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Marnetmar

Should Id Fire Tim Willits?

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As I see it, yes, because I think this guy, with his snooty attitude and narrow perspective on games, along with the position he's currently in and has been in (currently studio director, creative director on RAGE, lead designer on Doom 3), is the root of the majority of id's recent fuckups. Thoughts?

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I couldn't agree more. He played a large part in the mistakes Id made with Doom 3 and Rage. And yes, he has a very narrow perspective on games and he seems proud of it. The less input he has on Doom 4, the better.

At the very least, he should be demoted to the position of level designer. Sadly, he won't likely leave Id or change his position until the whole company decides to call it a day.

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DoomUK said:

I couldn't agree more. He played a large part in the mistakes Id made with Doom 3 and Rage. And yes, he has a very narrow perspective on games and he seems proud of it. The less input he has on Doom 4, the better.

At the very least, he should be demoted to the position of level designer. Sadly, he won't likely leave Id or change his position until the whole company decides to call it a day.


Yes, maybe. Doom 3 had amazing atmosphere but very bad gameplay, half of the levels were filler and took too much inspiration from Half Life. On the other hand RAGE had awesome gameplay but the levels were entirely linear and again, Id pays "homage" way too much to modern FPS conventions (just like Doom 3 with Half Life) and felt too much like a console game...which is not what an Id game should feel like. These things always give the feeling that they are not sure in their abilities anymore and copy other games in an almost servile manner. I mean it was OK when Valve made Half Life like a spiritual successor to Doom but it is not ok when Id does this, they are supposed to be the kings of FPS, THEY are supposed to be the ones who lead the FPS industry ahead. So yeah ever since Quake (and even Doom 2), I felt a gradual decline in both quality and ingenuity and I feel this is due to Tim Willits, he doesn't seem nearly as passionate as Romero, to him it seems that making games is just business although kudos to him for working on RAGE for 6 years, that couldn't have been easy. Good thing we had Valve and Looking Glass in the late 90s otherwise we'd still be playing brown levels in a brown castle. Don't get me wrong, the gaming industry owes a LOT to Id but after Doom 1, the single player portion of their games suffered greatly.

I also don't like his attitude, you can almost smell the PR talk every time he speaks, did you see his Doom 3 BFG edition interviews?EVERY interview, he gave the exact same answers just with different words. I do think John Carmack made the right decision when he fired Romero though. Imagine if Id had made Daikatana... although Carmack would probably not have tolerated this, he had the company by the balls and everyone knew it. Oh and Willits got his job because he made better Quake 1 levels than Romero. Can you believe that?!

P.S Matt Hooper is now the Creative Director at Id. If he fucks up Doom 4 you will know who to throw digital tomatoes at. (I certainly will)

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DooM_RO said:

after Doom 1, the single player portion of their games suffered greatly.


Except Doom 2's single player is superior to Doom 1 in every way.

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I see id like this.
There is a picnic somewhere and everybody's going. This one person doesn't really care for the destination and he really wants to go somewhere else, but he doesn't exactly know where it is and certainly won't go there alone. So he ends up walking 50 feet behind everybody else with his arms crossed. He's going there, but he doesn't have to like it or make any effort.

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I'd say so.

Everyone who's a "higher up" at id these days -- with the obvious exception of John Carmack -- doesn't seem to know what they're doing in terms of creating a game that will stand the test of time... and this has been going on for over a decade now.

While Carmack is still a weird genius at creating fantastic new engines (or at the very least manages to deliver on his side of things), nobody around him seems to be able to dream up and realise an actual game that can utilise the engine enough to put id back on the map as pioneers in the FPS genre, or deliver a product that can be played time and time again.

I loved Doom 3 at the time; it was different take on FPS horror, it looked fucking amazing in 2004, and I appreciated the direction that they were trying to take. On the other hand, I wish it wasn't a Doom title. While Doom just seems like rushing around blitzing the ever-loving shit out of Hellspawn, it can also have some tense moments if maps are constructed properly (no, seriously). Doom 3 just stuck to creeping around in the dark and "OH NO A MONSTER!!" the entire fucking way through. I can still play it, I can still enjoy it, but despite what the title and a lot of the content tells me, it doesn't seem like a fitting or 'true' Doom game. It's literally a linear slog through a bunch of really narrow corridors with the occasional box with SOME monsters, and a mere footnote in how to throw dynamic shadows around. That's a pretty shitty way of taking on the mantle of THE games that made FPS mainstream.

