John Carmack's biggest mistakes?

[Gibbon]

2 hours ago, UndeadRyker said:

Your response... I can appreciate that you're aware that your opinion is highly biased and subjective, similar to John Carmack's opinion on story in video games, I  guess? But telling someone to learn it doesn't mean that they don't have the right to think it's still more confusing than they initially understood it to be, if they do actually decide to take your advice and "learn it".

 

Using your remark, someone else can easily tell you to "just learn it" if you're confused about Doom's API being lumped into one source. "Just learn Doom LOL". See how highly subjective and insensitive that is?

I already know the Doom code..

 

What I was saying was that, when someone keeps asking about stuff that they don't understand, then this isn't the place to really talk about it.  It would be a massive derail and even after talking about all the technicalities, likely, they would still be confused.  Insensitive, no.  Realistic, yes.

 

Fact is, factor out the build engine.  The developers were 'never' given the build engine code but instead were given the header files, a library and object files to link against.  So they never touched the engine originally.  If you read the Duke source as it is, it is all gameplay code with bits for saving, loading etc..  all the map logic and 'how it works' was hidden to them.  So once you know the BUILD API well, it is pretty easy to read, at least for me.  The build engine code itself is also quite nice, granted I am biased but as long as you have a deep technical knowledge of C and assembler, it was not that bad.  Don't forget, Doom also had very little comments and was clearly written in a rather rushed fashion.

 

That was probably another mistake he did, not testing it ;)

[TasAcri]

Eh, i fully agree with Carmack on the story bit. I never cared about the story in any game. Most try to be like movies and take themselves too seriously and they end up being cringe fuel or just pretentious. I think the problem is mostly the way they portray said stories. If it's just a few pages on a manual, a short intro, or some in-game logs, to set up the atmosphere a bit, it's fine. But when you fill your games with cut-scenes and closeups on character's faces because "emotion", it's a no go for me.

 

It's especially bad with modern games like the recent Resident Evil games that i'm currently playing. You get theatrical, overly dramatic voice acting and while the faces look detailed, they still look lifeless and the animations are still stiff and "videogamey". A pretty bad combination i can't take seriously anymore. Plus, you also get all the tropes and cliches of mainstream movies. So tiresome and eye rolling really.

 

This is not something new in my case. Even back in the early days of CD gaming i despised the whole "cinematic" perspective that most others saw as a positive evolution in gaming.

[hybridial]

5 hours ago, ApprihensivSoul said:

I actually completely agree that you don't need much of a story, actually, where I stand is that you still need some form of story, and the Doom one, while silly, overly macho, and very minimal, is actually pretty well written, even back in the 90s.

So my point being that the story has to exist in some form to add meaning to motivate most players, even if the story is pointless and barebones. 

 

That's what Carmack meant I think by "It's expected to be there". You do generally need some form of motivation that fits the theme of the game, so in this case with Doom you need enough to explain the demons, where they come from, why they're here and why you have to start murdering all of them. I mean, Quake does this too it's just a much weirder set of monsters and locales. On the other hand it is well known around here I don't care for Half Life and I simple don't give a fuck about it's story. To me it barely has one because it's such a dry and bland invasion story, Doom is far more engaging and Quake is far more mysterious and interesting. 

 

It's an interesting topic because, one of my favourite games of all time is Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. And I'm playing Shin Megami Tensei V now and I absolutely adore it. I think these games have an amazing concept and story, and if you ask the Persona fanbase many of them will say these games don't have a story. They confuse storytelling with character building, which really I think you can have too much of. Persona to me, like a lot of anime type stuff to be honest, fluffs up character interaction so much it tends to get very irritating to me because to me its filler a lot of the time, most of the time they're not really enhancing anything about the characters, it's really more a form of pandering.

 

Then you got stuff like The Last of Us, which fancies itself a movie, and I would call it an average one, as a game it barely feels like one, it's so basic and rote.

 

But another of my favourite game series' is Baldur's Gate, and I really like the story to those, I think they were very strong combos of role playing, plot and tactical combat. The common theme for me in all this is focus and remember it is a video game you're making, interaction should be exciting and the motivation should come from the storytelling which is clear and concise. The Ace Attorney games are outright visual novels yet they do this very well. 

[ApprihensivSoul]

I actually hated the story in Baldur's Gate, and it's one of the reasons those games are so hard to replay for me. I enjoyed SMT 1 and 2, though. I think, overall, I tend to prefer more minimalist plots and world-building, but in cases like Morrowind when it's really fleshed out and intricate, and dealing with themes you don't see very often I'm more engaged. I actually do enjoy Half-Life, particularly the atmosphere. It's a generic Stephen King/Michael Criton plot to be sure, but it's intentional, and it delivers it quite well through the gameplay.

(Not condemning your taste at all, I just found the idea of enjoying Baldur's Gate for the plot and not Half-Life hard to understand, but I'm glad you like the things you like. It's not like they're really comparable either. I just pointed it out for the sake of exhibiting different taste.)

