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hardcore_gamer

Why haven't there been more indie Doom clones?

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40 minutes ago, Pegg said:

Because they don't ignore +20 years of changes in fps games.

 

I dismiss this argument because I don't regard the old school fps formula to be inferior, it's just a different style. A boring ultra linear shooter with a billion scripted events isn't fun for me.

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15 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Haven't there been a veritable fuckton of 'Doom clones' released basically every year since Doom came out? Just how many more do we need, am I missing something here?

Thank you!

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2 hours ago, hardcore_gamer said:

I dismiss this argument because I don't regard the old school fps formula to be inferior

 

2 hours ago, Pegg said:

Because they don't ignore +20 years of changes in fps games.

 

He never said it was inferior though.

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9 minutes ago, Agent6 said:

 

 

He never said it was inferior though.

 

Neither did I. I just answered the question. Not my problem he had a call of duty PTSD. Most shooters now are multiplayer or open ended.

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I find that there is a resurgence in '90s-FPS' type games which mostly fuse the graphics and gun roster of Doom and Quake along with the gameplay loop of Serious Sam and Painkiller.

 

Unfortunately, most of them are rather mediocre, often failing to successfully emulate the FPSes of yore and strike their own identity.

 

With that said there are a few excellent shooters I've seen crop up recently. I'd say Devil Daggers is an excellent shmup shooter with a distinct arcadey feel to it. And then we have DESYNC which is basically a fusion of DMC and Quake. It's grown to be not only one of my favorite FPSes, but one of my favorite games outright.

 

DESYNC deserves credit for trying to improve the '90s-FPS' and 'modern-FPS' formulas which have somehow both become stale.

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5 minutes ago, Pegg said:

Neither did I.

 

Stupid me, I quoted the posts in the wrong order, I was referring to you.

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Because the Raycaster Engine (Wolfenstien 3D clone game maker) is in GameMaker. As soon as someone upgrades the Raycaster Engine to something more Doom like we will see a lot of Doom clones.

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Takes a lot more work to make Doom-quality levels than it does to make Wolf3D-quality levels which is one reason why there are far more Wolf3D clones. No height variance, super low res art, usually no rotation angles for sprites means you can make one all by yourself with no or very low budget.

 

Making a Doom or Duke level of quality is going to take a lot more work and will pretty much require a team and budget, the best example is Ion Maiden.

 

Plus, if you just retread old school FPS games, whats stopping people from just buying the old school games instead of a new one? The old ones still exist, they are still high quality, and you have to have some really new unique stuff to stand out.

 

That said, I'm working on one. It'll be shown off soon. :D

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11 hours ago, wheresthebeef said:

Plus, if you just retread old school FPS games, whats stopping people from just buying the old school games instead of a new one? The old ones still exist, they are still high quality

 

 By that logic why buy any new games at all?

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6 hours ago, hardcore_gamer said:

 

 By that logic why buy any new games at all?

New games have new features and are updated with the times.

If a game is just a carbon copy of another game, there's no point in buying it when you can play the original.

Look at Ion Maiden which is an updated and fresh take on the Build engine style games and then look at the dime a dozen Wolf3D clones on Steam. One of them introduces new features yet still is inspired by oldies while the others are carbon copies that do nothing unique.

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27 minutes ago, wheresthebeef said:

New games have new features and are updated with the times.

If a game is just a carbon copy of another game, there's no point in buying it when you can play the original.

Look at Ion Maiden which is an updated and fresh take on the Build engine style games and then look at the dime a dozen Wolf3D clones on Steam. One of them introduces new features yet still is inspired by oldies while the others are carbon copies that do nothing unique.

 

What new features does Ion Maiden have? As far as I can tell it's just Duke Nukem but with new weapons and enemies. Aka, a Doom (Duke?) clone.

 

And yes, people do pay to experience different variations of the same thing over and over. Just look at FIFA or basically any sports game game ever. Even Doom 2 was just Doom 1 but with a few new things in it.

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On 5/19/2018 at 8:45 AM, hardcore_gamer said:

 

I massively disagree with this...

