Just the other day I was wondering whether these old games were just so much fun because I was much younger and it was simply something new and exciting to me, or whether there's something else to it. You know, sometimes less is more, if the game world is just about detailed enough that you can make out what things are supposed to be, you have to let the creative part of your brain do much more work to fill in the blanks, which ultimately gives the final product that your consciousness consumes a more personal note, since it's filled with your fantasy. Maybe this is part of why Minecraft is so successful. Everything is so chunky and rough, you have to imagine what things are. And your crude buildings and creations easily fit in with the rest of the game world, there automatically is consistency in detail, so your mind accepts it.
I tried Unreal Editor a few years ago. The engine is really impressive, there's a ton of assets, high res textures, it's easy to create a natural looking terrain, but then bringing it to life is hard work and takes skills. Everything I built looked clunky, out of place, lacked details, lighting seemed off, it was rubbish. Minecraft fixes this problem. Everyone can build good looking stuff.
>you have to let the creative part of your brain do much more work to fill in the blanks,
x100 this. Quake 1 was terrifying for me even though the pixelated graphics are poor by todays standard because my imagination would fill in the blanks making things feel way more scary.
Just take a look at these pixelated creatures. Coupled with the soundtrack from NIN and Trent Reznor and the gothic atmosphere they feel way scarier to me than what came after like Doom 3 or even Dooms of this decade. I don't now why but the recent Doom games just look a bit too cartoonish for me and not scary at all.
I think you are on to something about the impact being forced to use your imagination has. Quake 1 had amazing art direction and each chapter had its own feel because each of them was designed by a different dev following his own ideas.
I think perhaps the biggest reason why Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal don't feel "creepy" like the old games is because they are completely missing the point. The newer games are fun, beautiful, well designed games. However, instead of making a game that captures the essence of Doom its more like a Michael Bay version of Doom. Instead of desperately fighting never ending hordes of increasingly horrifying creatures from hell so you can get out in one piece and save the world, you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons for lulz. The whole way the story makes it seem like its a foregone conclusion that you've won. Its not a struggle, its just you punishing the hordes of hell that are powerless to stop you.
Aesthetically they nailed the look of the creatures although as you pointed out less can be more. The sound track is good but at some point the composer was consumed by his own pretentiousness (IMO Dusk's composer that replaced him produces far better "Doom" music). The combat is fun and if it wasn't a Doom game it would still be rightly lauded as one of the best shooters of the generation, but glory kills annihilate the flow of the game IMO and detract from any authentic feeling it may have had. Glory kills feel like shortened, dumbed-down quick time events that you're supposed to spam the entire time you play and quick time events always feel bad.
They are some of the best single player games I've played in years, but I was there with Id since the Commander Keen games and this does not feel like a Doom game to me.
I mean its literally a Doom game, but the franchise has clearly lost something and I feel like a lot of the people that preach about how authentically they captured the experience might be too young to have bothered to play it.
Doom II: Hell On Earth is IMO one of the top 5 games of all time. Quake 1 is also on the list. I hope some day we get proper remakes or spiritual successors that capture not just the aesthetic, but the feel and the point of the original games.
Dusk was a decently sized step in the right direction.
People flipped out when Doom 3 ended up being low light horror game and not a fast paced shooter.
Heck the lore of the Doom is that the protagonist is the 'Doom of demonkind'. Its the game where you are not locked in room with demons but they are locked in room with you.
> you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons
That is the 100% the core idea of Doom lore.
Tldr: The doom marine was entangled with 'hell' and at some stage was tricked that his dead son could be brought to life by a some demon deal - he came back as twisted undead. Doomguy got really angry and his anger propelled him to destroy all that is hell.
> They are some of the best single player games I've played in years, but I was there with Id since the Commander Keen games and this does not feel like a Doom game to me.
I have some mixed feelings about Doom Eternal as it sometimes feels like a puzzle and bit gamey. But Doom 2016 is quite literally a modernised version of Doom 1.
You've got the lore a little mixed up. Doom Guy was mad that the demons killed his rabbit Daisy after they invaded, and ended up voluntarily staying in Hell to kill demons after saving Earth. The Betrayer's son is the one who was resurrected as the Icon of Sin.
It feels like a generational thing, too. My aunt and uncle showed me the 1932 production of "The Mummy," and it terrified them. They were born in the 40s, and so saw this movie in their teens. (and perhaps even later) I watched it recently, and can't even imagine being scared.
I'd like to think that there is both an objective and subjective aspect to this. On the one hand, maybe people just can't appreciate the older styles of art. On the other hand, after being exposed to modern violence, cinematography, and suspense, the old techniques truly do pale in comparison, at least in the visceral, emotional sense.
I wonder how much of the difference is attributable to sensitivity (or lack thereof) to the art/medium/representation, and how much is due to the fact that the fears addressed by the work of art were more relatable to people at the time than they are to a modern audience.
My mom found "The Exorcist" truly frightening, so much so that she refused to re-watch it in adulthood. So my friend and I rented it one night looking forward to a good scare; instead, we mostly found ourselves laughing at how ridiculous it seemed. We must have been around 12 at the time, so probably already quite desensitized to horror movies in general, but I think it is also the case that the subject matter was just less frightening to us than it was to her. We were all raised Catholic, but she was of the stern-nuns-with-rulers generation whereas our elementary school in the 90's had been of the hippie-nuns-with-guitars variety. I don't think things like demons/the devil had ever felt like real objects of fear for us like they may have been for her (in such a deep way that their representation continued to creep her out long after she stopped believing in their literal existence).