[Rudolph]

17 hours ago, TasAcri said:

It's especially bad with modern games like the recent Resident Evil games that i'm currently playing. You get theatrical, overly dramatic voice acting and while the faces look detailed, they still look lifeless and the animations are still stiff and "videogamey". A pretty bad combination i can't take seriously anymore. Plus, you also get all the tropes and cliches of mainstream movies. So tiresome and eye rolling really.

Resident Evil 6 was a bloated mess, but I hear the franchise has been going through a renaissance ever since Resident Evil 7, though.

 

REmake 2 and 3 look pretty good too!

[hybridial]

6 hours ago, ApprihensivSoul said:

I actually hated the story in Baldur's Gate, and it's one of the reasons those games are so hard to replay for me. I enjoyed SMT 1 and 2, though. I think, overall, I tend to prefer more minimalist plots and world-building, but in cases like Morrowind when it's really fleshed out and intricate, and dealing with themes you don't see very often I'm more engaged. I actually do enjoy Half-Life, particularly the atmosphere. It's a generic Stephen King/Michael Criton plot to be sure, but it's intentional, and it delivers it quite well through the gameplay.

 

Well I don't find the Half Life games remotely atmospheric either, like nothing about them to me works on any level. 

 

As for Baldur's Gate, the only part of it that isn't great is the final part, Throne of Bhaal, because it felt like an obligation. It's not the worst thing, it's not Mass Effect 3 but it pretty much has lost most of it's steam. Only really neat thing was the idea of bringing back Sarevok. But the first game works because it is just a pretty basic story where you're just an adventurer who happens to be targeted by assassins for some unknown reason, but it's a very different CRPG to I think everything that came after it. Maybe it's less I like the "plot", and more I like the fact the plot is fairly low key and it's an excuse to have a solid low level D&D experience in a somewhat open world. I actually love that game, it tends to be treated as the less good BG2 and that really isn't what it is and I like it just as much if not more. And if Morrowind wasn't a complete and total nightmare to play I'd probably really like it, but it has the worst gameplay I have ever seen in almost anything. When I watch a video about "How to play Morrowind" and the first thing they do is go straight to alchemy spamming, yeah fuck that. And it's a shame because I can kinda see what it could be underneath, which was not present in Oblivion or Skyrim really, those games were much more playable but also much more bland. 

 

Baldur's Gate 2 is the Jon Irenicus show but he is one of the best written and best performed villians in videogame history and I actually fucking love that the plot in BG2 is a personal grudge with him and not a typical chosen one plot (they saved that for ToB where they quadrupled down on it). I do not think Bioware ever made anything remotely as good as BG1 and 2 afterwards (Mass Effect 1 and 2 were closest but... it's hard to look back on them without the feeling of crushing disappointment) and frankly most of the modern attempts have been garbage to me, except the first Pillars of Eternity which was alright. 

 

 

[Ralphis]

re: Quake 2 being soul-less and forgettable.

 

All of my friends with computers in the late 90s had Quake 2 and loved it. I bet if I talked to them about it today they would reminisce fondly about our time playing it online together. I imagine that there are many of these people out there but none of them are the type that spends time analyzing and litigating the history of these games on a forum dedicated to an even older game. Very similar to the "SNES was better than Genesis" arguments.

[Dark Pulse]

On 11/20/2021 at 9:56 AM, Gibbon said:

I never understood that.  Carmack did the Jaguar port and must have known the issues with getting the IDTech 1 running on non-x86 processors, let alone a dual RISC cpu setup.  I'm astounded that someone that technical could be blinded by his own ego that "it must be using my engine".  Really a shame.

That wasn't quite it. It had nothing to do with not running on x86 processors, it had to do with that game consoles of the time didn't have enough horsepower (unlike x86) to prevent affine texture warping.

 

The Saturn/PS1, as I'm sure you know, had absolutely no hardware for perspective-correct texture mapping, and the processors were obviously not exactly powerful enough to do this in software. Jim Bagley's engine was fast, but it didn't handle the warping - Carmack nixed it on that basis. (On the PS1, this was solved by breaking up the rendering into 1px polygonal strips - this definitely prevented the warping, but it absolutely murdered the graphics engine because it really is drawing a LOT more polys than most PS1 games do, every frame, and the of course there's overdraw and the like for far view distances on top of that; hence the occasionally lousy framerate.)

 

To be fair, Carmack did mea culpa on this years later and said that in hindsight, he should've seen how Jim could've solved this problem rather than force him to render like how the PC renderer did, but he was concerned with the presentation of the game, and to him, having no affine texture swim was a big deal for Doom's good name.

[holaareola]

19 hours ago, Ralphis said:

re: Quake 2 being soul-less and forgettable.

 

All of my friends with computers in the late 90s had Quake 2 and loved it. I bet if I talked to them about it today they would reminisce fondly about our time playing it online together. I imagine that there are many of these people out there but none of them are the type that spends time analyzing and litigating the history of these games on a forum dedicated to an even older game. Very similar to the "SNES was better than Genesis" arguments.

