id and Zenimax, Sitting in a Tree

This is terrible.

MikeRS said:
Impossible; the GPL is designed to be irrevocable. When it's out in the public, it's out forever, and nobody can take away the status of being free.

Yeah, I would say so too, although my comment was more about the possibility of corporate lawyers doing something stupid because of the GPL status being kind of "semi-official". It depends on any contracts they made, and iDoom, where they will be using the GPL license, should clear things up in a practical sense.

skadoomer said:

I think a lot of people are missing the point of what this deal means: Id software now has a worldwide publisher for its 360 titles as a child company and they have financial backing for all future products.

No the point of what this deal means is that now id software has an owner. Repeat it to yourself: Zenimax owns id software. They are fully within their legal rights to force id to produce teletubby games for the rest of their existence. Of course they would be stupid to mess with id software's formula: Every game id has ever made is a hit. But companies have been known to do stupid things and run perfectly profitable studios into the ground.

999cop said:

If the company lives up to the words stated in the article,

Why should it? Of course the company is going to state that nothing will change in a press release, that's just pr. The real test is what will happen six months later. Given the history of just about every company acquisition EVER in the videogame industry (Irrational becoming 2K Boston, Microsoft and Lionhead, etc.) ... we have a lot to worry about.

Interview with VentureBeat

Wow, that's really really weird. I don't really care per se, but still, weird.

printz said:

Maybe Doom 4 will be much better after this fusion... Just sayin'.

Perhaps you're right. There are four possibilities:

Awesome engines + awesome gameplay = Awesome game
Awesome engines + average gameplay = id's current status
Average gameplay + awesome engines = id's current status
Average gameplay + average engines = why bother?

Fine, 3 possibilities. But I think that the first outcome is the most likely to happen. I hope so...

soulsweat said:

This is terrible.

How so?

I was initially surprised, but after thinking about it, it's not a huge shock. Id has been ramping up to become a fully fledged studio for a while now. There's an interview with John Carmack where here discusses the buyout, and one thing he mentions is that Id already have over 100 hundred employees. They're running multiple teams and have a pipeline of projects on different platforms. Compare that with the "classic" era Id, where there was a team of about fourteen, working on a single title at a time. The wind has been blowing this way for a long time. I think for all his obvious geek credentials, Carmack is actually quite a hard-headed businessman. He did this because it made financial sense.

/me spittakes.

Jonathan said:

Compare that with the "classic" era Id, where there was a team of about fourteen, working on a single title at a time. The wind has been blowing this way for a long time.

Compare the needs of a professional-quality game now with that of the "classic era". You could do it with less than 20 people then, you need more than a hundred now.

Modders are affected by this for the same reason as well. Everything, from the code to the data, is more complex and takes a longer time and a larger team to create now. Compare the ease of modding Doom 1 with that of Quake IV.

Fallout Doom 4

..It could work

Story line anyone? :P

What we need now is Activision Blizzard buying Zenimax and EA, or EA buying Activision Blizzard and Zenimax, or Zenimax buying Activision Blizzard and EA. Then we can play monopoly!

... and now tell me there isn't a reason why so few good games get produced these days....

Scet said:

id (not ID or iD, you clowns)

You're arguing about the capitalization when Id themselves have already said that it really doesn't matter.

How can that matter, when even id changed the logo?

Remember this?
http://videogamecentral.com/gamersvoice/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/wolfenstein-3d.jpg

Well it started off as an Acronym, (Ideas from the Deep) but then it turned into representing the Freudian psychic apparatus part known as Id.

Graf Zahl said:

... and now tell me there isn't a reason why so few good games get produced these days....

Grab any given year from your Halcyon days and count how many good games actually came out. Then compare it to any post-2000 year for highly acclaimed games (even if you particularly don't like them, hell do that for the oldies too) and come back to me with the results.

GameSpot article with Carmack on ZeniMax, Apple, new Triple A title, and some other things for us to either praise or rip and tear apart.

Zaldron said:

Grab any given year from your Halcyon days and count how many good games actually came out. Then compare it to any post-2000 year for highly acclaimed games (even if you particularly don't like them, hell do that for the oldies too) and come back to me with the results.

Well, the result is always the same: The 'highly acclaimed' titles of today are good for one playthrough. It was that for every single game I played in the last few years.

But I still play Doom, DN3D, Quake 1+2 and such. Games that don't bother with a complex story driving the action.

What I dislike about modern games is not production quality but the general design philosophy.

Bwahahah:
http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6212648.html

GS: OK, last question. On his Twitter feed, [id cofounder former employee] John Romero called the ZeniMax deal "disgusting." What's your reaction to that?

JC: (Long pause) You know, it would take me a long while to formulate a real answer to that. John likes...well, let's just say he's probably happy people are mentioning his name so much. That's all I really have to say about that.

Yeah, but Carmack's was a gut reaction there. The interviewer also made sure to relay the worst, initial part of Romero's posts about the subject. Romero's reaction doesn't look that negative past that initial moment. Not much more than any fan's shock at id suddenly being bought.