I also loved RAGE when I got my hands on it; just run around maps while blasting the fuck out of guys, with no cutscene interruptions? Fuck yeah! For a while I was thinking "holy shit, this could be the one to break us out and make FPS games great again!" -- the gunplay was remarkably solid, I wasn't just pitted against EVIL RUSSIANS/NAZIS, and shooting things in the face with the assorted weapons was immensely satisfying, but by the time I reached the end I just thought "eh", and that was it for RAGE. What happened? Again, it was just too linear to warrant another run through with the same energy and vigour. I mean let's face, it; achievements don't mean a fucking thing in the long run, and don't necessarily stoke up that desire to run through something again, do they?

Now I've managed to get drunk while typing all this fucking nonsense and can't remember what I was getting at, but... wait, what the fuck was I on about? Oh yeah, that was it. Bollocks, just fire Tim Willits. Or kick him down a few pegs and make him design some levels; the EMPIRE series for The Ultimate Doom were some great maps for solo mid-90's efforts. Maybe if he can't throw so much weight around he'll actually do something worthwhile and not simply attempt to squeal his way out of explaining things.

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BaronOfStuff said:

While Carmack is still a weird genius at creating fantastic new engines (or at the very least manages to deliver on his side of things)

I'll wait and see what's done with Doom 4 before I write id Tech 5 off completely, but Rage was too much of a mixed bag and a step backwards for this to be unequivocally true.

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Yeah, his Quake maps were excellent, even though his Doom 1 maps were haphazard.

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Meh, id are just another game company these days. It would be nice for them to be the kick-ass innovators and kings of the FPS that they once were but that was a long time ago, in a galaxy fa.. in a very different gaming industry, with a different group of people and those glory days didn't actually last that long either.

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BaronOfStuff said:

...creating a game that will stand the test of time...
... pioneers in the FPS genre...
...a product that can be played time and time again.

I see where you're going with this, but as nice as all of that sounds, the whole reason most of us are on this forum is because we see the FPS genre a certain way. It could almost be described as a romanticised view. But clearly we're in the minority here. All the things we would ideally want the next id title to be probably aren't the same as the masses they're trying to appeal to. And any company looking to push out a big title is going to go where the money is.

Whether they keep Tim Willits or not is somewhat irrelevant, since the development of their next game is only going to go the way the big corporate think-tank wants it to. That, and there isn't a whole lot of pioneering left to do in the shooter genre anyway. If you can name it, it's probably been done. Sadly I don't expect anything but more average. Fingers crossed that I'm wrong, though.

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DooM_RO said:

after Doom 1, the single player portion of their games suffered greatly.


Majorly disagree. Not only was Doom 2 superior in that respect, but Quake 2 was better still. Quake 1 was admittedly a bit of a mess story-wise, due to the different design decisions that were all conflicting with each other, with id just tacking on a story after the fact about different dimensions, but it was still an achievement, technically and in terms of gameplay.

DooM_RO said:

P.S Matt Hooper is now the Creative Director at Id.


If that's true, good. I hope that's the case.

In any case, whether or not id fires Willits, they really just need to modernize. They've got some major aspects mastered, making good engines, making great gunplay, making awesome-looking levels with great art style being the primary ones. These are all huge advantages.

However, for all these +'s, they have a lot of major x's as well. They don't really know how to construct a good story, or how to present it in such a way that is really compelling and gripping. Sure, the way they tell a story would be just fine for a 90's game, but that's the problem: we aren't in the 90's anymore.

Character development is another thing. The characters in their games feel flat, not just in the sense that they lack a varied personality, but also because they don't really undergo any changes throughout the course of the storyline. Every character in Rage was exactly the same at the end of the game(or at the end of their part in it) as they were at the beginning.

