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unerxai

Thoughts on the state of old id games (and old games in general) on Steam

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Some of you may remember there used to be an "id Super Pack" on Steam. It was pretty much every id game released from Keen to Doom 3. It received criticism for the way they were released: Suboptimal DOSBox configuration, lack of Setup files, lack of music (Q1/Q2), unpatched games (Hexen DK) and other issues. Now the pack doesn't exist but the games remain individually on the store.

 

Most people quickly learn about source ports, and some learn to modify the DOSBox cfg (not hard at all, btw), so I guess this isn't something many people care about, but I've always thought it's sad such important and classic games had such poor Steam releases and have remained that way for so many years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by unerxai

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Steam is arguably the worst platform to play older games on because a lot of the games wont even work, but there rarely is a notice to tell players this before they buy. I think Good Old Games is a much better service for older games but I still use Steam for other stuff although I do play Quake on Steam and sometimes the older Doom games for nostalgia giggles.

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Yeah, GOG's releases tend to be a bit more complete, and have the more rare releases such as the patched up Plutonia and TNT IWADs, plus they actually take their time to preconfigure the games to make sure they actually do work.

 

Steam is worse here but for something like id's games honestly, I don't care since a) I don't use DOSBox and b) if I want something that's missing I can always find it.

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What I don't like about Steam is that you buy one game, and you usually get another, like I buy Quake 3 Arena, and they also give me Team Arena. I DON'T WANT SHITTY TEAM ARENA!! Steam doesn't really allow you to buy individual games. Like another one was Doom 2, and they lump in Final Doom, Ultimate Doom and the Master Levels for Doom 2!! I don't want SHITTY Final Doom and the Master Levels!!

 

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23 minutes ago, seed said:

Steam is worse here but for something like id's games honestly, I don't care since a) I don't use DOSBox and b) if I want something that's missing I can always find it.

 

For id Tech 1 games on Steam, I don't use Steam's own launchers at all, but Zandronum, in my Users folder. If I configure it and limit the SP's functions, it can be just as good as the original exe.

 

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1 hour ago, Foebane72 said:

What I don't like about Steam is that you buy one game, and you usually get another, like I buy Quake 3 Arena, and they also give me Team Arena. I DON'T WANT SHITTY TEAM ARENA!! Steam doesn't really allow you to buy individual games. Like another one was Doom 2, and they lump in Final Doom, Ultimate Doom and the Master Levels for Doom 2!! I don't want SHITTY Final Doom and the Master Levels!!

 

 

Blame the developers, it's how they set it up, it's not Steam's fault here.

 

1 hour ago, Foebane72 said:

For id Tech 1 games on Steam, I don't use Steam's own launchers at all

 

Me neither. I don't use the original launchers at all for the majority of old games I have.

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12 minutes ago, seed said:

 

Blame the developers, it's how they set it up, it's not Steam's fault here.

 

 

Me neither. I don't use the original launchers at all for the majority of old games I have.

 

Fair enough that the developers do that.

 

And I meant that I don't launch the id Tech 1 games from Steam, but from Zandronum (luckily Zandronum scans the "common" folder on Steam for .WADs).

 

Also, I didn't mean to imply that I dislike Ultimate Doom, as it's the original Doom with expansion, and the Master Levels for Doom 2 are worth a look, but Final Doom is rock hard.

 

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11 hours ago, seed said:

Yeah, GOG's releases tend to be a bit more complete, and have the more rare releases such as the patched up Plutonia and TNT IWADs, plus they actually take their time to preconfigure the games to make sure they actually do work. 

 

I'm pretty sure Quake 2 straight from GOG didn't work right last time I tried it. It only included the original v3.20 exe which requires some tweaking to run without crashing and screwing up mouse acceleration settings. It doesn't even play the CD soundtrack (which they at least include unlike the Steam release, albeit as lossy Ogg Vorbis files) without downloading a source port first. :P

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1 minute ago, xttl said:

I'm pretty sure Quake 2 straight from GOG didn't work right last time I tried it. It only included the original v3.20 exe which requires some tweaking to run without crashing and screwing up mouse acceleration settings. It doesn't even play the CD soundtrack (which they at least include unlike the Steam release, albeit as lossy Ogg Vorbis files) without downloading a source port first. :P

 

Eh, exceptions exist I guess :p , but I keep hearing that the games they have running in DOSBox for instance are better configured out-of-the-box than they do on Steam.

 

And the fact that they tend to be more complete is certainly true, as seen with Quake 2's music for instance.