Had those games been released in, say, '92, yep, I would have been all over them. Let me ask: Were you around, checking out games in '93? Cause, where you start makes a lot of difference in what amazes you. I know that a lot of young gamers don't know a good thing if it hits them in the head: "I can only get 60 fps??"  "The colors are bland."  "The gameplay is repetitive."  "Only 4 players at once??"

 

10 miles in the snow, and all that. I was happy with Pac-Man...

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7 hours ago, hardcore_gamer said:

 

What new features does Ion Maiden have? As far as I can tell it's just Duke Nukem but with new weapons and enemies. Aka, a Doom (Duke?) clone.

 

And yes, people do pay to experience different variations of the same thing over and over. Just look at FIFA or basically any sports game game ever. Even Doom 2 was just Doom 1 but with a few new things in it.

 

 

For one, Ion Maiden's levels are directly connected to eachother like what you see in Half-Life; you can go back and forth with just a quick load between them. All enemies, items, secrets, etc etc are all saved too so they don't just all respawn when you change between levels. There's no stats screen until the end of the entire zone either. None of the other Build games did this.

 


Second, it ups the interactivity and destruction; the boss fight level changes from when it starts to the end because of all the destruction going on in the level with less and less cover being available as the boss starts throwing more and more threats at you.

Third, its the same guys that worked on the EDuke32 source port and they improved on it further for Ion Maiden. They made engine upgrades and made it work on modern machines. All it currently needs is optimization, but it's still in early access.

There's more changes and improvements than just these too, and the full game isn't out yet, but this is all beside the point. They didn't just make Missile Mark or Radiated Rick.

 

And yeah, people buy similar games, there's a market for that; however, any game you make you are taking a risk, especially as an indie studio/single developer, and you have to do a lot to stand out today because there are so many games coming out. I'm not talking sequels to established franchises either, those are iterations that are (theoretically) improving on the previous entries, not just carbon copies.

 

As a small dev with a brand new IP, you are already taking a risk, you have to make your game unique and stand out to survive. If you just do the exact same thing another game did before without iterating or doing much more, it is possible you will go completely unnoticed. You can still totally fail making a unique game, too, but if you are completely derivative of another higher quality game, your chances are worse that you will just get lost in the shuffle.

 

Hell, look at how many companies are doing a Battle Royale mode now. Pubg and Fortnite already have the hold, you need to do something crazy to stand out and survive. Just ask the Radical Heights developer.

 

*edit* Also, I should point out, I don't consider games like Dusk, Strafe, etc etc to be clones.

When I think clone, I think of something that does the exact same thing but isn't trying to do anything new. Duke3D isn't a Doom clone, but Freedoom is.

 

*edit edit* I see you have a different definition of clone and are asking something else. Forget what I typed in the spoiler above.

Doom 'clones' by your definition are resurging and coming out/being announced more and more.

Edited by wheresthebeef

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On 5/19/2018 at 12:34 AM, Mr. Freeze said:

I can't tell you why developers don't bother in the first place, but I feel that a lot of developers don't really "get" Doom. 

 

I've always felt that Doom is predicated upon three "pillars" that comprise its gameplay- Action, Exploration and Suspense. A lot of clones wind up going full action and leaving out exploration and suspense, killing the pacing or making the gameplay monotonous. Strafe is a good example of this- a supposedly "retro" FPS that turns into an annoying slog very quickly (I have little faith in Dusk or that bluish-HR Geiger-looking game either).  

 

Either that or the gameplay has some annoying gimmick (weapon upgrades, RPG elements, alternate fire modes). Fuck off already. 

 

You read my mind, pal x3. I personally still love Doom today because it haves one of the great level design ever featured in a game, something I miss a lot in modern FPSs these days (open-world shooters doesn't count).

 

For me, a "Doom clone" made today must have these requirments: graphics made mostly of sprites and textures in 3Dish walls (use of polygonal object must be limited, if anything use it for some objects in game; if you make a game with Doom gameplay but made mostly of 3D objects, then it's a Quake-clone) and a complex, explorable open-ended design for levels (doesn't need to be abstract like the original Doom, you can use realistic map/building floors design) with some verticality in it since that the lack of it would make it more of a Wolf-clone. Of course, enemy placement also plays an important factor; having hordes of enemies placed in one single area, charging at you in all directions, can and will become tedious after a short while; having fewer enemies placed in a lot of different areas would make them feel more unpredictable, no matter the number.

