Tim made some great maps, particularly in the Q1/Q2 eras (although Jacquays was their best mapper in the latter), but he's also the guy who said "the kids want CoD gameplay so that's what we're gonna do" a few years back. A huge part of responsibility for the rot at id can probly be fairly laid at his door. 

I blame whoever thought adding car racing to RAGE was a good idea. That person. Directly. 

I actually blame the one who added guns to a perfectly good racing game. 

whilst daydreaming about that garden shed project he's been looking forward too 

highlights and enemy pickups from enemies are distracting. Some of the weapons sound weak as shit. The mancubus sucks. The cyberdemon sucks 

by the way the mancubus remake was a million times better in ss3 also he was way bigger. Doom 4 feels really scaled down 

 

"Willits has, for a long time now, come across as your typical middle-aged game dev veteran who lost interest in gaming over ten years ago, ..."
Yep. He's a typical corporate type as some have mentioned.

Romero got American in, who was from the modding community if I recall. He also loved his abstract design - as can be seen in his Alice games. His levels are my favourite levels in Quake. He's the sort you want to take in. But id software is, pardon the pun, doomed. They will never innovate ever again under Bethesda. Everyone who knows business, knows that innovation comes from small business, such as when id software started. It was just a few blokes who loved D&D, Evil Dead, Aliens, Gaming and rock music. My sort of fellows.

I remember in the "Masters of Doom" book, that id recruited two corporate types to keep the business end whilst they developed. They were always pushing to prosecute people who reverse-engineered their games or released mods/maps for them. It started with Wolfenstein 3D. Wasn't Willits one of those?

"I'd love to see the Lovecraft themes explored a little more and keep the abstraction."
This. I want to see non-euclidean geometry and dirty, gritty, stinky, rusty places. Multiple headed monsters seen in no other place. Trees made out of bodies. Yummy. 

Everyone who knows business, knows that innovation comes from small business

If you're implying that innovation comes only from small businesses, then this statement is false in many cases. It's also true in many cases, but that doesn't matter. 

Well you've emphasised the word "only" in your own text, a word which I didn't use at all. Pedantic? Or just one of Willits' best buddies? xD 

 

 

Innovation in gaming is so hard to achieve now, that the big AAA+ developers can't take the risk of doing something innovative in case it flops, only the indie's can do more innovative stuff but of course they don't have the budget to do it properly and we just get some pixel art crud that has some unique idea behind it. I would hope it's the mid level player that could have a decent budget, but be small enough to want to make a big impact, and they won't do that with another sandbox clone, or realistic shooter clone, or whatever it current in gaming. So they push the envelop for something a bit different, like GSC with Stalker.

I don't want id to be innovative, I want them to be the opposite, to be old skool. Or does that actually count as innovation now? That's what everyone probably wants from them. To make old skool Doom but with current technology.

Despite that, Rage had some innovation in, more than most games in 2011. In fact, can anyone name a more innovative AAA+ title released that year? Namely the innovation being the combination of driving/shooting and the painted texture thing, whatever that was officially called. Sure they weren't major things, but they were more than most games could claim. Were they successful? No, most players disliked the driving, probably the same players that never play racing games anyway so no matter how good id did the driving, it was going to fail. It could have been better though, only 2 races in the whole game were actually necessary. The texture thing also failed because they fucked up the drivers and had the major texture popping issues, that 4 years later is still not fixed. Plus I suspect it took them so fucking long to paint everything by hand that it wasn't worth it.

Anyway Rage was a great game. You can say all these things about Willits, but he can't be that bad if he was part of Rage. Doom4 was a great game also. Not without problems, but I'm yet to play a perfect game. Quake4 and Wolfenstein 2009 were both good as well, old skool style games, sure Raven made them but id had plenty of input I'm sure.

They just have to learn from their mistakes from Rage. Don't go and market it as a game with story and rpg. If id want to make a game as an rpg, it has to be as big and expansive as Bethesda's other games Fallout and Elder Scrolls, which Doom is never going to be. So they better avoid that completely. But if they can do all the weapon upgrading stuff, maybe the crafting (building) like Rage had, player upgrades as well which Rage lacked. Then just don't make it quite so linear, and don't clip everything.

But Rage was one of the best looking games of all time at it's time of release, I'd probably say top 5 easily, the art was fantastic. The combat was all fun. If they do those things so well again and just don't screw up the rpg elements, I'm thinking Doom 4 will be fantastic. If it'll be financially successful is another thing entirely, since the media and general gamers are morons - they have to be when you rank a game like Rage under 8/10 on metacritic. 

 

pixel art crud

How dare you.

