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What if id Software never made Doom?

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Seriously, if id Software never made Doom, how would Doom be different?

Ever since I started playing Doom, I had pondered this.

 

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Doom wouldn't be different because it wouldn't exist. id would be known for making Wolfenstein and it's sequels, and I'm probably exaggerating here, but all future FPS would consist of low ceiling rooms with all the walls at 90 degree angles.

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If id Software didn't make "Doom," someone else would have eventually made "space marines vs. demons and Hell." Would it be called Doom? Probably not but someone still would have thought of it eventually. Would it have been as good? I seriously doubt it.

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id wouldn't have made Doom. They would have made an Alien game...

 

You know what? We'd all be Star Wars fans instead. More or less LucasArts would have made Dark Forces stand on its own as a blockbuster Wolfenstein follower with variable angles, heights, texture mapping and light variation. It would have been better than just Doom, but tragically for a much shorter while, because they probably wouldn't be as open to modding and open source.

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There would probably have been a few Marathon clones, ROTT (if it still existed) may have been significantly more popular and spawned a sequel with a less-capable, but perhaps even quirkier build engine, and space sims might have lived longer and developed more.  Hard to say how the eventual future of hw accel may have played out.  "Duke 3D" would have been an edgy 3D platformer for N64, Romero and Tom Hall may have collaborated on a sidescrolling/overhead/both action-rpg called Chrono Sword (cue three-way confusion with Chrono Trigger, Chrono Master and "Chrono Sword"), and Carmack might have ended up becoming an F1 engineer or similar.

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34 minutes ago, printz said:

id wouldn't have made Doom. They would have made an Alien game...

 

You know what? We'd all be Star Wars fans instead. More or less LucasArts would have made Dark Forces stand on its own as a blockbuster Wolfenstein follower with variable angles, heights, texture mapping and light variation. It would have been better than just Doom, but tragically for a much shorter while, because they probably wouldn't be as open to modding and open source.

Oh yeah, the modding and open source aspects to this, as well as Quake's opening up of naked TCP/IP multiplayer (when everything (?) else was done through KALI, TEN, etc), are absolutely tremendous.

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Without Doom there could be a possibility of no Quake, and no Quake would significantly change the entire gaming industry. Literally everything would be different.

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6 minutes ago, MrGlide said:

Without Doom there could be a possibility of no Quake, and no Quake would significantly change the entire gaming industry. Literally everything would be different.

Someone else would have creates these games. They would have been called by different names but at their core, would be the same games.

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Ya, sorry but the chances that those other people would have made the engine Not GNU, thus it wouldn't have taken off as it did. There is a possability half life wouldn't have came out the way it did if it wern't for quake, then if half life failed, then the steam platform very well might not exist. Honestly Trying to take out Doom or Quake in the gaming industry would have drastic effects on how literally everything is.

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Rendering quasi-realistic 3D environments would have come anyway. But we don't know how the games would have been designed.

Probably the moddability would have been quite reduced. Far more important than the 3D stuff is Doom's contribution toward making games that can be expanded by the end user.

 

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The "How would Doom be different" bit throws me as Doom clearly wouldn't exist if it... Well, never existed. The question is meant to be silly I'm sure, but I did recently write up my take on how history would have played out had ID never made Doom:

 

On 10/20/2017 at 4:58 PM, Doomkid said:

[...] ID software rode the Wolfenstein wave forever. Quake and Doom never happened - in their place, even more Wolfenstein sequels. They developed the ID tech 1 (classic Doom) engine for Wolfenstein II. It was a total blockbuster, outselling even Wolf3D and SoD by a wide margin. There were several expansions (think doom2, final doom, but done for Wolfy instead) and finally the console-exclusive Wolfenstein 64 which had the interesting spin of BJ fighting space-Nazis in the future. Good game, as I recall.

 

Wolfenstein 4 hit shelves in 2003 and had arguably the best graphics of any game ever made at the time, but many people complained that the Nazis took far too many shots to die. The reliance on realism was also divisive, some preferred the realistic feel of sneaking through a quiet, dreary castle, aware of your every footstep, where Nazis can sneakily ambush you at any time. Real thriller of a game in that sense, but the people who preferred the faster, less realistic 'run and gun' nature of Wolf 2 and Wolf 3 were disappointed with the gameplay. Having to read the tedious, uninteresting Nazi logbooks left around to figure out how to open mandatory locked chests was a real damper on the fun at times too.