Granted, I was a teen in the 90s, but I never found Doom to be scary. However, Wolfenstein 3D left me an anxious wreck -- likely because the AI always (seemed to?) know where you were. (I also didn't get to play Wolf3d until DOOM had already come out, so I don't think it's related.)
>People flipped out when Doom 3 ended up being low light horror game and not a fast paced shooter.
A game can have a creepy aesthetic and even scare people without being a slow paced survival game where you walk around awkwardly pointing at things with a flashlight. The early games had creepy vibes at many different parts of the game. If you disagree to each his own.
> you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons
> That is the 100% the core idea of Doom lore.
> But Doom 2016 is quite literally a modernised version of Doom 1.
Not really, here's the final paragraphs to the introduction to Doom 1 from the original manual:
> Things aren't looking too good. You'll never navigate off the planet on your own. Plus, all the heavy weapons have been taken by the assault team leaving you only with a pistol. If only you could get your hands around a plasma rifle or even a shotgun you could take a few down on your way out. Whatever killed your buddies deserves a couple pellets in the forehead. Securing your helmet, you exit the landing pod. Hopefully you can find more substantial firepower somewhere within the station. As you walk through the main entrance of the base, you hear animal-like growls echoing throughout the distant corridors. They know you're here. There's no turning back now.
Yes, he's a highly trained badass, but he's just a Marine. He ends up killing all of the monsters if you finish the game, but the setup and the aesthetic and lore of the entire game makes it seem like an insurmountable challenge ahead of you, just a guy, fighting through hell and later on repelling the hordes of hell from earth.
The art team did a great job replicating doom, the composer did a great job of renewing classic Doom music and merging it with modern takes on the Doom aesthetic, although it is ridiculous that the music is intended to overpower the other sounds in the game.
The gameplay is where they really screwed up IMO. Its a great game but its not authentic old school Doom gameplay. You could modernize it properly, I'm just saying that in my opinion they haven't for the reasons I explained elsewhere. They instead created a new thing that uses the Doom franchise and it just happens to be fantastic. As great as it is though I would rather have had a well executed modern take that also feels authentic.
Doom came out right when I left univeristy. Loved that game. I like the new Dooms too. I think they're fun. Way more "doom like" than anything else I've played since.
The "New Doom" music/sound producer gave a pretty good GDC one hour talk about the music came about. Some fun stories there ( the sound easter egg story was fun). Its more than about just the sound, its about process and change.
He's definitely talented and I did watch his talk a while back. It was a pretty good talk and pretty enlightening. I didn't realize how much effort some musicians put into setting up like 40 different pieces of equipment to achieve a single effect for a small part of a song.
The Doom soundtrack to me constitutes excellent video game music. I didn't enjoy it enough to listen to the OST like many folks did. I'm a metal head but it didn't quite do it for me like Mr. Bungle/Meshuggah does. I do listen to the parts of the Dusk soundtrack once in a while though.
They just re-recorded their first album which was a pretty straightforward but still weird trash album from 85 that's arguably as good as anything else from the era. It was recorded by a kid on a 4 track though so the quality of the original was too bad to really understand how good it was.
Dave Lombardo (Slayer Drummer) and Scott Ian (Anthrax Guitarist) joined three of the original members for the re-recording. Scott Ian was a fan of it back in the day and thinks it was more musically complex than what they and most of the other big metal bands were doing at the time. And it was written by 15-17 year olds inspired by Slayer's Reign in Blood.
But yes Bungle did a later album that was crazy circus metal and eventually they did a really great album of music that was less heavy (not metal at all) and more accessible called California.
I love all of it. Search for the 2020 version of Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny for their new stuff. Easily the best album released this year IMO. RTJ4 was also pretty good though.
Bungle wasn't really an offshoot of FNM, it was the lead singer Mike Patton's first band. FNM is also criminally under-rated. Their only really famous song "Epic" isn't really representative of the rest of their work. IMO the follow-up album Angel Dust is the best album of all time. They experiment with lots of genres and its still weird stuff though so its not gonna be everyone's cup of tea.
> However, instead of making a game that captures the essence of Doom its more like a Michael Bay version of Doom. Instead of desperately fighting never ending hordes of increasingly horrifying creatures from hell so you can get out in one piece and save the world, you're an unkillable demigod that's basically dunking on armies of demons for lulz.
Doom was structured in such a way that when you started off playing it was practically survival horror, but when you "got gud" you were practically the unkillable demigod. That's what I loved about it: it was so open-ended. It could be that way because its engine was so limited. There were only so many possible level layouts, and only a few different parameters that determined how enemies behaved. Using those, you could construct a combinatoric explosion of battle scenarios that ran the gamut from balls-out arena battle to hunting down enemies in dark narrow corridors and everything in between. Furthermore, the level data was small enough that the entire level, and all objects spawned within it, could live in memory at once. This made each level feel like a living world. Enemies from a faraway part of the level you haven't reached yet can spot you and start chasing and attacking.