Rage was a missed opportunity to really employ some situations where the player character could have impacted the outcome of the story with his actions, like you see in the Bioshock series. Rage ends the exact same way every time you play it, and every supporting character views the player mostly the same as they did at the beginning. There's no way you can impact that, or change it, because you aren't given alternatives on how to handle certain situations.

I really don't mind linear gameplay, personally. The Dead Space games were all totally linear, and were all fun as hell. You can open up a lot of options with non-linear gameplay, but it all comes down to how fun the mechanics of your game are, in my opinion. If Doom 4 turns out to be as linear as Rage, I won't hold it against id (much), provided that they nail down some of the above-mentioned aspects. It wouldn't bother me if you had to complete all the missions/objectives in a certain order, but letting the player impact how certain story elements evolve would be nice.

Rage itself, being a mixed bag, was a pretty good representation of id, to me: they have certain things mastered in a way that few others in the industry do, and they are lagging behind in other areas.

EDIT: Oh yeah, also... they really need to explore beyond the silent protagonist perspective. I think a storyline can be interesting with a silent protagonist or with one who talks, but I ultimately believe the talking protagonist wins out.

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Caffeine Freak said:

a lot of good stuff

I was pretty much with you all the way until the final point. I personally far prefer the silent protagonist because that allows me to be the protagonist. As soon as he gets a voice, he starts saying things that I wouldn't and it means I'm merely controlling a protagonist rather than being him.

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Enjay said:

I was pretty much with you all the way until the final point. I personally far prefer the silent protagonist because that allows me to be the protagonist. As soon as he gets a voice, he starts saying things that I wouldn't and it means I'm merely controlling a protagonist rather than being him.


In addition, I think a silent protagonist is slightly more badass than a talking one. Both classic Doom and Doom 3 are examples of this: When you consider the situations both marines are faced with and the fact they stay silent, that's pretty awesome. I'm sure someone will argue that perhaps the situations in Doom 3 aren't tough or frightening, but I think you would feel differently if you were ACTUALLY there. It's easy to use your WASD and click/point, but I wouldn't want to walk down a pitch black corridor with sod-all light with some eerie growling emanating from somewhere. Original Doomguy on the other hand, would blast through levels at lightning speed, blowing shit up and getting shot to pieces by various demons/zombies, yet his facial expression rarely ever changes, and still he carries on. I strongly doubt I will live to see the person who has those sort of capabilites.

Now, on the second side of the argument you have the talking protagonsists.

Sure, Duke Nukem is pretty damn good. Stopping an entire alien invasion single-handed is no simple task. However, unlike the silent Doomguy who did the same thing with demons, Duke Nukem gets distracted by his one liners and also, he's powered by steroids. How pathetic do you think he'd become without them? "Oh an Assault tr- *NOPE*"

Admittedly, we can't tell anything from his expression, because unlike Doom, there is no face in the DN3D HUD, although it was intended to contain one originally.

Another talking protagonist is SPECTRE from the SOCOM series, most memorably for me SOCOM 3 and Combined Assault, which were basically the same game with different levels. This guy was actually pretty cool. Although he was part of a 4-person team, SPECTRE would usually go first and kill the terrorists before the team had caught up with him. SOCOM 3 and Combined Assault both had great level sets too. NIGHTCRAWLER is the best stealth level I've played on any game, and I like the way it makes you use the command interface, where SPECTRE leaves two of his team in a sniper position, runs back and blows up a windmill to lure the terrorists out of a house, then sneak past them as they make their way to the windmill, into the house then bugs the communications inside, then sneaks back out again to escape via their van, and still leaving the enemy completely oblivious.

That said, these situations are far less intense than those faced in classic Doom. Though I'd like to see a SOCOM mod (never going to happen) where SPECTRE and friends do something like Demon Defence.


Upon reflection of what I have just written, it appears I have become the successor to gggmork. Not quite sure how I managed to write all this.

EDIT: So here are some links that relate to what I just said.