There was a larger novelty factor when the technology leapt forward with each title and far fewer games were being released per year. I played the hell out of Q2 multiplayer (Q2DM1 til I die!), joined clans and all that. But once Q3 came out the Q2 servers were more or less dead where I lived. SP was a memory once HL had come out (or Unreal, for those who could run it).

 

To my mind, Doom, Q1, Blood, HL and UT all outlasting it in terms of player and creator base is no accident. 

 

 

I think Carmack's biggest mistake was not focusing on tooling and re-inventing too much of the wheel with each engine. Cf with Tim Sweeney, who was a bit of a business visionary as well as an ultra-talented frontier games programmer.

[Tetzlaff]

There were several custom SP releases for Quake 2 in 2020, so it’s surely not dead. There is much more custom content for Q2 than for Unreal (I just started replaying custom Unreal episodes, and there really isn’t much custom content).

 

Also Quake 2 MP lived on after the release of Quake 3 Arena. I actually started online gaming in 1999 with Q3A, and then started playing Q2 Threewave CTF afterwards, there were still many active servers.

 

Normally people who think Quake 2 is soulless or bland are just disappointed that the game didn’t continue with Quake‘s lovecraftian/fantasy style.

 

I adore Quake‘s chaotic mishmash of themes and it is a great base to create custom content for, because you can go industrial or dark medieval or lovecraftian horror. But as a game Quake 2 is much more developed, coherent and convincing. For me it’s the pinnacle of late 1990s FPS design and I really like the industrial alien cyborg theme.

[Caffeine Freak]

On 11/20/2021 at 1:50 PM, Rudolph said:

@Caffeine Freak Eh. I do not know. Quake IV had a much greater emphasis on story and it was not a particularly good game.

 

Then again, I did enjoy Doom 3 for its story presentation, so maybe it was just a matter of Raven not being as talented as Id Software.

 

Curious about this... when you say you enjoyed Doom 3 'for its story presentation', do you mean that was one of the *predominant* factors you enjoyed it for? Or do you mean it was one factor among others that you enjoyed it equally for?

 

Does that question make sense?

[holaareola]

 

16 hours ago, Tetzlaff said:

There were several custom SP releases for Quake 2 in 2020, so it’s surely not dead. There is much more custom content for Q2 than for Unreal (I just started replaying custom Unreal episodes, and there really isn’t much custom content).

 

Also Quake 2 MP lived on after the release of Quake 3 Arena. I actually started online gaming in 1999 with Q3A, and then started playing Q2 Threewave CTF afterwards, there were still many active servers.

 

Normally people who think Quake 2 is soulless or bland are just disappointed that the game didn’t continue with Quake‘s lovecraftian/fantasy style.

 

I adore Quake‘s chaotic mishmash of themes and it is a great base to create custom content for, because you can go industrial or dark medieval or lovecraftian horror. But as a game Quake 2 is much more developed, coherent and convincing. For me it’s the pinnacle of late 1990s FPS design and I really like the industrial alien cyborg theme.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it was completely dead. You're right about Unreal SP, it never seemed to attract many mappers which was why I didn't include it in the second para.

 

I agree with your line of thinking about Q2's coherence, believability etc -- although HL arguably did this better -- but I think the enemies, the weapons, the unimpressive set pieces, the game feel (although then again, I see HLDM has many multiples more online players than Q2 these days, so who knows on game feel) just didn't add up to something timeless and great. Those are the reasons I'd give for why it has way smaller player and creator bases than the standard bearer titles of its near forebears, contemporaries and successors.

[Rudolph]

21 hours ago, Caffeine Freak said:

Curious about this... when you say you enjoyed Doom 3 'for its story presentation', do you mean that was one of the *predominant* factors you enjoyed it for? Or do you mean it was one factor among others that you enjoyed it equally for?

 

Does that question make sense?

Quake IV only gets kind of good once you get stroggified. Everything before that feels like a half-baked Call of Duty clone where you have to follow or babysit NPCs, backtrack your way to a critical item or NPC and go through bland vehicle sections. That is not to say that there is no enjoyment to be found; in fact, I would say Quake IV's arsenal is much better than Doom 3's. However, before the stroggification, you move so slow and are so weak that it makes gunfights rather tedious, if not downright irritating when you have to deal with fast enemies that can not only outrun you but also instantly kill you, like the Berserker.

 

Also, the writing is not great and the story plays it itself so much more seriously than Quake II that it is hard to believe that they are set in the same universe (the fact that the Marines and most of the Strogg look nothing like their Quake II counterparts does not help), it really tries too hard to make you care about your squadmates - even though they are all super forgettable and they will not shut up - and all in all it just feels like an unrelated Doom 3 total conversion with vague Quake II references here and there.

 

Doom 3 is a much more atmospheric game that leans heavily on the horror aspect and is not shy about showcasing its (for the most part) still amazing visuals and effects, which makes your character's slower movement speed feel more justified. You spend almost the entirety of the game alone, the worldbuilding is stronger, the main antagonist is quite memorable (and his voice actor is clearly having fun hamming it up) and overall the game is much more satisfying experience than Quake IV.

Edited November 25, 2021 by Rudolph