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 

it was fun while it lasted, sadly it didn't last long enough and the last couple of levels were really abrupt. The last level was a massive disappointment, it felt unfinished.

Wolf TNO is an excellent game. I have enjoyed it quite a lot, there were a few moments when I felt the game was being unfair, you're pretty squishy. The moon levels were the best in the game but didn't last long enough, I was hoping to do a lot more moonwalking. I felt like I was in a James Bond game, it was incredible. 

Congrats OTP you've out-moroned yourself. Spotting some blurry textures very close up always was, and still is, the most obvious and pointless straw-clutching of any anti-Rage argument. Every game has it's graphical flaws and the minor ones in Rage were completely nullified by it's general graphical quality.

TBH the screenshot that Kona posted isn't in the top 100 scenes found in Rage, and it still makes his point. 

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_pSwKe_alqE/VcpiiPoo85I/AAAAAAAAAcg/1Zf6TVeqkMQ/s1600/ragescreen2.jpg

Fifth is completely right about the ending tho.

P.S. by "screenshot Kona posted", I meant his 2nd screenshot with the long list of games. The 1st one is completely on point. 

Rage was an incredibly beautiful game when it was released, I was pretty surprised because I had the 360 version it looked fantastic still. There were some issues I still had such as the skybox being static and some of the environments could have used a little more "life" or motion (windy effects, tumbleweed, moving scenery etc).
Overall though I was impressed. I had expected that id would have added something to the end of the game so that it felt finished but I don't even think the DLC tied the game up properly (I never played it so correct me if I am wrong) 

Nah. The DLC was nice -- both the added stuff as well as "ultra nightmare" difficulty -- but didn't fix the ending. 

How should have Rage ended? (In the Rage thread, perhaps?) 

the dlc was great, well worth $5. but it had nothing to do with the main plot. it did have a slightly more appropriate spike in difficulty at the end with the ship battle, although by that point you know you're nearing the end so wasting every bit of awesome ammo you had left. those shotgun rockets were my choice. 

Man this thread is getting off topic, but it is still orbiting around the recent works of id, so...

I don't think Rage is a bad game, but I do think it is a lower point for id. As for innovation, I didn't see any with Rage. The technology was neat, but the driving/shooting combo had been seen, recently, with Borderlands, and previously with Halo. On top of that, the driving wasn't rewarding (the sounds alone made it difficult to enjoy) and the vehicle combat was awkward. I appreciate that id was trying to broaden their horizons, but you could cut vehicles in all forms from Rage and its quality wouldn't decrease, at least as far as my experiences went. It was ultimately filler, and a chore at times.

Rage looked great, and it felt good too. The shooting was responsive, the AI and animations blended together well... I loved the pirouette the Authority guys did if you decapitated them with a pulse round. But onetruepurple's image isn't as deceptive as has been suggested. Yes, it is blurry. That isn't the issue. It's a decal of a system of pipes with junctions, flow controls, and a switch of some sort. Just pasted onto the world. It doesn't matter how blurry or crisp that is, that looks bad, and is inconsistent with the overall aesthetic. Have an example of a similar issue, from Battlefield 3: http://i.imgur.com/IGOi1jL.jpg Note the red... Cinderblock? Lego piece? It clearly has geometry, but it is a very 2d image. It doesn't belong and once you notice it, you can't stop noticing it. I had a similar problem with the 3d assets being reduced to borderline spray paint decals in Rage (and the cardboard shrubbery which didn't seem to match the world at all).

Rage is beautiful. But not all of it is, and because it is beautiful, those hiccups, bad calls, and other issues are far more stark. Rage is _amazing_ at vistas. I think it would've been well suited for an RTS or Diablo clone, something where you look at a bigger picture at all times.

As for its ending, well, I don't think it had one. It smells strongly of id being told to wrap it up. You get a bit of a ramp up in theme as you are directly confronting the Authority, but it never amounts to more than some fights in hallways, and a brief tiny arena fight, that I thought was just another encounter. Then I hit a switch and got a Steam achievement. I hadn't even used a BFG round. No, the game plainly wasn't done. They didn't build all of the Subway city with its new NPCs just to hit you with a few more missions and send you to the final wave. The whole thing screams for larger ideas, and practically demands it.

As for other games that year, well we had Dark Souls, Brink (yeah the execution sucked, but I'm talking about ideas), and Modern Warfare 3 (the Strike Package system greatly expanded the player roles in MP and opened the game up without infringing on the core style).

Honestly, I'd buy another Rage, if they cut the minigames, the driving (unless they made it compelling), and focused on giving us detailed large spaces with more of Nelno's AI and Carmack's 60hz shooting. Give me 10 hours of the Dead City and the various clan hangouts.

Oh and here is something I never hear people bring up regarding Rage, good or bad. The stealth. Crouch walk, use a crossbow, headshot the last guy in a group when he is out of sight. You can go a long way, unnoticed, if you do that. That is very rewarding.

Almost as rewarding as two turrets in that creepy brewery.

As for Doom 4 - it doesn't need to be like the originals, I just don't want it to suck. I want more good games to play, and this flat combat where you regain health and ammo by watching animations with monsters doesn't do anything for me. I'm also tired of hearing id talk about how fast it is, when it plays slower than the average Advanced Warfare match. Frankly I think they should try again at Rage, or do a new IP. Stop using the reputation of old games they don't seem to understand, and try something of their own. 

 

"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. "

that's a fucking weird thing to see considering your company invented fps and probably perfected them. 

Game dev should be "ok let's design some awesome gameplay ideas on paper then figure out the tech we need to develop to realise this".

Instead id would go "Ok, Carmack is working on some cool stuff that tickles his fancy or whatever, so let's see how that pans out and then figure out what sort of game we can bang out that uses all that".

Carmack is therefore both the hero, and the villain, in the grand saga that is the rise and fall of id.