 

On 5/19/2018 at 5:46 AM, Halfblind said:

How about these games? Do these count?

 

Retro Blazer looks a lot of what I mean for modern Doom clone... if it wasn't for the orizzontaly, very labyrinthic level design, which reminds me more of WOlf. It's not bad per se, but the main problem with Wolf-3d were the levels bein very labyrinthic and looking too monotonous in textures and design, making the levels feel more the same and harder to navigate.

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7 minutes ago, MattGuy1990 said:

For me, a "Doom clone" made today must have these requirments: graphics made mostly of sprites and textures in 3Dish walls (use of polygonal object must be limited, if anything use it for some objects in game; if you make a game with Doom gameplay but made mostly of 3D objects, then it's a Quake-clone)

 

I have never understood this point of view. So what if Quake had better technology and 3D graphics? The gameplay formula is exactly the same. The terms Doom clone and Quake clone mean the same thing to me: A first person maze shooter style game where you progress through somewhat open ended levels to look for keycards and/or other items to unlock new areas and at some point find an exist. What technology is used is beyond the point. I guess you could argue this means the term Wolf clone technically makes the most sense since Wolf3D came first, but the term Doom clone gained more popularity so meh.

 

And if it's true that Ion Maiden has Half-life style level progression then I fail to see what even makes it a retro game. So what if it has old graphics? If it still has modern design then it's still a modern game, albeit one that is running on an old engine.

 

 

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8 minutes ago, hardcore_gamer said:

And if it's true that Ion Maiden has Half-life style level progression then I fail to see what even makes it a retro game. So what if it has old graphics? If it still has modern design then it's still a modern game, albeit one that is running on an old engine.

I fail to understand why its disqualified from being a retro game because it progresses across levels like Half-Life does. Half-Life was released in 1998, early enough to be a retro game (at least by my definition, which requires a pre-2000 release), and it was one of the defining games in the entire genre, and it still was pretty similar to Doom, really.

Protagonist an ultra-giga badass in iconic armor? Check.

Protagonist carries a massive arsenal? Check.

Protagonist can run fast as hell? Check.

Fights an army of extraterrestrial (read: alien) invaders? Check.

The only real hope to defeat the invasion? Check!

Called on to save Earth after Earth has basically been decimated by an invasion? Double check!

Enters the other realm to kill the big badass in charge of it all? Checkity check check.

 

Seems pretty retro to me.

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I have never understood this point of view. So what if Quake had better technology and 3D graphics? The gameplay formula is exactly the same. The terms Doom clone and Quake clone mean the same thing to me: A first person maze shooter style game where you progress through somewhat open ended levels to look for keycards and/or other items to unlock new areas and at some point find an exist. What technology is used is beyond the point. I guess you could argue this means the term Wolf clone technically makes the most sense since Wolf3D came first, but the term Doom clone gained more popularity so meh.

 

And if it's true that Ion Maiden has Half-life style level progression then I fail to see what even makes it a retro game. So what if it has old graphics? If it still has modern design then it's still a modern game, albeit one that is running on an old engine.

 

For me Ion Maiden is a Doom clone because the phisophy it uses in both gameplay and level design is very like the one used in 90s shooters (and yeah, Hald Life 1 counts as such too, despite having some particularities then made it go above your averag Doom clone of the time). Who cares if levels are all linked instead of being separated, the ideology in the design is still the same.

 

I get though why all this might create confusion in you, as Doom and Quake are similar in gameplay and design, but see it this way: a "Doom Clone" is easy to reconize because it uses the same kind of technology (NOT game engine, mind you) and gameplay phyloophy that Doom/Wolf-3d had, which is what every FPS in the early 90s was doing; when Quake was introduced things were starting to change rapidly, as things like a narrative story told in the game were being introduced only a few years after it. So yeah, maybe using the term Quake clone isn't all that right given the context, but you gotta trust when saying that Doom clones are much easier to reconize and being understood.

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I'm not in the boat that says "Half-Life is a Doom clone," I'm that guy in the water swimming away from all the people jammed into their little rowboats.

Joking aside, I don't see Half-Life as necessarily being a Doom clone proper.

