Matthew on 3/10/2011 at 14:05
I think Dark Forces also had some kind of mouselook that you could enable with the right know-how, but again non-native. It did have that odd 'Page Up/Page Down' looking solution though.
Digital Nightfall on 3/10/2011 at 14:33
I remember hearing about mouselook in a game called Terminator: Future Shock made by none other than Bethesda, maybe a year or so before Quake 2? What I meant was that I specifically checked out Quake 2 to (and only to) try out the mouselook. :)
Malf on 3/10/2011 at 15:12
Quote Posted by Vernon
I know the multiplayer component was popular (Enemy Territory), but that mod came a long time after the game's initial release.
Sorry to be pedantic here, but RtCW shipped with multiplayer, and in my eyes, Vanilla RtCW with OSP outclassed Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory by a country mile.
Nerve Software developed the multiplayer in vanilla, and took the best ideas of Team Fortress and UT's Assault and combined them to create objective based multiplayer that in my experience, hasn't been beaten to this day.
They condensed the classes of TF down to a manageable 4 (Soldier, Engineer, Medic & Lieutenant), which on the surface, seemed like a bad idea, but actually made the focus incredibly tight.
They also didn't have an experience system in place, something that I think has now become a horrible blight on the face of FPS online gaming. You were just as good as your skills.
So there were no campaign maps, just enclosed one-offs, Beach probably being the most famous.
W:ET was developed by Splash Damage, who needlessly added a new class, Covert Ops, to make it more like TF, ruining the balance somewhat. Add on top of that the experience system that was probably the genesis of the CoD: MW one (except not persistent), and was completely overpowered at maximum XP, and all in all, you had a worse competetive game.
RtCW with OSP is still probably my favourite competitive multiplayer game to this day, and is the yardstick I use to measure all other games, and not a one has come close to recreating that sublime objective-based play in my eyes.
It's also the last game I ever played at a highly competitive level, with my clan getting to number 7 in the European Clanbase ladder at the time. Heady days :)
Volitions Advocate on 3/10/2011 at 15:19
Heretic was the first FPS game I played with an up/down look. That and Dark Forces (first game with a jump!).
Re: Wolfenstein 2009, the reviewers got everything wrong. In the context of the OP talking about ID having mostly the brainless shooter mindset, Wolfenstein is one of the great exceptions. In a way I guess I liked the raven games more than the pure ID games. Wolf 2009, Quake 4, Heretic etc. Wolf 2009 wasn't exactly system shock, but it was based on hub levels, the mission system was quite a bit like Thief DS, there were weapon upgrades, multiple paths and hidden secrets. It was a great game.
Also, am I mistaken that Brink uses idTech5? I played the free weekend a bit and I swear I saw that on the splash screen.
Also having watched all the odd themed trailers for Rage I think the big deal with idTech5 compared to the previous engines is not just the megatexturing, since that was actually introduced into idTech4 with Quake Wars, but the way they do it. It looks like the level designers and artists have the tools to paint the game down to the pixel inside the editors that Carmack built for them. I can see how this would create a huge advantage for detail. You're not loading a hundred different textures for terrain and rigid bodies that you created in 3rd party software, instead you're painting the textures in the level editor. I'm sure the engine has much more built on to it than that that is new and fancy, but that's one of the main points I saw.
lost_soul on 3/10/2011 at 15:32
I never really considered LGS games competitors to id games. They're both first person, but that's about as far as it goes. One developer made games which were more based on stealth and tactics (LGS), but the other made games which were purely about fragging the heck out of everything (id).
I've played games from both developers for over the past decade. Both types have their place... but I know there are some Thief players out there who hate Quake and surely some Quake players who would hate Thief.
I also really like RTCW. The artwork (particularly the textures) was beautiful. The main menu music was also very pretty.
I haven't played Wolfenstein 2009 yet, but I'll probably pick it up used some day.
You could have mouse look in Quake 1, but you had to type +mlook in the console and put it in a cfg for the setting to stick. I played a lot of Quake 1 online and I doubt anybody was playing by using the keyboard to look up/down. Quake 1/2 had the best implementation of CTF ever. Random powerups would spawn around the map for things like increased damage, increased speed, regeneration, and shield. All players were also equipped with a grappling hook.