In Doom 3, Doom (2016), and Doom Eternal, the engine is so unlimited that the designers had to basically pick a playstyle in order to narrow down the solution space, just to get started. Doom 3 opted for a survival horror style while the latter two games opted for a Serious Sam/Painkiller style combat game: move to area, sweep all enemies, move to next area, repeat. They feel more fun and more like Doom than Doom 3 did, but there's still something missing. Not that I blame them for adopting a few modern shooter conventions. Had they made it a total "boomer shooter" I doubt it would have sold as well.
I think you're underestimating Quake's sound design and Lovecraftian influences by Sandy Petersen.
For me the games that best illustrate this are ancient Ultima games. Ultima I-IV have tile based symbolic graphics. Ultima V also is tile-based, but makes an effort to represent every torch, chair, brazier; as much detail as they can fit. Fallen Enchantress screenshots worked for me, but the game itself was a failure.
One thing I've noted is that scary monsters designs don't really have any effect anymore (did they really ever?). If a spoopy monster's head splits in half and two more fleshier ones spawn out with visceral scream... well whatever, I guess it will have a different attack pattern now. What's really scary is enemies you don't understand, with unexpected or undefined behaviors, weird dynamic animations, or norm breaking behaviors that don't feel scripted.
Mr. X of the RE2 remake was very good at this (for the first playthrough at least). The original amnesia monsters were pretty good for a bit too. Both grew kind of tiresome after you were familiar with their mechanics.
I wonder if the games are creepier because your brain can't fill in the blanks. The creatures all move like vicious predators, behave like machines, and look like pixellated mutant animals. Can the mind even categorize that? They're as mysterious as they are vicious. Fear is the first response.
I think Quake's enemy models are clumsily made, except for the Scrag which elevates the whole game. Eventually someone made a whole game with the Scrag aesthetic (Devil Daggers) and it became a huge hit. Wish there was a campaign game like that.
I have so much to write on this, sorry if it comes off as incoherent rambling.
The gist of it is I think the 90s really were a special time in computer gaming, and it's not just nostalgia you're feeling. I'll try to list what came to mind.
- Just like the 60s-70s in music, product people had no concept of what a marketable game looked like, and were willing to fund much more riskier ideas.
- Video game team sizes and budgets were smaller, allowing designers much more leeway, as well being able to personally oversee the production much better.
- Although Moore's law was a thing before and after the 90s, It's the advancement during that time meant that games went from pixelated abstract bleep-bloop affairs, to being able to render and simulate complex 2D and 3D worlds.
- Feeding in to my previous point, people were literally writing the book on modern game genres, like RTS, Sim games (who thought that managing a city could be fun?), FPS, etc.
- John Carmack, I literally cannot overstate how impactful his contributions were to the FPS genre. With the introduction of Binary Space Partitioning in games (first in Doom in 2D, then a fully 3D version in Quake), he elegantly solved occlusion culling, collision detection, and 3D level editors in a masterstroke, while allowing 3D games to run on the meagre hardware of the times. Almost literally every FPS game used a BSP to represent its levels for more than a decade (Unreal, Quake and Source sure did).
Unfortunately, the console era which came after, has put a brake to this breakneck pace of development.Console games, especially in the PS1-X360 eras, were dumbed down for both technical limitations, and gameplay:
- Studios sought to appeal to the masses, who didn't always appreciate the complex mechanics.
- You just can't make as sophisticated UI for gamepads as for keyboard/mouse. This killed of multiple PC genres on console, the RTS most prominent among them.
- Due to the primary storage medium being DVDs/CDS in the console space, developers had to contend with their limitations, such as slow transfer speed, and abysmal seek times (yes even compared to HDDs). This meant that levels needed to be more linear, and player freedom had to be restricted. RAM sizes were also tiny compared to PCs of the time, further increasing the problem.
> The gist of it is I think the 90s really were a special time in computer gaming, and it's not just nostalgia you're feeling.
I don't think it'd be exaggerating to say that the 90s were, for 3D gaming, the equivalent of 1900-1910 for aircraft. The decade started with a few barely-functional attempts and ended with relatively polished and widely available products.
I'm not super familiar with the history of aviation, but by the end of the 90s, 3D accelerators became widespread.
This meant that 3D became available to the masses, but the only way you could render graphics was the DirectX/OpenGL way, with triangles,Z-Buffers,vertex/pixel shaders.
Unfortunately this meant that other techniques, like voxel raycasting, spline surfaces and other weird techniques couldn't be accelerated, and became much less prominent.
So yeah, the analogy stands that 3D transitioned from a period of whimsical experimentation to a "this-is-how-we-do-things" mindset in the timeframe, while a number of otherwise interesting solutions fell by the wayside.
I think your description is pretty spot-on. Doom was released in 1993. Quake 3 Arena was released in 1999. Doom had all the ingredients needed to make Q3 but Quake 3 Arena still holds up as an arcade-style shooter, whereas Doom feels like a relic of the past. I think that period of time in the 90s was really a remarkable time in the evolution of digital entertainment.
I dunno man - for a 'high tech' sci-fi movie, there aren't anything resembling modern phones in the Matrix. My 7yo has a hard time understanding pay phones. At least the Godfather is set in the past haha.
Most FPS games were literally consolized. Until Halo came around, no one could make a FPS work because a controller was too slow and imprecise. Halo's trick was to sloooow the action down.