The engine on which it runs is definitely much stronger, and it doesn't use sprites except for muzzle flares and a couple other things. It uses models for everything else. It has actual interaction, very limited, yes, but interaction, with AI allies, which Doom obviously didn't. And usually still doesn't.

It's capable of so much more that, far as I'm concerned, Half-Life isn't a Doom clone so much as a Doom descendant.

But that's just my opinion on the relationship between the two.

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I agree with you here, and I'm gonna explain myself better; Half-Life isn't a Doom clones because, despite of having lots of elements token from it, there's one key aspect that makes the philosophy of the game very different; it's pacing. Unlike any other shooter before, HL asks the player to just stop moving, at various points, either to listen to an NPC talking or because the way forward is blocked and the gamer needs to observe the area in order to find the alternate route (or making it himself).

 

Doom and clones are almsot the exact opposite; they are all about movement. The pacing never stops being fast, both in combat and exploration, and even when the player's stuck all it needs to do is running around in order to find the right door/the key to unlock it/the button that makes the right platform going down. A typical Doom level hardly, if ever, asks the player to stop dead on the track. That's way games like Quake 1 and 2 or even the original Unreal qualifies as Doom clones, since the philosophy in gameplay and pacing it's the same, and it's indeed the key factor that differentiates Doom and clones from all other kinds of FPSs, modern or not.

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I say the fewer the better. Most of them can't even get good FPS things right, like the weapon feel, enemy death satisfaction animations etc...

It's always some rouge, wave/arena based garbage with pixelation up the ass, thinking that kind of pixelation was back in the day.

 

However, I do see some successes, like DUSK, Ion Maiden, Amid Evil, so leave that to the professionals, I say.

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Any time someone ventures to "make something look retro" is missing the point. 'Retro' does not mean "pixelated", or "8-bit", or any of that garbage. "Retro" means "a developer's best shot, at the time." The developers were trying to make the their games look and play as good as possible, and they were somewhat limited by what was possible.

 

Adding "pixelation", reducing sound quality, etc., are an attempted slap in the face of the giants whose shoulders are being stood upon, if you ask me. "Retro" means games that were fast enough, sharp enough, and fun enough to be remembered years later. Retro games are games that people still want to play years later. Or, for newcomers who want to see what all the fuss was about.

 

The technology used, clone or otherwise, should be chosen to best tell the story. The technology is not what makes a game fun or not. Those indie games listed above could have been just as much fun as Doom, with the right mindset and skill. We were very lucky to have John Romero and Tom Hall (yes, Tom too) to build a fun world around John Carmack's tech. I call it right-brain vs. left-brain. You can find many beautiful, useless, buggy programs. You can also find very efficient, perfect algorithms with horrible GUIs. In both of these categories, the left or right brain thinking was missing. You need both to be successful.

 

For an FPS, you need good technology, but also good content. Cloned tech can work, with the right content. Or perfect content can fail with a buggy engine.

 

(sorry, what a rambling post...)

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1 hour ago, kb1 said:

Adding "pixelation", reducing sound quality, etc., are an attempted slap in the face of the giants whose shoulders are being stood upon, if you ask me. "Retro" means games that were fast enough, sharp enough, and fun enough to be remembered years later. Retro games are games that people still want to play years later. Or, for newcomers who want to see what all the fuss was about.

 

I agree that retro shouldn't mean half-assed, but that has nothing to do with pixels and chiptunes. I find low-poly models horribly unattractive; you have to get at least to Unreal 2 quality before I'd prefer them to Doom sprites. And for 2D platformers I'd take truly good pixels like oldschool Sonic over 99% of anything. As an indie dev time and cash are always limited, and retro is a good way to split time between presentation and gameplay.

 

Honestly I still think the gameplay is what's often lacking - even in the Wolf clones, I can't recall a moment as striking as the original Wolf's Tom Hall level where in the final room you find the zombies have gone berserk and killed the guards, or as devious as the Romero one with a ton of little wood-paneled passages that enemies flood into from the barracks where the key is.

