Carmack Loves You

[Arioch]

sargebaldy said:

true, but not because they have to. id has HAD designers who have gone one to do cool experimental games like anachronox and alice, but carmack has refused to take the risk required to make a good innovative new game, preferring to play it safe and either irritate designers into leaving or just plain firing them.

Cool doesn't mean reliably profitable. Or even profitable at all.

And on that grand scale of "former-id" game design flubs, we have Daikatana topping the list.

[sargebaldy]

Arioch said:

Cool doesn't mean reliably profitable. Or even profitable at all.

true. deus ex for example didn't do as well as it should have. but 'consistent' (and therefore unoriginal) and 'reliably profitable' are often linked. id has made quite a lot of money doing the same thing over and over again. good for them, but i for one got bored around doom2.

And on that grand scale of "former-id" game design flubs, we have Daikatana topping the list.

heh, i knew that would get mentioned. although parts of it were godawful (ugh, ep4) and it wasn't very cohesively designed, i still liked it better than quake2 on the whole because at least it wasn't boring.

[Draconio]

Personally I don't like the Quake 2 remix idea. I'd rather see the professionals spending their effort on an entirely new game, and leave upgrading eye-candy to the fans, like we've seen with JDoom for Doom and Tenebrae for Quake 1, as examples.

[Naked Snake]

Pretty cool stuff. I hope the next game is maybe Hectacon, the third installment of the Heretic and Hexen trilogy. Man, I'd love to have ID to a possible recreation of Strife in the Doom 3 or next rendering engine. Maybe even a 3rd person RPG or something. *shrugs*

[Arioch]

sargebaldy said:

true. deus ex for example didn't do as well as it should have.

But that's not the best of examples to use in any case, since that game, along with Anachronox, came out of Ion Austin, while Romero worked at Ion Dallas ... which put out Daikatana.

FWIW, I loved Deus Ex.

[Fletcher`]

BBG said:

Pretty cool stuff. I hope the next game is maybe Hectacon, the third installment of the Heretic and Hexen trilogy. Man, I'd love to have ID to a possible recreation of Strife in the Doom 3 or next rendering engine. Maybe even a 3rd person RPG or something. *shrugs*

Say, weren't we talking about a Hexen 3 or something a few months ago?

Personally, 'Hectacon' sounds like a Transformer. :P
'Legacy of the Shadow Riders' sounds a little better. :)

[sargebaldy]

Arioch said:

But that's not the best of examples to use in any case, since that game, along with Anachronox, came out of Ion Austin, while Romero worked at Ion Dallas ... which put out Daikatana.

FWIW, I loved Deus Ex.

true, i didn't meant to imply that was by romero or hall or anyone else from id. that was by another group completely, although tom hall did do some excellent voice acting for it.

[NiGHTMARE]

sargebaldy said:

several people also left due to id's decision to make doom3.

One doesn't equal several ;)

[sargebaldy]

heh, my bad. i don't even know the name of the guy who did leave. i haven't really gave a crap about id for most of a decade though anyway.

[Little Faith]

Thankfully they are prohibited from making a Hovertank remake since that would pretty much just be Descent.

[geekmarine]

Heh, I like the idea of Quake 2 Remix (Quake 1 Remix would be cooler, though), but it would pretty much have to be made by professionals. Any fan attempt to create Quake 2 in the Doom 3 engine would be foxed. Bah, sometimes I hate copyright laws. Oh, and as for gameplay, no they wouldn't have to create the gameplay. Sure, it's a new engine, and they would have to reprogram everything like game physics and weapons and whatnot, but they wouldn't be creating it from scratch, they would just be copying it from Quake 2.

[Draconio]

Yeah, I wasn't thinking of having a fanmade Quake 2 built on Doom 3, but rather a fanmade modification of the Quake 2 source, like was done with Doom and Quake.

[LorD BaZTArD]

Several people left because of the decision to make doom? HA!