Btw Rage's "painted texture thing" wasn't innovative in a gamey way, it was just some graphics tech thing that meant nothing to 99% of players who just looked at the graphics and went "cool" in the same way they went "cool" to every other really good looking FPS they played that year. 

Megatexture killed modding on idtech5. 

http://i.imgur.com/zV4qk.jpg

One of the best looking games of all time at it's time of release, I'd probably say top 5 easily, the art was fantastic. 

Kona's post is a whole other thing to address, so I might do so after work tonight if I remember to.

I just wanted to note that Willits was a mapper from the Doom community who's work was picked up for the Master Levels, and sat with Romero during Quake from December 95 till June 96. He was assisted by his sister Theresa Chasar (her initials can be found in e2m7).

McGee knew Carmack from his mechanic work, and expressed interest in game development, joining in time to do about a third of the levels in Doom 2.

Neither has a "corporate" background. They're both mappers who became general directors. 

...is the guy who said this, don't forget:

I think that... we live in, it may be good or it may be bad, but we live in a Call of Duty era. That�s just the way it is. And that franchise has more impact on the industry than I think people realise. You just have to kind of go with the flow.

(Source) 

Yep I agree with your first 3 paragraphs. Megatexture was innovative, but as you say, they took a risk and it didn't work out. I'm not fond of story in action fps games, unless of course it's action/puzzle like HL2.

"Doom4 was a great game also."
I think you mean DOOM 3? I have to disagree, I think it was a very dark affair that used jump-scare excessively. It pushed its crap story in your face, and used limited monsters because it couldn't handle too many on screen at once. You originally had to keep swapping torch/gun. Its only real tech innovation was realtime lighting, which looks absolutely ugly. Talk about dark edged shadows. Even a blur applied to the edges as they did in F.E.A.R. would've been good enough. Not only that, but they totally removed lightmaps from the engine so that you couldn't even make a custom map with baked and realtime lighting (as in HL2). They realised their mistake and brought them back in Rage, which by that time we had soft shadowing and other lighting methods. Still, Rage does look good, but the gameplay is mostly boring.

Anyway, I'm actually looking forward to DOOM 4. I've not been this excited for a triple-a game since..., actually I think its been too long. I was looking forward to Bioshock: Infinite, but was very disappointed that it was a PC-infused, CoD inspired sack of shite. For people who liked Infinite, ask them what they liked about it, and all they can say is it looked amazing. That shows you how shallow people are.

Do you know what? I might've confused Willits with Jay Wilbur. 

You originally had to keep swapping torch/gun

This was actually a good design decision and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. 

OTP: yeah that's one famous screenshot and texture that was plastered everywhere during Rage discussion. Not exactly in indication of what the game really looked like though.

The game was more like this: http://wallpaper.pickywallpapers.com/2560x1440/rage-landscape.jpg

The low res textures were common, but when you're actually playing the game you never get close enough to really notice them. Only in the first 30mins when you're still judging the environment, do you get up close in that shit and think "this texture's a bit shit up close". After that you just play the game and forget about it, just like the texture issues. In fact I played the game for about an hour before I finally quit and looked up how to get rid of the texture popping. I was that immersed and didn't want to quit.

BTW I said "cool" a lot more times than any other game in 2011. Not that I've played them all yet; still have Crysis 2, Deus ex, Skyrim to play. 

Yeah I meant Doom3. Everyone has their own tastes on whether they liked it or not. But the game itself was only part of the experience for me, once you play all the mods, which there are heaps and the mission pack, I ended up liking the game even more. The cheap monster closets, fake scares and other things people complained about weren't used so much. And a faster movement tweak improved it a lot.

Same happened with Crysis, good game at the time. Once I played the all the many mods, it became a great game. 

I think megatexturing is great. I recently played the new Wolfenstein and there was nothing wrong with how it looked. More games should use it. Tiling = bad

I finally bought Rage when I could get it for cheap and it was way, way better than I expected due to all the negative reviews and comments I seen. 

Actually here's some comparisons of buildings between 2011 games. Tell me Rage doesn't look just about an entire generation ahead of those other games...

Rage building: http://images6.alphacoders.com/338/338798.png

SS3: https://xboxoz360.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/serious-sam-3-bfe-screenshots-oxcgn-17.jpg

LA Noire: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71XaigyZfrL._SL1280_.jpg

Spiderman: http://www.animationmagazine.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/The-Amazing-Spider-Man-game-post-2.jpg

Fear3: http://media1.gameinformer.com/imagefeed/screenshots/FEAR3/FEAR3_360_Point_Man_POV_Village_Helicopter_Destroying_House.jpg

Hard reset: https://www.overclockers.ua/games/hard-reset/02-big-hard-reset.jpg

Section 8: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5d/Section8prejudice.jpg