Doomguy (Mr Ito) being badass in Go 2 It
Doom3guy staying completely calm as Tim Willits' sister turns into a demon. How appropriate

Duke Nukem clearing a Moonbase and crossing a chasm in E2L7 of DN3D
NIGHTCRAWLER from SOCOM 3. Best quality there is, sadly

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Caffeine Freak said:

Majorly disagree. Not only was Doom 2 superior in that respect, but Quake 2 was better still. Quake 1 was admittedly a bit of a mess story-wise, due to the different design decisions that were all conflicting with each other, with id just tacking on a story after the fact about different dimensions, but it was still an achievement, technically and in terms of gameplay.


Yea, it was an achievement from a graphical standpoint but the visuals (art style) and gameplay didn't advance at all until Looking Glass and Valve came.

Think about it, Doom 2 used exactly the same weapons from Doom 1, without any modifications - not even extra sprites to make the animations smoother. It reused more than 50% of textures, all enemies look the same and the levels are uglier than the original. All it got was a new weapon, and a few enemies. Is that really enough for a sequel, especially to Doom?

I would have liked to see something akin to Zdoom features like doors that open horizontally, more coherent and realistic level design (like in Duke 3D), new sprites with smoother animations, more animated wall sprites, increased texture count, new ways to make the levels less blocky (like overlayed cut textures to give the illusion of depth), new ways to find secrets (like in Duke 3D) alternative ways to finish levels(and rewarding you for it), new weapons each episode (in hell you get magical weapons).

Doom 2 was hardly revolutionary, the only good thing was the clever level design(and the new shotgun). The same goes for both Quakes. I often wonder why these games didn't get any flak for this back in the days. I guess it's because gamers hadn't become so jaded yet and didn't look for the littlest things to bitch about. This probably also happened because the lack of internet culture, back then I doubt it was cool to bitch about games, people just played games to have fun.

Let me give you an example: Remember how people didn't bitch when the last boss of Ultimate Doom was the Spider mastermind? Fast forward a decade and see how people bitched when they did the SAME thing in Doom 3 BFG with the guardian boss.

How would you feel if Id polished and reused half of the Doom 3 stuff, added a few new enemies and a weapon and called it Doom 4? They wouldn't get away with it, at least I wouldn't let them.

Bottom line, Id has to grow some balls and try something new, something very daring that has the chance to change the industry as we know it, without following any (unnecessary) modern conventions. Even if they fail, they will earn my respect for trying (although I doubt it means much to them). I understand that it's harder to do this than in the 90s due to increased development costs but I consider Id one of the companies who are capable of this... but I'm not sure if it's possible with people like Tim Willits.

DoomUK said:

I'll wait and see what's done with Doom 4 before I write id Tech 5 off completely, but Rage was too much of a mixed bag and a step backwards for this to be unequivocally true.


Not sure about this. I don't consider it a step backwards simply because it didn't look as good as the best looking games. If anything I consider megatextures as a complement to the art style which is getting more and more important. Before 2005, how much stuff you could put in a level was quite limited, nowadays even without the best engine you can still make interesting environments because even relatively average graphics are past "tolerable".

Let's compare Deus Ex and Human Revolution. While both games didn't have the greatest looking graphics for their respective time, Human Revolution has an advantage over the origial in this regard: Even if it doesn't have state of the art graphics, it still has one of the best art directions out there and this is due to the reduced limitations compared to the year 2000. If you put better textures and better models in the original it would still look ugly because it's so empty.

What I'm saying is that today graphical fidelity is not as important as good art direction anymore because models and textures don't look horrible anymore. It was until about the year 2005-2007, but not anymore. I think this is why Id worked on megatextures, because good art direction is becoming more important that actual fidelity.

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I never played RAGE but I watched some walkthroughs of the levels and read some reviews on it. I think that id could have made the story a bit more interesting if they didn't simply spoon feed the player all the information in the beginning. When the protagonist gets saved in the beginning by one of the game characters, when they get into the buggy, the game character proceeds to spoon feed the player all of the information of what's going on. It is also strange that the game character already knows who the protagonist is.