Paul Steed was fired by Adrian Carmack.
Paul Jaquay's wasn't apart of the original ID that made doom, and since wasn't into the concept, he left to try other concepts.
Graeme Devine apparently left because he had done his part with the sound.

WOW! THREE PEOPLE LEAVE! That's a mass exodus? There was six months between each departure! That's not even a tiny exodus.

Oh and no ex-idder had a part in Deus Ex. Well apart from the fact Tom Hall voiced a character.

Draconio: Actually, there is a few Quake 2 ports floating around, most are in early stages, I can't remember any links atm. Sorry.

[Grimm]

Heh, are you forgetting about Hexen 2?

[Rellik]

The Quake2max engine is pretty good but more of a modders engine. Q2Evolved is just amazing. Hell just their reworked menu system kicks all kinds of ass. It's too bad the Tenebrae team went from Quake1 straight to Quake3, tenebrae quake2 would've been fantastic.

[sargebaldy]

LorD BaZTArD said:

Several people left because of the decision to make doom? HA!

Paul Steed was fired by Adrian Carmack.
Paul Jaquay's wasn't apart of the original ID that made doom, and since wasn't into the concept, he left to try other concepts.

no, he wasn't. only 3 people at id were involved in the creation of doom or doom2: john carmack (programmer), adrian carmack (artist) and kevin cloud (artist). only j. carmack out of those three even wanted to make the game.

Graeme Devine apparently left because he had done his part with the sound.

uh, wtf. graeme devine was the GAME DESIGNER. even if he had something to do with sounds as well. i still don't see how no one seems to care even slightly id is making doom3 without even a puppet game designer.

WOW! THREE PEOPLE LEAVE! That's a mass exodus? There was six months between each departure! That's not even a tiny exodus.

who the hell called it an exodus??

Oh and no ex-idder had a part in Deus Ex. Well apart from the fact Tom Hall voiced a character.

uh yes. i already pointed that out.

[Rellik]

only 3 people at id were involved in the creation of doom or doom2: john carmack (programmer), adrian carmack (artist) and kevin cloud (artist). only j. carmack out of those three even wanted to make the game

1 - Nope, John didn't want to make doom3. When I was there I asked Tim Willits about the situation and he said that John and a couple others had 'misgivings' about it but that it had all been worked out. Then he quickly changed the subject. :p

2 - Technically they don't need a game designer there right now. The game is completely designed and that's left is converting the design to brushes.

3 - Considering the core staff is only about 9-12 people, 3 would almost classify as a mass exodus. :p If a quarter of the people in the forums just up and moved to another site, that'd be an exodus for sure. :p

[sargebaldy]

heh, true (about the exodus). so um, j. carmack didn't like the idea either? from what i read he was the one who forced it on the artists.. i don't understand how it could have gone through if none of id's owners were interested in the idea. i still think it's stupid id doesn't have a game designer though. although i'll agree with you that game design is something you set up early, you need someone around to make sure it's implemented correctly.

[Arioch]

Well, which would you rather believe ... the word out of the horse's mouth ... or random rumors? Noting that we still don't have any sort of hard information, one way or the other, on Trent Reznor leaving the Doom 3 project.

In any organization, especially successful ones, you should see people cycle in and out. Hell, where I used to work up until last year, I've seen 3 completely different sets of people work in accounting, and that's like an 8 person job. Sure, you had Steed, Jaquays, and Devine leaving, but around the same time period id hired on people like Fred Nilsson, Seneca Menard, and Mal Blackwell.

And unless you can get all those people who have left id (even just since June 2000, mind) to say that they left specifically because they didn't want to work on Doom 3, then I see no real reason to read into their departure notices. This is America, people don't get locked into doing any one thing at any one place.

[Bloodshedder]

sargebaldy said:

only 3 people at id were involved in the creation of doom or doom2: john carmack (programmer), adrian carmack (artist) and kevin cloud (artist).