Graf Zahl said:

What I dislike about modern games is not production quality but the general design philosophy.

So basically: I don't like today's games == There are no good games today.

Zaldron said:

So basically: I don't like today's games == There are no good games today.

Today's games lack one important aspect: Replayability. If I have to spend €50 on a game that wears off after playing it only once it's simply not worth that amount of money.

I don't know what to make of all this. Everything I've read sounds like it will be beneficial for both companies. I guess it's just hard to imagine. If it really means more games that'd be great.

Graf Zahl said:

Today's games lack one important aspect: Replayability. If I have to spend €50 on a game that wears off after playing it only once it's simply not worth that amount of money.

Lack of game replayability is like built-in obsolescence. We could always have lightbulbs that don't die, or nylons that don't break, or plumbing that doesn't leak, etc. But when players stop buying new games, manufacturers stop making money.

Graf Zahl said:

Today's games lack one important aspect: Replayability. If I have to spend €50 on a game that wears off after playing it only once it's simply not worth that amount of money.

Ah, but is this lack a real tangible problem of the games themselves or the considerable inertia involved in shifting and attracting a modding community? I agree games such as Doom/2 and Quake were more replayable than some other critically acclaimed games, past or present, but I reckon they would be nowhere as interesting these days without the strong community you see here and everywhere else. Many game developers don't consider the option of releasing and supporting an SDK on the grounds of today's compartmentalization of modding communities into tightly-knit groups attached to specific games and companies. In a way, the highly replayable, highly supported, highly modular and highly famous games of the last decade/years have decimated the interest in customization, both developer and customer wise.

Anyone who thinks Doom would still be "loads" of fun without source ports or the massive amount of quality wads is a lunatic. It wouldn't be even half as fun as it currently is, it wouldn't even be a quarter of fun.

Well, games like Bethesda's three most recent titles (TES3, TES4, FO3) have a ton of replayability, thanks to their sandboxy nature and the ease with which they can be modded.

Now maybe sandboxy RPGs aren't your cup of tea and you don't like these games. That's your right, de gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum. But it's false to say all recent games have no replayability.

I wouldn't necessarily call sandbox features replayability, it's more like extensibility. Football has replayabiliry, D&D doesn't. I think the distinction is important because you can have both together.

Zaldron said:
Anyone who thinks Doom would still be "loads" of fun without source ports or the massive amount of quality wads is a lunatic. It wouldn't be even half as fun as it currently is, it wouldn't even be a quarter of fun.

You mean popular, or with a relatively large online community. Otherwise it's not a debatable matter (see Gez's Latin phrase above). Your percentages could be reduced to a number of people regularly using the game, but not to how much fun it is. This accounts to any people added by extra features, but also to a large degree to portability and setup ease in regard to how current systems work. Only a lunatic would reduce how fun a game to this factor. I mean, you're saying this and you hardly have anything to do with the classic games yourself, nowadays, whereas I take at least half of the fun from using the game without a source port (or in an equivalent way). That's why you spoke of "would" and I just say "is". After all, you're a tech guy who likes tech advancement, hence to you something like source modding will be of particular interest in such a hobby.

1) I trust Zenimax and Bethesda a lot more than I trust id's previous publishers.
2) I liked both Doom 3 and Fallout 3.
3) ???
4) Profit.

Zaldron said:

Ah, but is this lack a real tangible problem of the games themselves or the considerable inertia involved in shifting and attracting a modding community? I agree games such as Doom/2 and Quake were more replayable than some other critically acclaimed games, past or present, but I reckon they would be nowhere as interesting these days without the strong community you see here and everywhere else. Many game developers don't consider the option of releasing and supporting an SDK on the grounds of today's compartmentalization of modding communities into tightly-knit groups attached to specific games and companies. In a way, the highly replayable, highly supported, highly modular and highly famous games of the last decade/years have decimated the interest in customization, both developer and customer wise.

Anyone who thinks Doom would still be "loads" of fun without source ports or the massive amount of quality wads is a lunatic. It wouldn't be even half as fun as it currently is, it wouldn't even be a quarter of fun.

You know, I still love playing through Doom and Doom 2, the user made .wads are an added bonus. I would agree part of Doom's longevity is due to it's modability,but the original games are still extremely fun. I think it's mainly due to the fact that it's not scripted, so every time you go through a level it will be similar, but it will never be exactly the same. The rose tinted glasses help I'm sure, but they're still amazing games. The last game I played that really made me say "wow" was Half-Life, and that was 1999, but even Half-Life gets old because so many of the wow moments were scripted.

This brings me to my next point, Bethesda games aren't really scripted aside from the main story, they maintain a huge amount of user decisions, you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want. Coupled with the fact that they release the source code for their games, listen to user feedback, and update their games accordingly, albeit with some issues, they seem to be very fan based and focused on their work. If there was a single company that had to take over id due to financial issues, I'm glad it's Bethesda/Zenimax. At least they care about making games and seem to regard money as a bonus, as opposed to Activision or EA.