The chunky thing was why making levels for DooM was so easy. Prodeus (early access) also has easy to use level editor, but currently the game has some design problems - such as dumb and slow monsters. Those in DooM were also dumb, but their AI was functional. They could swarm and surround you well enough. I honestly think Prodeus looks better than Doom Eternal, the art direction especially. But I don't need as much ketchup.
I think games like these (Dusk, Graven, Ion Fury etc...) will sell in part because players' expectations have changed. Players have also realized that if they want action reminiscent of old FPS games, they can't look towards AAA games because no AAA game will imitate the experience. It's too much risk. You need to give smaller studios a chance, and the only way smaller studios can make it work is by limiting visual detail.
I agree that the action was slower, however, Halo's real trick was designing a set of weapons that were fun to use, but were mostly horribly inaccurate. The sniper was the clear exception.
I did a controller VS mouse/keyboard competition with Halo 1 on PC vs the best console Halo player in my Battalion when we were deployed to Kuwait. We would both use the same weapons at the same time for most of the games to make it fair and objective since we were doing it out of curiosity. We were mostly even with the majority of the weapons. With the shotgun the console player had a clear advantage although I don't know why because I would have assumed a mouse would still be faster (maybe it was just me). When we were using sniper rifles, however, with my mouse and keyboard vs a controller it was like playing against someone that had never played Halo before. The mouse was just too quick and accurate and at that point Halo hadn't developed a really egregious form of aim assist yet. The funny thing about this last observation was that I was the one that had barely ever played Halo.
Note: I don't look down on people that prefer gaming on a console and I have enjoyed my Switch/PS4 immensely. For some genres an analog controller is objectively superior without purposefully implementing a software advantage to balance things out like many games choose to do with aim assist. I do tend to agree with Shroud's opinion that when it comes to competitive play at a certain level of MM rank they should just have separate queues for each controller type. Ultimately its a tradeoff though because if queues for a game like COD:Warzone were forcibly separated the game's community on PC would have died completely after a month or two like previous games did.
It does, and some of the later Halos had more accurate weapons (I recall a 3 or 4 shot burst rifle being the new starting weapon?).
The pistol actually seemed popular among players with better accuracy than myself, specifically because it was one of the few weapons accurate enough to reliably land headshots.
I tried some of the later Halo games, and it felt very non-Halo, and I think this pins it down. In the original Halo, it was relatively difficult to die instantly. Grenades, sniper rifles, the bazooka, and the hand sword were the only weapons that could do it, and each of them had substantial tradeoffs (grenades were limited, the bazooka traveled rather slowly and only killed on direct hits or very close hits, etc). Now there are tons of weapons that can kill in one hit. I think the starting rifle can't one shot, but two bursts to the head is death. And they've turned up the aim assist to the point where players are fairly good at getting headshots.
It misses all those "if I hide behind this rock and let my shields regen, I might survive" moments. There's no tension to the game as you struggle to survive; in a flash you're either the conqueror or the conquered. There's no cat and mouse as you chase someone through their base, hoping they don't hide behind a corner and stick you with a plasma grenade.
Maybe the tension is what I miss more than the slower speed of play. After all, fast playing games can still be fun (like Sonic) because they keep that tension that you could die at any second. That kind of tension that keeps you on the edge of your seat, so when you finally make it through you get the level you lean back and pat yourself on the shoulder. Modern AAA games seem to want to get directly to the dopamine hit, so they crushed the combat sequence into a very small number of actions so that you can do it over and over again faster. It just doesn't do as much for me.
I can't speak for Turok (I only played it once, and don't remember anything about it other than something something dinosaurs), but Goldeneye probably doesn't have much of a word here; its controls were clunky as shit. And sure, that was part of the fun, and it's still an iconic game, but I'm very much glad that modern FPS games have adopted more sane control schemes.
Goldeneye had a Turok-style control option that I largely used: move with the arrow keys, aim with the stick, trigger to shoot, shoulder to aim. Circle strafing is simple, as is aiming up or down. Goldeneye's shoulder aim allowed players more precision, at a cost of mobility, which has a certain logic to it.
Overall it's fairly similar to Halo, without the extra buttons for crouch, jump, grenade, or melee. Halo's golden triangle would be functionally dead without them. But... the pro controllers exist for a reason -- you can't use a fleet of thumb buttons on the controller face if your left and right thumbs are dedicated to moving and looking.
Which games imitate Goldeneye and Turok? I mean I guess you have a point that these games work, but the fact they've been ignored by game designers is telling something.
Goldeneye wasn't ignored, the thief designers have talked about the difficulty vs mission structure coming from straight from Goldeneye.
Edit: timesplitters, that was David doak and his goldeneye mates when they left rare and set up free radical. I think that franchise lost its way on the third one when they ditched the Goldeneye style controls.
Honestly, the difference over time is just the addition of a second analog stick. The Turok move with one thumb, aim with the other style closely mimics mouse+keyboard.
And of course, LAN play really helps vs split screen matches, but thats mostly a function of the era rather than game design philosophy.
It was subtle, but it was there. I remember getting frustrated with the fact that it dragged the target reticule towards center of mass, which made headshots trickier.
This is from memory of fifteen years ago, so I might be mistaken. I did play the original on Xbox obsessively, FWIW.
> I tried Unreal Editor a few years ago. The engine is really impressive, there's a ton of assets, high res textures, it's easy to create a natural looking terrain, but then bringing it to life is hard work and takes skills. Everything I built looked clunky, out of place, lacked details, lighting seemed off, it was rubbish. Minecraft fixes this problem. Everyone can build good looking stuff.