 

As far as why less Doom clones, I think a lot of it's because the style's not as well known nowadays. I know plenty of gamers  a couple years younger and when then think classic FPS they think Halo, Deus Ex, or Half-Life 2. Ideas like mobility as defense, dungeon-style exploration, and hordes of enemies weren't really in their lexicon until we talked. And if the part of Doom you like isn't one of those three, you can probably find something else - Battle Royale-types for pure openness, TF2 for fast multiplayer, and anything AAA game if graphical realism was the draw.

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2 hours ago, zodiac said:

 

I agree that retro shouldn't mean half-assed, but that has nothing to do with pixels and chiptunes. I find low-poly models horribly unattractive; you have to get at least to Unreal 2 quality before I'd prefer them to Doom sprites. And for 2D platformers I'd take truly good pixels like oldschool Sonic over 99% of anything. As an indie dev time and cash are always limited, and retro is a good way to split time between presentation and gameplay.

I agree with that. I wasn't really getting my message across. Pixels are great. But *purposely* dumbing down your presentation doesn't make it look "Retro" to me. The devs back then were trying to make it look good. Going the other direction, for the sake of a "retro look" just doesn't cut it for me.

 

2 hours ago, zodiac said:

 

Honestly I still think the gameplay is what's often lacking - even in the Wolf clones, I can't recall a moment as striking as the original Wolf's Tom Hall level where in the final room you find the zombies have gone berserk and killed the guards, or as devious as the Romero one with a ton of little wood-paneled passages that enemies flood into from the barracks where the key is.

Also agree. The Atari 2600 had some of the ugliest rendering in existence. But it was fun (Most of it. Some of it.) The TRS-80 looked even worse. But, again, those games rocked. I think game devs today get so caught up in the renderer that they just assume the game will be fun, and may not even have any time left to make the game fun.

 

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12 hours ago, kb1 said:

Any time someone ventures to "make something look retro" is missing the point. 'Retro' does not mean "pixelated", or "8-bit", or any of that garbage. "Retro" means "a developer's best shot, at the time." The developers were trying to make the their games look and play as good as possible, and they were somewhat limited by what was possible.

 

Adding "pixelation", reducing sound quality, etc., are an attempted slap in the face of the giants whose shoulders are being stood upon, if you ask me. "Retro" means games that were fast enough, sharp enough, and fun enough to be remembered years later. Retro games are games that people still want to play years later. Or, for newcomers who want to see what all the fuss was about.

 

The technology used, clone or otherwise, should be chosen to best tell the story. The technology is not what makes a game fun or not. Those indie games listed above could have been just as much fun as Doom, with the right mindset and skill. We were very lucky to have John Romero and Tom Hall (yes, Tom too) to build a fun world around John Carmack's tech. I call it right-brain vs. left-brain. You can find many beautiful, useless, buggy programs. You can also find very efficient, perfect algorithms with horrible GUIs. In both of these categories, the left or right brain thinking was missing. You need both to be successful.

 

For an FPS, you need good technology, but also good content. Cloned tech can work, with the right content. Or perfect content can fail with a buggy engine.

 

(sorry, what a rambling post...)

 

Exactly. To make a game feel retro, old looking graphics and gameplay aren't enough; you need to recapture the same ideaology devs of the past used to make their game. Things like how you design your levels, what kind of combat and exploration you want the player to use, the pacing of it all... you can have these three and still making the game feel retro without old looking graphics. Just look at Doom 2016; it haves one of the most beautiful graphics of latest generation yet the gamme developers tried their damnest to make the game feel as closest to Romero and pals' style as possible, and it shows.

 

Unfortunately a lot of indie games are pretty lazy in lazy design, these days. Just chack out how many of them uses random generation levels and enemy spawning. It's not old school, it's lazy and feels samey after a while. That's why if you wan to make a good game, indie or AAA, it's better to be a team of eople then a single developer (and making sure that such people knows what they are doing in the first place xp).

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In 1992, at age 20, I played Wolfenstein3d on an old dos system...at about 10-15 frames per second. It was amazing to "walk" around in what looked like a 3d world. Not long after it was Doom. Those 2 game set the stage for decades of fps games to come. Pretty hard to ask about clones of a game that literally STARTED the whole genre. IF you want to generalize the thought, you could say every fps game since 1993 is a doom clone of sorts.

 

 

My 2 cents.

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