Jump to content
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...
kermode

What if id had more time?

Recommended Posts

It just occurred to me that Doom was made in about a year from creating the new engine, designing everything & releasing it. Sandy Petersen designed most of episodes 2 & 3 & he was a late hire when Tom Hall left. I think he had only a few months to do them all. & they were using fairly primitive computers & map editors compared with what we have today. Or at least not Doom Builder. So what would they have done if they'd had more time to work on it, like mappers on this forum do?

Share this post


Link to post

Level design of E2 and E3 could have been put more effort into and maybe touched up by Romero. The game would end up being less haphazardly abstract in the levels with supposed concrete themes / settings. Particularly E2M1, E2M8, E2M9, E3M1, E3M8 and E3M9 could have been improved. They would also experiment with advantages of the engine much more than they did, and produce maps with more height and light variation and perhaps even some tricks. Anyway, the game would end up being roughly as much memorable as it did in real, that's how I see it.

In before oh no yet another wave of "What if" threads!

Share this post


Link to post

Different layouts, possibly better, it wouldn't matter because it would end up being Doom as we know it now only in an alternate universe. Maybe they would be so bad the game would be long forgotten. It's really hard to speculate. Aside from time and things like Doom Builder we have the luxury of limit removing sourceports. Even being constrained by Vanilla, I doubt we'd see more detailed maps as hardware was quite limiting at the time. Time isn't always a luxury or indicative of things necessarily being better either. Look at DNF developer hell. Time constraint speed mapping works wonders for creative productivity :D

Another thing the modern Doomer possesses are previous works for a frame of reference. The iD team were making the game from scratch with nothing to draw upon but their own concept. Uncharted territory. A palette of textures and a blank slate. The grid is blank. They're setting the standard with every vertex, line, sector, and thing placement. It's never been done before.

Share this post


Link to post

If id had more time to make Doom, they would have made more textures, levels, weapons, and monsters. Oh wait that was called Doom 2.

Share this post


Link to post

making things pretty fast was kind of id's M.O. - think of how quickly all the Keen games were made, or all those Wolf3D levels. in hindsight maybe it's easier to see how something like Episode 2 would benefit from having a more coherent arc like Episode 1, but there's no guarantee that the project might not have petered out and lost focus if they spent more time on it. and the (sometimes unintentional) bizarreness is actually what drew me to Doom way back when, so it might have lost some of that.

you have to remember that they were inventing an entirely new design language. as it is, so many things about Doom were already so new that just having any of it at all was novel that it's hard to say that they'd be able to really recognize exactly what everything needed on the first go. but i mean, they got it a lot more right than most people afterwards. and i think that probably couldn't be overstated.

Share this post


Link to post

I really think the only difference would be less texture misalignments and a few other small touch ups with sprites, like the little cyan holes you see in some frames would probably get filled in. Other than that the game is basically perfect and most of the existing bugs are hard to notice, I don't think they would have gotten picked up even with a few extra months of testing.

They obviously really wanted to be done with it after 1.666 anyway, which I think is why we get the little oddities in Doom2 with 1.8 and 1.9 - They were like "fuck, we are so done with this shit, just get the bugs out ASAP and send it to the public!"

Share this post


Link to post

they were to games as Stephen King was to novels... pumping out masterpieces at a pretty speedy rate for a while.

Some just have that talent
.. in this case... the right group of people at the right place at the right time (in a tech sense).

Time (design longevity) wasn't their style nor did they need it.

of course that's changed over the years as technology and development move to beyond cinematic proportions and expectations... and apparently taking more time has affected their ability under new teams... they haven't had masterpieces of that sort since that group of people who could pump out a game (or two) every year split apart.

Oh, and that hardware and tools were anything but "ancient" at the time. They were developing doom on machines that were several thousand dollars+ each, which would have been nearly double the price by todays inflation, and simply porting it down to pc. This was stuff the 386 and 486 crowd of the time could only wet dream of. take that, you x86 peasant.

Man, what I'd do to get my hands on one of those Nex... oh wait.

Share this post


Link to post
scifista42 said:

The game would end up being less haphazardly abstract in the levels with supposed concrete themes / settings. Particularly E2M1, E2M8, E2M9, E3M1, E3M8 and E3M9 could have been improved.


Seems like that was a deliberate design choice, given they initially had plans to make this an actual base with an in-depth story. Or maybe the abstract design was due to hardware limitations, something that can't very well be overturned with just time.

Share this post


Link to post

It's been already established that id, as an engine tech company, at least after the Keen games, never "cultivated" a particular game franchise themselves. They simply make a "killer app" game to showcase their current hot wares (the Wolf3D, Doom, Quake, Quake 3 etc. engine), and then move on.

If they wanted, sure, they could have delayed Quake and plough away at improving Doom, only that they never did. With the limits of the engine, at most they would have gotten it to Hexen or Boom level, and that's it. But by then, they had already produced Quake and Quake II, while Quake III was being worked on. Totally different priorities.

Share this post


Link to post

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×