Caffeine Freak said:

Right, let's fire everybody but the lead tech guy in a company with 100+ employees. Brilliant decision. THEN the game will get done.

Oh wait the already fired a ton of people in 2011, right when COD Doom was scrapped. Too bad they didn't fire the COD loving Willits. At least someone else is creative director now. Maybe he won't pollute our precious franchise.

They are a pretty small company btw, I don't think they have a lot over 50 people.

Caffeine Freak said:

To be honest, during Rage development, it was mostly Carmack's fault that the game was delayed over and over and over again because of engine rewrites. Carmack may be a legend, but anyone can see the toll that the megatexture project has taken on the company, and any sensible person can see that the underwhelming results just aren't worth it. Though in general I think they need to get out of their "I make games that feel like they were designed in the 90s" attitude, the truth is, they've got more (and better) talent working there now than they ever have, and ultimately Carmack's tinkering is what fucks everything up. Well, I make a reservation on that comment about their talent because several of their best guys actually left during Rage (art director Kenneth Scott immediately comes to mind; he's literally the best in the industry for sci-fi, in my opinion, and now he's working on Halo).

I'm quite cercain that if Id had released the game in 2007-2008 it would have been a hit. People would not have said that Id copied Bioshock or Borderlands. That and the game would not have felt so...old.

And speaking of Carmack and his tinkering, those fancy lighting effects REALLY put a toll on systems, which is why levels were often cramped and samey. I think he said this in one of his recent keynotes.

DooM_RO said:

And speaking of Carmack and his tinkering, those fancy lighting effects REALLY put a toll on systems, which is why levels were often cramped and samey. I think he said this in one of his recent keynotes.

That's one of the things that have bothered me about id in recent years. I'm all for progression and working towards the next big thing but if the paying customer gets a compromised game because the technology is ahead of the hardware it doesn't seem right.

The customer wants a great gaming experience now. It's what he has paid his money in hope of. However, he is effectively being told "see this relatively featureless corridor - if it was 5 years from now and you were playing a game by someone else who had bought our gaming engine, it would look great".

Not sure I'm following what you guys are saying. You could experience all of Doom 3's bells and whistles if you had a high-end system back in 2004, and was also well optimised for low-end systems of the era. Upon release it ran very well on my friend's Geforce 4 with only a superficial loss of image quality, as I recall.

Despite the non-performance-related technical problems, as a piece of software Rage is also a well-made game and is pretty flexible if your system isn't cutting edge. It runs just as well as other contemporary games/engines do on my aging computer with most of the settings cranked up, at any rate.

I can't remember my system specs, but at the time it came out Doom 3 ran better and looked better than it had any right to on my system. This is the same computer that struggled with
Freedom Force (imgur).

DooM_RO said:

Oh wait the already fired a ton of people in 2011, right when COD Doom was scrapped. Too bad they didn't fire the COD loving Willits. At least someone else is creative director now. Maybe he won't pollute our precious franchise.

They are a pretty small company btw, I don't think they have a lot over 50 people.

They have over two hundred employees, according to Wikipedia. They've expanded a lot since being acquired by Zenimax.


The second block of text you quoted doesn't belong to me, btw.