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Would be nice to have a rerelease of these older games in a more modern setup, like how modders and a lot of new GoG games use wrappers. Quake is notorious by now for its problematic soundtrack, would be nice to have an official version out of the box that runs natively in Windows 10, soundtrack and all.

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10 hours ago, seed said:

And the fact that they tend to be more complete is certainly true, as seen with Quake 2's music for instance

 

Yeah, their Quake 1 comes with CD audio as well (uncompressed even). Would be cool if they also offered the original CD/floppy images as an optional download (for all games in general, not just Quakes), but maybe there are some licensing issues with that and/or they have been lost.

Edited by xttl

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2 minutes ago, xttl said:

Yeah, their Quake 1 comes with CD audio as well (uncompressed even). Would be cool if they also offered the original CD/floppy images as an optional download, but maybe there are some licensing issues with that and/or they have been lost.

 

Or maybe they just never considered including them too, who knows.

 

I doubt it's due to licensing issues since the music itself would have more than likely been impossible to distribute if that was the case, but I'm not an expert in legal matters so I could easily be wrong.

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Them being on steam means the IWADS are easily accesible to the masses for use with source ports

3 hours ago, Foebane72 said:

 I don't want SHITTY Final Doom

 

Imagine thinking Plutonia is shitty in any way... 

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31 minutes ago, jazzmaster9 said:

Imagine thinking Plutonia is shitty in any way... 

 

I'm actually playing that with God mode, because it would just kill me otherwise. It's just too hard. And I don't like a lot of the new textures, neither.

 

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4 hours ago, Foebane72 said:

What I don't like about Steam is that you buy one game, and you usually get another, like I buy Quake 3 Arena, and they also give me Team Arena. I DON'T WANT SHITTY TEAM ARENA!! Steam doesn't really allow you to buy individual games. Like another one was Doom 2, and they lump in Final Doom, Ultimate Doom and the Master Levels for Doom 2!! I don't want SHITTY Final Doom and the Master Levels!!

Do you think the games would be cheaper if they lacked content?

 

But if you prefer not to buy games in their fully complete version, then may I interest you in Paradox's games? Every single component part of these games is a separate DLC, so you can get only the part you want. Of course if you want the full game then you need to buy 3792 separate DLCs.

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Bit late now, Gez, I already have all the games I'm interested in. I know Steam tends to offer discounts on multi-game packages for better value, so I'm used to that now. But of course, some games are better than others.

 

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11 hours ago, Boaby Kenobi said:

Steam is arguably the worst platform to play older games on because a lot of the games wont even work, but there rarely is a notice to tell players this before they buy. I think Good Old Games is a much better service for older games but I still use Steam for other stuff although I do play Quake on Steam and sometimes the older Doom games for nostalgia giggles.

Yeah GOG releases ain't perfect but are far better most of the time.

 

When it comes to old games, there's a mindset of "we are ok as long as we can find a fix online" among most PC gamers, and that has allowed companies to get away with these crippled/flawed releases. Combine that with the fact old games go for dirt cheap and no wonder people don't care about correctness.

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11 hours ago, Boaby Kenobi said:

Steam is arguably the worst platform to play older games on because a lot of the games wont even work, but there rarely is a notice to tell players this before they buy. I think Good Old Games is a much better service for older games but I still use Steam for other stuff although I do play Quake on Steam and sometimes the older Doom games for nostalgia giggles.

Sad, but true. You really have to set up some things just to get Blood 2 working. Something you shouldn't even have to do in my opinion. If a game doesen't work straight after buying it you basically just got ripped off. It's a shitty thing for Steam to do, but Steam does some pretty shitty stuff in general.

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I'm used to having to finagle old games to get them to work ... it was normal in the 90s. Steam used to annoy me more because the launcher would eat up my CPU time like a tasty snack, but my comp now is fine with it. I only use it when necessary so I haven't encountered any games not working. I imagine the whole idea of a launcher that aggregates all teh games would end eventually lead to compatibility problems...

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14 hours ago, unerxai said:

Some of you may remember there used to be an "id Super Pack" on Steam. It was pretty much every id game released from Keen to Doom 3. It received criticism for the way they were released: Suboptimal DOSBox configuration, lack of Setup files, lack of music (Q1/Q2), unpatched games (Hexen DK) and other issues. Now the pack doesn't exist but the games remain individually on the store.

 

Most people quickly learn about source ports, and some learn to modify the DOSBox cfg (not hard at all, btw), so I guess this isn't something many people care about, but I've always thought it's sad such important and classic games had such poor Steam releases and have remained that way for so many years.