Q3a ruined CTF because it shipped with such a bland mode with no powerups and no grapple hook.
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I wonder how long it will be before the Doom 3 source is released... They said they wouldn't work on it until Rage was done, but I'm sure Rage has gone gold by now. Then we will have a stealth game like Thief which will belong to the community and remain fixable and able to be enhanced forever!
Renault on 3/10/2011 at 16:19
Interesting how Looking Glass went fully 3D (System Shock) nearly 2 years before id Software did (Quake). Not long after, Sean Barrett was consulting with John Carmack for help when creating the Dark Engine renderer. Obviously LGS was more interested in "the game" itself while id focused on "the tech." I suppose that speaks volumes about the state of gaming in in the past decade or so since LGS is long gone and id is still thriving and bigger than ever.
That said, even though I love LGS games, I've also always been sort of an id fanboy. Rage absolutely looks worth picking up.
lost_soul on 3/10/2011 at 17:21
Yes, Carmack said it best. Quake was like a sport. We didn't play it for the story or character development. It was like a game of basketball. It is a shame that Doom 3 had such limited multiplayer. 4 players? Come on!
demagogue on 3/10/2011 at 18:05
I've been watching the Rage trailers and liking what I'm seeing. I just love how open and expansive the environments are. They're indulgent with it; not a bad thing. Gameplay still looks hammed, but that was expected.
Of course my biggest experience with id has been building for Dark Mod. After playing with Dromed for a long time, I was really happy about how nice & open id4 is to work with... If I have an idea, I can write a script or even go right into the source code (TDM's, but Doom3's source is coming soon enough!). You just can't under-sell how nice that is. Seriously, I wanted a "zone style" ambient sounds like Dromed did so well (one of the things I missed from it), so I literally just wrote a script to do it myself, and I could do it! That made a deep impression on me.
Some people even tried to dissuade me because it might not work, but with an open system, you can just go in and do it and no one can stop you, haha. Really sold me on the whole "open source" ethos. On those grounds, id is a heroic company for me now, especially after all the frustration with the Dark Engine's source (at least not LGS's fault). Id isn't so great for the actual games for me; but the for tech & openness, absolutely.
EvaUnit02 on 3/10/2011 at 18:54
Quote Posted by Volitions Advocate
Also, am I mistaken that Brink uses idTech5? I played the free weekend a bit and I swear I saw that on the splash screen.
Nope, it uses a modified version of the IdTech 4 Quake Wars fork. (Same developer, Splash Damage).
Prey was quite an underrated game as well, not perfect by any means (eg the flying vehicle sections were terrible; the post-death mini-game was really annoying; and the plot line was cookie cutter generic for the first two acts). It was made by Human Head, who were basically the Hexen/Heretic team from Raven who left when the latter developer was bought out by Activision in the late '90s.
Prey 2 looks awesome:- non-linear RPG-like character building; Deus Ex-like multiple approaches to missions; seamless blending of visceral action with Mirror's Edge-like First Person view parkour and a natural feeling 1st person cover system.
june gloom on 3/10/2011 at 21:52
I hate the fact that I'm agreeing with lost_soul here- but with a caveat.
I don't believe that id and LGS were necessarily competing with each other. id makes fast-paced murder simulators with a lot of blood, biomechs and boomsticks. LGS traditionally made slower-paced games with more emphasis on exploration and survival. id's formula changed very little from the beginning of the 90s to the end of the 90s; LGS made games with different conceits, so Underworld wasn't like System Shock wasn't like Thief.
So why did Doom beat out System Shock in sales? Simple. Doom was popular because id had already created a wide, established fanbase through widespread shareware distribution of Wolf3D and other games, but also because of John Romero. He was like a rockstar, always keeping up with id's fans, and going to some ridiculous lengths to bring Doom to the mainstream- up to and including meeting with Microsoft and getting Bill Gates himself to star in a video using Doom to showcase DirectX.
System Shock came out months after Doom, didn't have the same kind of intuitive controls or fast engine, and was more complex overall than the slick, fast, streamlined Doom. It also didn't have a John Romero cheerleading the shit out of it. It got its fans, yes, but it never reached the same kind of widespread appeal- or controversy.