I think it would have been a lot more interesting to have had the player emerge from the pod and have him explore the wasteland for a bit before receiving any human contact. Perhaps he could have come into contact with some mutants and the protagonist could've been like "what the hell are those things?" Maybe after fighting a couple of tough, near death battles with some mutants, just before the player is about to get annihilated, some humans could show up and save him. The humans shouldn't know who he is, but they could explain to him what year it is or where the player is at, etc. However, the player shouldn't be spoon fed all of the story. Rather, the story ought to be revealed slowly in little tid bits of information.

That's what id needs to master. Don't spoon feed the player all of the story. Rather, make the player figure out the story for himself through observation of the game world.

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Personally, I found the story of RAGE so bland as to be virtually unsalvageable. Even with some tweaks, the core story is a snorefest. They should've either gone full-on campy (e.g. Doom 2, Quake 1) or left it out almost entirely (Doom 1).

That said, when the NPCs had finally shut up, you'd finished driving to your destination, and the action had started in earnest, RAGE was a pretty solid shooter. Shame about all the filler in between.

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As a sidenote, I'm not the only one who thought the starting room of Rage was pretty much the start of Eternal Doom, right?

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DooM_RO said:

Yea, it was an achievement from a graphical standpoint but the visuals (art style) and gameplay didn't advance at all until Looking Glass and Valve came.

Think about it, Doom 2 used exactly the same weapons from Doom 1, without any modifications - not even extra sprites to make the animations smoother. It reused more than 50% of textures, all enemies look the same and the levels are uglier than the original. All it got was a new weapon, and a few enemies. Is that really enough for a sequel, especially to Doom?

I would have liked to see something akin to Zdoom features like doors that open horizontally, more coherent and realistic level design (like in Duke 3D), new sprites with smoother animations, more animated wall sprites, increased texture count, new ways to make the levels less blocky (like overlayed cut textures to give the illusion of depth), new ways to find secrets (like in Duke 3D) alternative ways to finish levels(and rewarding you for it), new weapons each episode (in hell you get magical weapons).

Doom 2 was hardly revolutionary, the only good thing was the clever level design(and the new shotgun). The same goes for both Quakes. I often wonder why these games didn't get any flak for this back in the days. I guess it's because gamers hadn't become so jaded yet and didn't look for the littlest things to bitch about. This probably also happened because the lack of internet culture, back then I doubt it was cool to bitch about games, people just played games to have fun.

Let me give you an example: Remember how people didn't bitch when the last boss of Ultimate Doom was the Spider mastermind? Fast forward a decade and see how people bitched when they did the SAME thing in Doom 3 BFG with the guardian boss.

How would you feel if Id polished and reused half of the Doom 3 stuff, added a few new enemies and a weapon and called it Doom 4? They wouldn't get away with it, at least I wouldn't let them.

Bottom line, Id has to grow some balls and try something new, something very daring that has the chance to change the industry as we know it, without following any (unnecessary) modern conventions. Even if they fail, they will earn my respect for trying (although I doubt it means much to them). I understand that it's harder to do this than in the 90s due to increased development costs but I consider Id one of the companies who are capable of this... but I'm not sure if it's possible with people like Tim Willits.


Honestly, at this point, I could care less about "revolutionary" and these other buzz words that gaming corporations use to woo over gamers and make them think that their game is "the next big thing." Just give me a solid shooter with great action, great graphics, great AI, awesome guns, etc. As someone else has already stated, the likelihood that id can do something "revolutionary" at this point is extremely slim. Can anyone name anything that hasn't been done before? I mean, almost everything conceivable has already been done. I would be afraid that if id tried to do something "revolutionary" with Doom 4, it would end up being something really strange and it deviate to far from its core gameplay.

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Seeing that I didn't really mind Doom 3 there's only Rage to complain about and even then I only really have a problem with that bloody ending. However, we really only seem to bring up Doom 3 and RAGE and it's all too easy to forget that these are the only two real games that id Software has released since 2004. Now, Romero has released more games than this in that time and most aren't that great and some of these Facebook games are pretty average, and yet people here still tend to stand by him being a good designer... Point is, wait till Doom 4 is released, it's that game is a steaming heap then I call for Willits to get fired, but remember id Software is a company not one person... He's not the only one at fault.

