june gloom on 4/8/2007 at 19:28

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romero's a toolbox. post-daikatana he learned some humility and he's a nice enough guy, but yeah, a lot of his ideas were rather high-schooly. it's like he never grew up past 17.

that said, i think doom probably would've benefited from all the stuff tom hall came up with. and while i enjoyed doom 3's story (it's not THAT bad, if a bit cliche, and at least its delivered in a manner that appeals to me) i can't help but think that the game would've benefited a LOT if it were a proper exploration game instead of the bullshit linear thing it turned out to be.

ulukai, i think you're letting your idea of what doom turned out to be colour your opinion of what doom could have been. like i said, if doom had been made the way tom hall wanted it (slower and more SSish) and not the way carmack wanted it, we'd probably be discussing doom and not system shock.

june gloom on 4/8/2007 at 20:17

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i agree, but that's not the point of the discussion, now is it? ;p

june gloom on 4/8/2007 at 22:29

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trust me. lurking there has taught me to invest in a salt mine.

Hemebond on 5/8/2007 at 06:01

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Hahaha. I remember that quote now. Classic. He's not wrong though. Or wasn't when he said that. Story didn't apply to his game. Or most games where the focus wasn't on story (adventure games).

Even if Doom had had an awesome amazing story, it still would have been the same game.

june gloom on 5/8/2007 at 10:16

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i found what gabe said about exploration (not non-linearity as i'd previously said, which can be a separate thing.)

"What we try to do is get people through as much entertainment as possible. This is an argument I have with Warren Spector; he builds a game that you can play through six different times. So that means that people pay for the game, but don't get to play five sixths of the game, which I feel is a mistake. You spend all of this time to build stuff that most players will never ever ever see, and I feel we try to maximise... I mean, I understand the exploration impulse and we try to make people happy doing that because it's an important part. Exposition, exploration, combat and so on are things that we need to make sure are present, but if only one per cent of your customers see this cool thing that takes five per cent of your development budget, that's not a good use of resources."

((http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=65391) source)

i think he's full of shit. what that boils down to is "exploration is a waste of time, linearity is good."

ironically enough, if you wanted to get ahead in system shock you had to explore EVERYWHERE. that's half the fun of exploration- covering all the territory available to you. i think what gabe was thinking of was deus ex, where there were often at least 2 ways of doing something. but gabe uses a faulty argument where he says that a player has the potential of missing 5/6ths of the game. first of all, i'd call that a bad game. second, i can't think of any GOOD exploration-heavy game that locked you into a set path once you've chosen it with no way to turn back (which, btw, ironically makes it not that exploratory.) third, if a game was good enough to warrant a replay, the player would likely choose a separate path just to see what happened.

[edit] robin walker said something after that that i also take issue with.

Playtesting drives a lot of this. Often, you'll watch a playtest and something incredibly cool happens, and the first question you ask afterwards is how can we make sure all of our customers see that? They'll say 'the gunship nearly crashed on me when I shot it down and I had to jump to the side to dodge it and that was incredibly cool'. How can we make sure that happens to almost everyone?

again, that boils down to "scripting is great, let's kill any sense of replay value by making the same thing happen every goddamn time."