A lot of this is probably lighting. Lighting is hugely important for things to look good. Not just photorealism high-res whatever. Dynamic raytraced super expensive lighting looks good. Old school, fake lighting where everything is automatically lit is also good. Poorly configured lighting is very bad.
Minecraft has good enough lighting by default. Unreal does not. I don't care much about high quality graphics, but I don't think I agree with your hypotheses about lower quality being better for imagination though. It's just another sort of uncanny valley.
If you want the 1 minute laydown on good enough unreal light:
* Put a directional light in the scene
* Set it's property that says its a sun
* Set it to mobile (so it doesn't try to bake things)
* Add a sky atmosphere and set all of its light scattering colors to black (so it gets its colors realistically from the sun)
As a non artist, the lighting and atmosphere functionality of unreal is probably my favorite feature: https://youtu.be/SeNM9zBPLCA?t=932
> I don't care much about high quality graphics, but I don't think I agree with your hypotheses about lower quality being better for imagination though. It's just another sort of uncanny valley.
Hmh, not sure. I agree on lighting being very important, but RTX-Quake looked just weird too. But imagination probably plays a role in games like doom where enemies are barely more than a couple pixels. It's like horror movies are scary because of the stuff that is only implied through storytelling and sound, as these things then happen directly in your brain and not on the screen.
I'm only watching the trailer but I think RTX Quake looks pretty good with the glaring exception of big polygonal visual effects. The explosions in particular don't work.
Certainly ray traced lighting isn't going to be good if the logic of what makes, blocks, and transparently passes light doesn't look good.
When there is a lack of information, our imagination works. It is taken to the extreme with roguelikes (with ASCII graphics) such as ADOM. Even now, Jupiter Hell (the successor of DoomRL) is less attractive for me because of its polished graphics.
But I think that there is another aspect - polishing gameplay & pace. Contemporary shooters often have too many cutscenes, too many things to add to the story (and equipment, and everything) that distract from instead of complement the experience. The minimalism of games like Doom, with a fast, uninterrupted pace, is still a masterpiece. Fine-tuning mechanics is hard.
Which games do you use as reference for "Contemporary shooters", and did you actually play them?
A pattern I see each time there are discussions about games, is to compare games in the past, actually played, with contemporary games, as observed in reviews or youtube videos (which, additionally, biases towards AAA-games, since they have more coverage).
To answer the parent:
> Just the other day I was wondering whether these old games were just so much fun because I was much younger and it was simply something new and exciting to me, or whether there's something else to it.
This is the nostalgia lens, and there are a couple of reasons.
The first is that today the gaming landscape is considerably wider than it was, because the barrier to entry is considerably lower, but one instinctually considers just the AAA games, and additionally, the noisier ones. There has been "one" Doom and Quake for some time, and with reasons - there was one Carmack only. Today there are plenty.
Second, one forgets very easily how games could have poor mechanics. From the article:
> But not everything from the past is being included in Dusk. “I want to avoid unintuitive navigation and overly obscure puzzles,” Szymanski said. Not everything transfers so well into the present day.
>Which games do you use as reference for "Contemporary shooters", and did you actually play them?
> A pattern I see each time there are discussions about games, is to compare games in the past, actually played, with contemporary games, as observed in reviews or youtube videos (which, additionally, biases towards AAA-games, since they have more coverage).
+1 to that. A lot of AAA games are designed with every moment being a handcrafted experience. That is, some sort of scripted thing is happening that couldn't happen organically by normal mechanics. Older AAA titles tended to just produce a solid set of mechanics and just let them speak for themselves.
But there's plenty of good stuff that still leans into that approach.
In my experience, after Doom, the pace of shooters started going down. Even Doom 3 was (IMHO) a cutscene horror. For me the only game in the spirit of Doom (with enemies attacking en masse, with meaningful weapons, without pretending there is some interesting story) was Painkiller. Otherwise, games got slower, even ones I otherwise enjoyed immensely (e.g. Half-Life).
Doom 2016 & Eternal are back to the game - with fast-paced mechanics, and (though, I cannot bear Doom Eternal demon piñata glitter, vide https://medium.com/@pmigdal/doom-2016-vs-doom-eternal-ui-sid...).
Dusk has a nice, gloomy mood, fast (and respecting players - in terms of challenge and difficulty). Ultrakill has g(l)ory kill mechanics, IMHO better than from Doom Eternal (even if not as visually appealing).
> Second, one forgets very easily how games could have poor mechanics.
Mechanics is hard. Kudos to Szymanski for polishing the mechanics, not the story or graphics glitter.
> [T]here was one Carmack only. Today there are plenty.
Well, Carmack is unique. His focus and attention to detail are second to none. Plus, there was another John - Romero. In Doom, he was designing and obsessively tweaking all parameters.
(To the extend, I compare these Johns to John Bell, and Albert Einstein. No, it is not a joke: https://crastina.se/theres-no-projects-like-side-projects/.).
My current game dev project is being done with relatively low poly models and non-realistic textures. I've tried adding higher levels of detail to the game, but gave up pretty early on. Unless it looks great and stylized, highly detailed art that's just okay ends up looking cheaper than intentionally simple and under-detailed art. I ended up settling on something a little bit above Sega Saturn style and I'm feeling immersed in my own test levels.