Fourth person: Donna Jackson

[sargebaldy]

Bloodshedder said:

Fourth person: Donna Jackson

i said the creation of the game. she does work for them but she's just the 'id mom'.

[LorD BaZTArD]

The Quake2max engine is pretty good but more of a modders engine. Q2Evolved is just amazing. Hell just their reworked menu system kicks all kinds of ass. It's too bad the Tenebrae team went from Quake1 straight to Quake3, tenebrae quake2 would've been fantastic.

Quake 2 Evolved, could you link me to this project Rellik?
Also, Rellik, Tenebrae didn't go to Quake 3. It went Stand alone. It's not Quake 3. Only the map and model format are from quake 3, It's a project that evolved from Tenebrae 1.

Sarge. WTF?? You didn't read what I said when you replied to that did you. Try again:

Sarge Said: "no, he wasn't. only 3 people at id were involved in the creation of doom or doom2: john carmack (programmer), adrian carmack (artist) and kevin cloud (artist). only j. carmack out of those three even wanted to make the game"

I said: "Several people left because of the decision to make doom? HA! Paul Steed was fired by Adrian Carmack in retaliation to John Carmack wanting to make Doom3. Paul Jaquay's was not a part of the original ID that made doom, and since he wasn't into the concept, he left id because he had no interest in doom

Who the hell called it an exodus??

Uh sarge, YOU did: "several people also left due to id's decision to make doom3" You didn't say the word, but you implied it.

Rellik: ID is now 20 people. Has been since mid last year, arioch is exactly right.

[Grimm]

Heh, what exactly does she do? Ever since I heard her refered to as the "id mom" and I saw that one of Doom tracks is called "Donna to the Rescue, I've been wondering.

[Rellik]

First time I read about how it was kind of everyone against John C. I thought "holy shit, this is the end". I wondered if a guy impulsive enough to chop down the meeting room door with a battle axe would tolerate a mutiny like that. :p

Rellik: ID is now 20 people.

Yup, has been for a while now but that's not permanent and they don't work at id, they do the out-of-house stuff. The core office staff is only about a dozen people, all the rest are only working till D3 is done. They were also talking about since games these days require so many high quality assets that id might have to break their tradition and permanently increase the size of the staff. They've never wanted to do that, they think things go much better when it's a small group of people working closely together but that just might not be a possability anymore. If they have already decided to have 20 permanent staff, they'll have to move to a bigger place because there is no way they'd be able to cram 20 people into their current digs. :p

Oh, as for Donna Jackson she runs things out front so everyone else can not leave their offices all day. She started out as a secretary but I think now she manages all the office stuff and AFAIK she's a part owner of id Software as well. I could be wrong about that last bit but I think I read somewhere that she bought into the company back when they were producing DOOM 1.

[Grimm]

I wondered if a guy impulsive enough to chop down the meeting room door with a battle axe would tolerate a mutiny like that. :p

He did that?! Gotta love id. :) Thanks for the Donna info, by the way.

[Rellik]

Those guys must have a good sense of humor about it, there's a picture or the door and article from the local newspaper on the incident hung in the main hallway that John walks down every day to get to his office.

Here's the link to the Q2 Evolved site: http://planetquake.com/blur/

They got a great video of the blood effects in the forum. The link is in their news.

[Little Faith]

I've always thought Donna Jackson's job was something akin to a rock band's manager.

[NiGHTMARE]

sargebaldy said:

only 3 people at id were involved in the creation of doom or doom2: john carmack (programmer), adrian carmack (artist) and kevin cloud (artist). only j. carmack out of those three even wanted to make the game.

Technically 4, as Tim Willits made a couple of levels for Ultimate Doom.

[dsm]

Grimm said:

Heh, what exactly does she do? Ever since I heard her refered to as the "id mom" and I saw that one of Doom tracks is called "Donna to the Rescue, I've been wondering.

She makes sure that the rest of the iD team wears clean underwear in case of an emergency.