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Don't forget Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, another id game post Doom 3.

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DooM_RO said:

Think about it, Doom 2 used exactly the same weapons from Doom 1, without any modifications - not even extra sprites to make the animations smoother. It reused more than 50% of textures, all enemies look the same and the levels are uglier than the original. All it got was a new weapon, and a few enemies. Is that really enough for a sequel, especially to Doom?

I would have liked to see something akin to Zdoom features like doors that open horizontally, more coherent and realistic level design (like in Duke 3D), new sprites with smoother animations, more animated wall sprites, increased texture count, new ways to make the levels less blocky (like overlayed cut textures to give the illusion of depth), new ways to find secrets (like in Duke 3D) alternative ways to finish levels(and rewarding you for it), new weapons each episode (in hell you get magical weapons).

Doom 2 was hardly revolutionary, the only good thing was the clever level design(and the new shotgun). The same goes for both Quakes. I often wonder why these games didn't get any flak for this back in the days. I guess it's because gamers hadn't become so jaded yet and didn't look for the littlest things to bitch about. This probably also happened because the lack of internet culture, back then I doubt it was cool to bitch about games, people just played games to have fun.


I think you're confusing 'revolutionary' and 'innovating' with 'it's a great game'.

I never said Doom 2 was revolutionary, but that doesn't mean it isn't superior to Doom 1. The first Doom was revolutionary in a way ALL of it's FPS successors weren't simply because it came first. That doesn't mean it's successors aren't superior games.

DooM_RO said:

How would you feel if Id polished and reused half of the Doom 3 stuff, added a few new enemies and a weapon and called it Doom 4? They wouldn't get away with it, at least I wouldn't let them.


People let Valve get away with essentially the same thing. It was called Left 4 Dead 2, and despite the fact that it's essentially a re-packaging of the first one, it's still very much superior.

That aside, the Doom series has a legacy now that it didn't have back in 1994, when Doom 2 was released. People look at the FPS genre that has thrived and withstood the test of time, and they can always trace the roots back to the original Doom. Because of this, people will always look at Doom as a special case, because it's seen as the grandfather of the FPS genre.

My point is, that legacy about Doom didn't exist in 1994, so it wouldn't be the same thing if id did the same thing now and made Doom 4 out of re-packaged Doom 3 assets. This, plus the fact that it was feasible for a game company to pump out new titles every year-year 1/2 in the 90's. This isn't the case now(except for companies like EA, who can contract multiple full-size studios to pump out the next COD title every 12 months or so.) Games these days are much more akin to cinematic productions, both in terms of production technology, budget and development time, and gamers are understanding of that. So again, it wouldn't be the same thing for id to just re-package Doom 3 and call it Doom 4, like they did with the first Doom.

DooM_RO said:

Don't forget Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, another id game post Doom 3.


Splash Damage.

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I don't think they should fire Tim, I think that id shouldn't be so serious and be the "fun" game developers they were back in the old days. They should also take some ideas from the doom community, I mean how would you like to contribute to Doom 4? I know I would.

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DooM_RO said:

Let me give you an example: Remember how people didn't bitch when the last boss of Ultimate Doom was the Spider mastermind? Fast forward a decade and see how people bitched when they did the SAME thing in Doom 3 BFG with the guardian boss.

I did. There was just no easy way to bitch to the world back then. ;)

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Tim is the bald guy right? Bald guys are easier to dislike.

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schwerpunk said:

Nonono. It's Romero. He's got to go.

No man's hair has a right to be that silky.


Also fire Adrian Carmack. There's only room enough for one Carmack at Id Software; and that's John.

And fire Tom Hall because he makes boring architecture. I mean, if he was Tom Veranda, Tom Undercroft, or Tom Belfry it would be kinda interesting I guess, but Tom Hall and Tom Corridor have got to go.

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So to make iD games better we'd fire everyone but the guy that designs the tech.

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