Whenever I see a game with super detailed forests and houses and human models, it's almost impossible to get interested in it. It's too real and bland. Maybe it's a mental association from seeing a bunch of cheap Russian and Chinese games on Steam that use premade assets.
It’s interesting to think about the constraints that bring about a level of self-narrative in games. Here you point out the graphics, and I think mostly textual games like the Football Manager series also evoke these feelings. But on the flip side I think a lot of modern open world games are a response to the very constrained paths and mazes of the some eras of first person shooter, giving players back the ability to follow their own story to an extent.
I think RPGs especially have paid a big price as fidelity has gone up. The move to voice acting lost us rich, broad textual interactions with every NPC, the waypoints-and-cutscenes that give us almost film-like narratives mean that role play is now largely limited to a small number of paths (good/evil or strong/stealthy). The complexity of these games has really gone down overall, and while they’re often wonderful storytelling experiences you’re right it’s far less _your_ story in many modern games.
Voice cutscenes everywhere is the worst thing to ever happen to rpgs. It slows the pace down to a crawl. Granted, there was some archaic gameplay design from the old days that felt slow too and has since largely been dispensed with, but I think it pales in impact.
Even AAA action-adventure games are now like watching interactive tv.
Games in this era were also ultimately designed to sell copies and be fun.
No micro-transactions, no limitations by console platforms, no huge worldwide marketing campaigns and TV adverts.
Just developers trying to make the games as fun as possible so more people would buy a copy when magazines gave it a good review or people showed their friends when they were over.
Don't worry we're on the cusp of getting loads of PS1/N64 aesthetic games. It's been bubbling in some niches (notably horror) but it feels like we're about to see it as the next indie thing.
I personally am looking forward to a return of the wobbly skin model skinning from Kingpin!
David OReilly wrote a nice essay covering the 'less is more' philosophy in 3d art ('Basic Animation Aesthetics' -pdf can be found here: http://www.davidoreilly.com/downloads)
He's done a bunch of great animations (eg The External World, The Horse Raised by Spheres - youtube) and games (Mountain, EVERYTHING - steam/consoles) that epitomize it imo - very worth a watch/play
Speaking specifically about FPS games, after the heyday of games like Quake and Unreal, a new generation of FPS games came up, iirc starting with Half-Life (focusing more on story, platforming than shooting), then moving on to Medal of Honor and Call of Duty (realistic shooters); the more 'arcade' shooters fell out of grace, and probably more when other game categories became big in e-sports.
But, then Id started to make a comeback; games like the Wolfenstein reboot which were more about over the top violence again, and Doom which made FPS games fast again (if it wasn't for the constant scramble for ammo it really would've captured the 'old' feel even better I think). That one's criticized for having too much platforming in it though, but other than that it's still a fun / fast paced FPS games.
Alongside there's been the Serious Sam franchise which never stopped feeling outdated, lol. It's a weird one because the gameplay of that one seems to be focused on kiting.
> It's a weird one because the gameplay of that one seems to be focused on kiting.
Kiting works artistically with rocket launchers!
From the older days, it's one of the big reasons teenage me preferred Unreal Tournament over Quake III Arena. In the former, the rockets had a nice exhaust plume and were slow enough that if you were strafing while shooting, you got to see a nice view of a missile in flight[0]. In Q3A, the rockets were just glowing blobs with a small trail behind, rarely giving you nice visuals. I always favored railguns because of a nicer trail.
Serious Sam, back in those days, also had a very nice missile trail visual, and coupled with the outdoor gameplay (giving rockets many seconds of flight), I just loved kiting and unloading rockets at the coalescing piles of enemies.
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[0] - Let's ignore for a moment that real-life rockets would be much faster.
I think how the game plays is very important. Counter Strike 1.6, Minecraft, Wolfenstein etc. These games had a lot to offer as an experience, almost an arcadeish feeling. With CS:GO or the new COD games there is just so much to take in it just takes away the arcade feeling and makes it more of a movie experience rather than a game
whenever I go back and play 1.6, I'm always amazed at how crisp and direct the controls feel. it's hard to describe the feeling precisely, but modern fps games (even csgo to an extent) just seem clunky in comparison. it's almost like the feeling you get when you forget to turn off vsync. not sure if this is just my nostalgia kicking in or if there's a technical reason for this.
I totally get what you mean. The gameplay itself is just.. different. Not the story or whatever but strictly the movement. What you wrote about vsync just hit me on another level. I remember playing CS Source (don't ask) and that was just awful, I still played it for hundreds of hours, but it just was not hitting it like before. I think there is a technical reason for it, because I turned on CS 1.6 in between these comments and the difference was noticeable immediately
> You know, sometimes less is more, if the game world is just about detailed enough that you can make out what things are supposed to be, you have to let the creative part of your brain do much more work to fill in the blanks, which ultimately gives the final product that your consciousness consumes a more personal note, since it's filled with your fantasy.
Scott McCloud made the same point while discussing Abstraction in comics in his book 'Understanding Comics'. The more abstract the representation of a character is, the more easily a reader can project themselves onto that character and identify with it.
My school teacher also told us that anonymous, blank slate characters are often used to represent everyone, or the reader. This is what most people don't get about the Doom Guy or Gordon Freeman. If you try to fix it, you're actually breaking the quality.