 

Wolfenstein 2016 (or 5 as I insist on calling it) finally came out last year. Basically a mix of the awesome graphics of 4 and the faster gameplay of 3 but made for modern times. Great game, introduced the Wolf legacy to a whole new wave of gamers. The way the Nazis explode into ammo and health as you kill them is kind of weird but not a deal breaker by any means. Everyone keeps saying it's a ripoff of the Brutal Wolfenstein mod by General Mark III, but other than the assassination animations, I really don't see it.

 

It's just a shame that WolfenSnap is nowhere close to GZWolfBuilder in terms of flexibility. I mean seriously, every "custom map" just feels like a basic boring Castle prefab. Still though, Wolf2016 carried the torch into the new era pretty damn well, imo. I know Wolf mapping has been super flexible since 1994 so it was disappointing in that sense, but as a standalone game, it was still loads of fun.

 

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On 11/13/2017 at 4:47 AM, Doomkid said:

The "How would Doom be different" bit throws me as Doom clearly wouldn't exist if it... Well, never existed. The question is meant to be silly I'm sure, but I did recently write up my take on how history would have played out had ID never made Doom:

 

 

This is literally the first thing I thought of when I read the question, particularly after @Sgt Jack V's comment about Wolfenstein. I remembered @Doomkid's extensive alternate reality writeup culminating in Wolfenstein 2016.

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If you look back at the early and mid 90s, the only non-Doom shooters that have had any lasting impact are Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem 3D. Pretty much everyone else got buried; very few developers were competent enough to create a fast, stable, addictive shooter that can easily be modded. Arguably, no one was competent enough other than id. Is there a community for Corridor 7H.U.R.L.Nerves of Steel or Witchaven? Even noteworthy titles like Rise of the Triad never gained much traction. Basically, if Doom never existed, then the 90s would essentially be a forgotten era for first person shooters and Duke would have been hailed as the title that pushed the genre into the modern era.

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Ultima Underworld came out before any of this stuff and it had textured walls which could be diagonal, floor ramps, 3D bridges and doors, real-time combat and movement not constrained to a grid (although admittedly the map format itself was grid-based). without id's presence it'd take longer to surface, but someone would necessarily make something very similar to Doom sooner than later. the impetus was there and so was the influence

 

ps if these games had stuck to their RPG roots instead of paring down the simulationism in favor of arcade action I'd probably be much happier with the genre :P

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19 minutes ago, Mr.Rocket said:

I probably would have taken up oil painting..

 

Bob_at_Easel.jpg.2fbd399e871b08c5f1e9affb35f42881.jpg

Alright, let's put a happy little crusher right over there...

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Some other shovelware company would have made it... that is of course if there was no Wolfenstien. Wolfenstien beat everyone to the punch and gave them the money to do other things. Chances are there were larger companies working on their own 3D - ish FPS games who had too much story, set pieces and production values while iD was like this is great let's go with this! I'm not saying any of this to raise anyone's ire, but iD did publish so many games in a year. They seemed light weight, motivated and okay with their production values.

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I might have had a life.

 

17 hours ago, Chewyninja69 said:

There would be significantly higher murder rates, imo.

 

...then again, maybe not.

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Doom is definitely unique and creative. In fact if we introduced Doom to an alternate reality they would probably see it as a messy concept that doesn't know what it wants to be.

 

I do believe similar FPS games would have been developed at some point by id or someone else but they would likely be more of a consistent theme and story driven.

 

It's unlikely but what if a Warhammer 40k fps were to exist? Going around as a space marine killing orks, tyranids and chaos.

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Sometimes I believe that humanity needed doom... you know a piece of art with demons to kill with weapons and chainsaw, metal music, gore and action on pixel. If it was not id it was someone else who would have "answered this need" or "extracted from collective consciousness" Doom.

 

Other days, I think everythings depend on chance and random, and without Doom we would have had another Wolfenstein, Dark Forces, or something else, with attention on other aspects of videogames (as Doom did on custom mapping and online games)

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Yeah uh, someone else would've made it, of course it wouldn't be titled Doom and probably wouldn't be about Demonic invasion and stuff.

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