 

Rather than the original Dosbox, I recommend Dosbox-staging:

 

https://dosbox-staging.github.io/about/

 

https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging

Edited by Master O

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you can buy doom 2 by itself on steam for $5. You don't have to get final doom and master levels, it's part of an entirely separate $15 bundle. You indeed cannot buy Quake 3 on it's own, and I suppose I can sympathize with this viewpoint because Quake 3 is $15 but Quake Live (which lacks that content) is $10, so as much as I want to make a comment about how we're now at the stage of complaining when a game contains more content, I can't because it may actually be bringing up the price.

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Alot of my friends are put off by Doom due to all the source ports, I wish the version on Steam was just better.

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I bought that pack, but having been well-entrenched in source ports for years and years by then, I knew what I was really after was the WADs.

 

The kicker for all this stuff is that, of course, to be bundled with something "better," they have to either make an agreement with a port's author to bundle it (which would certainly come into play with issues like money/royalties, etc.) or they'd need something they could more fully control. Obviously for all those old games, DOSBox is the easiest way to package them, so that's what they'll do. I'd imagine if they re-released it now, for Doom stuff at least it'd be bundled with the Unity port. (Things like Heretic/Hexen/etc. are thornier issues.)

 

In practice though, the steam community page for the game will no doubt have more than a few people saying "Don't bother setting up DOSBox, just go get GZDoom."

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GOG games do a pretty good use of DOSBox. They give proper user-friendly access to the setup files and the DOSBox settings (at least the normal installer, the GOG Galaxy launcher fucks some things up). Also the overall setup of the game is just better. Steam tends to be a lot shittier in this regard for some reason.

 

I've been using DOSBox and source ports since like 2003 so it has never been that much of a problem for me to play old games, but I guess it still bugs me the games are so shitty "out of the box".

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58 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

I bought that pack, but having been well-entrenched in source ports for years and years by then, I knew what I was really after was the WADs.

 

The kicker for all this stuff is that, of course, to be bundled with something "better," they have to either make an agreement with a port's author to bundle it (which would certainly come into play with issues like money/royalties, etc.) or they'd need something they could more fully control. Obviously for all those old games, DOSBox is the easiest way to package them, so that's what they'll do. I'd imagine if they re-released it now, for Doom stuff at least it'd be bundled with the Unity port. (Things like Heretic/Hexen/etc. are thornier issues.)

 

In practice though, the steam community page for the game will no doubt have more than a few people saying "Don't bother setting up DOSBox, just go get GZDoom."

Yeah exactly. Get Doom on steam but use Gzdoom for it. What’s so difficult about that?

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And if you want your playtime count, you can just replace dosbox.exe with something like ZDL and keep on rolling.

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I can sympathise with wanting a perfect, clean Doom package that comes ready out of the box. The vanilla EXEs are really for hardcore oldschoolers at this point, if it came with either Chocolate or GZD by default I’d be much happier with that. I know it’s a tough situation due to port licensing and all that but still, it’s a shame for people to have to bother with emulators and stuff. The only troubles I ever had with Doom back in the day were audio related, but at least simply double-clicking the EXE straight off the disc started the game right up.

 

I guess this is probably becoming less and less common but I just have a vision of some poor computer-illiterate soul buying Doom and wondering “what a Dos Box is”..

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I can sympathize with this as well, but there is one issue - they will obviously have to constantly update it with new releases, otherwise there's no point in supplying a port that will be outdated in a year or two, so frankly the current distribution is just fine for me. Get the game, and then a source port, and if you want Steam to still track your play time, you can just replace dosbox.exe with the executable of your port of choice and bingo, problem solved.

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1 hour ago, Doomkid said:

I can sympathise with wanting a perfect, clean Doom package that comes ready out of the box. The vanilla EXEs are really for hardcore oldschoolers at this point, if it came with either Chocolate or GZD by default I’d be much happier with that. I know it’s a tough situation due to port licensing and all that but still, it’s a shame for people to have to bother with emulators and stuff. The only troubles I ever had with Doom back in the day were audio related, but at least simply double-clicking the EXE straight off the disc started the game right up.

I'm so glad that GPL licensing is so hardcore that it discourages publishers from using fan-made ports. And Doom.exe works just fine under DOSBox. I would say it feels better than most ports actually. Granted, there are platforms by now where DOSBox isn't catching up well enough, so my point is weakening. But I think we should all wish for DOSBox perpetuity, as it's not just Doom.exe which is at stake.

 

Anyway, if DOSBox stops being a good solution, then the only port they should adopt is Chocolate Doom, full stop. It's the most sensible option, because new people should play the real thing, just with the dirty backend updated to work on modern systems.

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