Just in case anyone is wary and is tempted to write Dusk off as just a cheap cash-in on some recent retro/low-fi trend. It really isn't - it's a spectacularly fun and creative game with solid mechanics. If you prefer a little more colour you can also check out Amid Evil or Ion Fury
There's another upcoming game I'm keeping an eye on - Hrot. It's a solo-dev effort with a home-made engine written in Pascal (!) set in a pre-revolution Czechoslovak(-style?) state. I have no idea about the developer's track record in gaming and haven't played any of the early-access stuff, but it's got a good look and the tech demos show some fun stuff so I'm kinda curious how it will turn out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xovpHxsVRTQ
What I like about 90s shooters is how little fuss there is to get to the action. Doom, you launch it and can be killing things within 15 seconds. With modern shooters, it loading, loading, game selection, lobby, connecting, loading, cutscene, weapon selection, tutorial, realizing you need to grind to get better weapons, pay for better weapons, mission objectives, notified there's an update, enter your credentials, reset your password. Start game. die. wait in the lobby for the next round. maybe then you get your first kill. Mentally taxing. i miss the simplicity of old games.
My hypothesis is that many game designers have actually forgotten what makes a game fun. Games have become a cargo cult of sorts. Games have character levels, level ups and skill trees but why exactly? Does it make Project Warlock more fun? Certain game traits are replicated without thought.
In my opinion games won't "grow up" as a medium if game designers let others shame them into implementing stuff that doesn't make games better. Like, meaningful moral choices, versus a game letting you play in a number of creative ways. Making a fuss about non-lethal approaches to challenges. The more cutscenes and story you add to a game, the more it becomes a graphic novel. Games aren't about telling stories. They're about generating them. That's what games do best and no other medium can come close - not radio, not movies, not books. The best games are the ones with a ton of mods, with a vibrant community, speedrunners inventing challenges and categories by themselves rather than relying on a programmed system of achievements. No one complains about lack of a story in basketball, chess or soccer!
Games are more about acting than theatre (playhouse) is. Only a few people act in a play, the rest are watching. In a game, everyone expresses himself through actions. The core of a game is acting, in a simulated world or within a set of rules. Games are not about immersion - you can get immersed in a book or a movie. Immersion is just something many best games do.
I don't think it's cargo culting, as much as it's a generation of gamers who were raised with the expectation of a "progression system". I remember back when EA was ridiculed for their statement about "giving a players a sense of pride and accomplishment" regarding requiring a long grind (or big payment) to unlock the most powerful characters in a Star Wars game. I've seen people beg developers to give them something pointless to grind for because they won't play a game without rewards. I think developers know how to make fun games, but I don't think most players want fun games because they've been conditioned to want addiction simulators with meaningless rewards.
>I think developers know how to make fun games, but I don't think most players want fun games because they've been conditioned to want addiction simulators with meaningless rewards.
I have spent the last two or three years trying to find a fun android and/or console game (outside of some switch games), and I've never been able to put my finger on why the games in the app store, and many, many PC games are just not fun. But this is it.
They're not fun, they're a targeted level up system designed to be just hard enough to keep you from breezing through (until you die two or three times and can watch an ad to get a bigger gun), with level progression just slow enough to make you want to pay for experience.
They're not fun. Commander Keen and Leisure Suit Larry and Doom and Deathtrack and Hexen and The Lost Vikings and System Shock 2 and those kind of games were fun. I thought it might just be because I'm 35-45 years old and am being very 'get off my lawn' about it.
But that's not it. Those games were designed to sell because they were fun. New games, especially mobile games, are designed to be free and addicting enough to get you to spend real money.
> Commander Keen and Leisure Suit Larry and Doom and Deathtrack and Hexen and The Lost Vikings and System Shock 2
Yes, and the very first Duke Nukem [1]. So much fun! I'm getting into game design this year, and will endeavour to make pay-once, short, super fun games. (I say short, albeit with replay value - I'd hate to string you along for 100+ hours with pointless side quests)
I mean old games were designed to be addicting too, so that people would stand in the arcade and feed the machine quarters for hours. OTOH, those games were a lot faster paced/etc. I don't even think its possible to have the kind of super fast arcade level games on a touchscreen.
Which is maybe part of the problem. Old games had a joystick and two buttons. They were easy to learn, hard to master.
> Games have character levels, level ups and skill trees but why exactly? Does it make Project Warlock more fun? Certain game traits are replicated without thought.
Because simple gameplay loops like that keep people hooked to play them for longer. It's the cynical behaviorist approach to game design, and especially for online games that rely on people playing for longer times and/or paying for more content, that's a great way to extract money from players. Also, game designers are very much aware of it.
The games industry no longer designs games; They scientifically engineer games to be as addictive and profitable as possible. This process is oblivious to any concept of "fun". Just another thing obsessive capitalism ruins.
Fortunately, the independent games development scene is healthy and booming - it's the easiest time for any given person to make a game than it has ever been in the history of our civilization. Many indies are simply not concerned with making money off of it. It's more of a hobby, a creative endeavour of self-expression, with a chance of fame and fortune.
Of course, not all indies have any idea how to design games, either.
I've been playing Ultimate Doom again and it's incredible how tight the experience is, the level design, the difficulty progression (of course I'm playing in Ultra Violence). I'm using the GZDoom frontend and I didn't have to configure it either, it automatically detected the WADs from the GOG installation folder.
