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David_Dweedle

If the original Doom team still existed.. what sort of games would we be seeing?

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Carmack: Can I play with rockets nowwwwww???

Romero: PEW PEW PEW!!!

Hall: Ok, so here, this big demon comes out and does something our engine just can't handle! Then there's a cutscene.

Businessman's assistant: Can't we just fire them? They haven't released anything in over 15 years!

Businessman wearing tie: Nah, they made Doom! How do you fire something like that?

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The sort of game would be something innovative, not just a tech-demo (which the majority of new releases are).
It would be modding friendly.
It won't have any copy protection.
It would become open source.
There will be a complete Episode for free, since this is their idea of Shareware.
The story would hastily be written, after the game is done, eventhough some elements reveal earlier, but dropped ideas (like Tei Tenga in Doom).
15 Years later, John Romero still surprised the fanbase with releasing previously unreleased stuff related to the game.

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If we assume the original team hadn't broken up, Hall and Romero would still be trying (and failing) to reconcile their gaming philosophies while it would be business as usual for John Carmack - cranking out ever more capable and complex game engines. The graphic artists and mappers would be constantly revising or re-creating their work to meet the specs of each new engine - and - Doom would still be a shareware product with a development history longer than DNF.

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GreyGhost said:
Hall and Romero would still be trying (and failing) to reconcile their gaming philosophies while it would be business as usual for John Carmack

The main friction during DOOM's development was between John Carmack and Tom Hall. John Romero was kind of in the middle but chose to go more with Carmack's concept for this occasion. Carmack has always liked the concept of engine development plus a tightly fitting game design for that engine, even though he's shown more pragmatism in the near past and present for business reasons, mainly by taking a step back (though still having a say) from the design process.

We might get the idea that the issue was between Romero and Hall by the anecdote where Romero presented less realistic levels. But it wasn't really realism that that Hall was after, but interaction with a variety of auxiliary game elements as opposed to a straight shoot-em' up like Wolf3D, which he felt they had already produced. You can see some of the stuff he had in mind in Rise of the Triad. I'm sure they could have merged the more dynamic level design style Romero was working on with more of those elements, but Romero decided to go with Carmack's simpler action and suspense concept. Romero and Hall could probably still combine their design styles, if they find the right games to develop, as they teamed up together again after id Software and the "design is law" motto of Ion Storm was more or less a "we're not Carmack" expression.

All in all, I'd agree with DuckReconMajor's parodic illustration. Another owner who left was Adrian Carmack, who was unsatisfied with the influence he had on the direction of game development. He didn't like that the company was resorting too much to previous franchises. It's one thing to do something, at one point, in the heat of the moment, but keeping a team together or bringing it back when they are all aware of their limitations and differences is very hard, unless they really coincide in key things, which is not the case here anymore.

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We wouldn't be seeing anything.

~7 dudes making a game in 2009 will still get you something about Doom quality - a 2.5D engine and 128x128 textures. As you increase engine and art complexity, either lead time on a game gets longer, or you need to hire more staff. Even small commercial game houses these days have hundreds of people working in teams on multiple projects for months on end.

The perfect synergy of people and technology that came together in 1993 to bring us Doom will probably never be repeated. This just makes me love the game even more.

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I belive I would've liked DOOM3 ALOT more, all of the original HORDE
cast updated with the new engine, Plus the new ones ones from D3 & D3-R. It probably would'nt have been so damned dark.

Anything else besides that seems pretty much up in the air.

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Doom 3 could not have had hordes of monsters even if Id wanted them, the Doom 3 engine rendering 40 monsters on screen would have overloaded any PC on the market, regardless of price.

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If they tried to create something similar to today's games with _only_ their staff back then, I'd see something either like DNF or KDiZD.

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Super Jamie said:

We wouldn't be seeing anything.

~7 dudes making a game in 2009 will still get you something about Doom quality

Not necessarily. Some years ago there was this big fuss about two dudes making some sort of next gen game involving trolls or something. I think it was called Project Offset. It was another one of those hyped up graphics games that are forgotten in the sea of brown games..

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Yeah, even one-man projects can be well-known, but I don't think we're likely to see something as life changing, genre defining and long lasting as Doom from a small team these days.

Or, probably, ever again. Christmas 93 was a special time indeed.

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Super Jamie said:

Or, probably, ever again. Christmas 93 was a special time indeed.


I was one year old at the time... It's a shame, really. That would have probably been my favorite Christmas/b-day combo ever (I was born in December).

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Super Jamie said:

Yeah, even one-man projects can be well-known, but I don't think we're likely to see something as life changing, genre defining and long lasting as Doom from a small team these days.


I myself wonder if we will ever see a game as genre defining as Doom again, even with a large dev team more akin to the developers of today. All the video game genres seem to have been defined.

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Maybe if producers gave the designers more opportunity to polish and test before release, modern games wouldn't suck so hard.

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Aaronjw said:

I myself wonder if we will ever see a game as genre defining as Doom again, even with a large dev team more akin to the developers of today. All the video game genres seem to have been defined.

I think Portal is about as close as it's going to get.

Yet, it feels like the unique achievements of that game have been diluted because EVERYONE ELSE decided to make their own portal-based game too. I mean there are even portals for Doom ffs.

But I don't lose hope. The reason we can't think of anything new to define is because nobody has made it yet. Some clever person will come along and surprise us all one day.

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Portal is a pretty big stretch. It added a new/updated (Quake 3 has portals you can peer into... they don't work quite the same though) element to game, but it didn't really define any genre (be that FPS, adventure, or puzzle... I think those are about all the ones Portal could be defined as, am I missing any?).

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leileilol said:

Not necessarily. Some years ago there was this big fuss about two dudes making some sort of next gen game involving trolls or something. I think it was called Project Offset. It was another one of those hyped up graphics games that are forgotten in the sea of brown games..

There's far from just two dudes (even though they were three) in Project offset still though. They have been quite a large team for quite some time now.

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MikeRS said:

Portal is a pretty big stretch. It added a new/updated (Quake 3 has portals you can peer into... they don't work quite the same though) element to game, but it didn't really define any genre (be that FPS, adventure, or puzzle... I think those are about all the ones Portal could be defined as, am I missing any?).


I don't think it defined any genres, but it did a lot of things right.

It wasn't to long, so it didn't get boring, but was also short enough that it's enjoyable just to run through when you're bored. It had a great story, without it being shoved down your throat. It was challenging at times, but never to hard it became frustrating. It was funny in a funny way, not in that really annoying "Saturday morning cartoon" kinda way. And it's probably the game with referenced joke in the past decade.

It was a fresh change from everything else I'd played up till that point, and I think it'll be a long time until another game does that, I think. But it proved that it can be done.

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Yeah, seriously. I'm sick of people telling me that cake is a lie. You know how many birthdays I've had over the years? Plenty - and I've always had a cake, and so far nothing bad has happened to me...yet.

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