I am _really_ enjoying it, even though I did play it in my teenage years already. Stoked to play Doom II for the first time when I'm done.
You've been gaslighted into believing that DooM is primitive and archaic. Simply put, DooM perfected what it set out to be. No one ever bested it in the visceral, action-packed shooter category. Maybe a game will do in the future, but the path doesn't lead through denialism. You could say Quake 3 was a pinnacle of the fast, brutal first person shooter, but it was a duel game at its core.
I agree with this, which is why I have a nes classic plugged into the TV too. Everyone who uses it vs the xbone agrees its 100% a better experience. I don't have to log into an account to play, it doesn't take 10 mins to update a game, etc. Two people grab controllers and within a few seconds are shooting/fighting/whatever each other. Plus the variety is much larger.
I think a lot of the problem is the commoditization and merging of genre's along with the overwhelming dominance of a small number of game engines.
This means that a modern RPG pretty much plays the same as a strategy or shooter. Which makes everything feel like a remake of something you have already played. Particularly as the games don't really have differing artistic styles anymore either because that is more a function of how the game engine works than what texture selection or lighting effects are used.
Maybe the best way to describe it, is that modern games are "cold".
this is one of the main things drew me into fighting games. the best of everything they have to offer is concentrated into a 90 second round. you don't have to sit through 10 minute corridor sequences or grind to the endgame to actually do something cool, you can play a first to five over your lunch break and walk away completely satisfied with the experience.
Since the mid 2000s when all the suits who've never played a video game in their lives started taking over AAA game companies, they've had this weird obsession to make games as "cinematic" as they can. To match movies as much as they can. Now that I think about it, it's probably an inferiority complex (don't really know why either since video games have been surpassing movies in raw sales for years now). Hopefully with the success of Doom 2016, we'll continue to see reinvigorated focus on what mamakesde video games so great in the first place: the game play.
Nah, there is a HUGE difference between Quake/QuakeWorld and any other game (even Quake 2) and it has to do with game physics and not graphics.
Quake 3 was an attempt to get a little of it back with some results.
Basically, simplistic physics model in Quake has a special quality that lets you move effortlessly, at great speeds, as long as you are willing to spend time to learn it.
So the question is, does it have the physics?
Does it allow you to jump out of lege at huge speed only to change your mind midway and get back to your starting point? Does it allow you to jump over huge distances not normally designed for the purpose? Is it possible to exchange a little bit of your health and a rocket to fly off in the air in a carefully selected direction?
As to graphics, I don't remember anybody playing Quake competitively and using stock graphics look and feel. I have been personally using software renderer with a ridiculous mipmap setting that caused all textures to go away except for entities. It caused all enemies and entities like health boxes to stand out and be much more visible / targetable from long distances.
Aside from the game itself, the soundtrack is an amazing 43-song piece of art made by Andrew Hulshult, which has jewels like Hand Cannon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgXnz2t1KMs) or Departure to Destruction (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWnzazIvXI8). You should definitely listen to it. Also, Andrew is the new soundtrack composer for Doom, so that tells something.
If you like this vibe look up Prodeus, its in early access but pretty much everyone is giving it 10/10. It runs in stylized ~480x270 resolution and looks like what DOOM Eternal (2020) would of looked like if it was released for DOS using heavily upgraded Quake (1997) engine.
Civvie covered this one in depth, it seems to be a great game. Oh, and you can buy it at http://waste.money which is hilarious. (Edit: link seems to not lead to the steam page anymore)
If you're a fan of old school FPS, Civvie 11 is a fantastic resource to spend an evening with. His Pro Doom/Blood/Duke Nukem/Daikatana (yikes!) series are an excellent walkthrough/documentary of each game in the series.
What I miss in modern games is the unique textures that old games have. Just lookup "Sacrifice" game on steam. There's so much post-processing crap in modern games that it sucks out all the life from a game.
If you like the look of this I'd also suggest Hedon[1], built on a modern version of the Doom engine and very reminiscent of Strife in feel that it's levels try to replicate a world that feels real with shops and houses etc, combat feels really good in it more tactile than Doom and the art style/world building is very unique.
I just discovered the Pico-8. It has the retro feel but most of all, the games are awesome arcade games. They're fun but you don't feel addicted when you have to walk away from them.
Dusk is an amazing game. The gun, movement and general mechanics of the game are solid. The action is solid and the level and enemy design is great.
There are quite a few “wow” moments in the game.
For those that like these games I also recommend Amid Evil. The game is excellent and well worth a look for many of the same reasons.
Some of the other “boomer” shooters have been a bit hit and miss. Ion Fury was good but Tbh is a bit easy. prodeus is okay in bursts and wrath of aeon is solid but like the original quake can get a bit boring. Some of the other FPS games in the same vain have been "I've played it for a day and probably won't play it today".
These days I am playing Doom mods via GZDoom and there is soo much there now you could just play doom mods and never play anything else.
I tried Unreal Editor a few years ago. The engine is really impressive, there's a ton of assets, high res textures, it's easy to create a natural looking terrain, but then bringing it to life is hard work and takes skills. Everything I built looked clunky, out of place, lacked details, lighting seemed off, it was rubbish. Minecraft fixes this problem. Everyone can build good looking stuff.