Zwiffle, you say you judge games on mostly gameplay, then you go and pretty much talk about only tech aspects in your rants... =)

I thought HL2 was a great game, sense of location and atmosphere were perfect, and the gameplay was definatly not repetitive, each area had different kind of fighting etc, unlike doom3, which got old at around the end of the 2nd map. 

he judges them on how long they were in development. 

That explanation sounds like you are a math student yourself. Seriously though, measuring "good" or "bad" properties is too simple an approach in my opinion. First of all, who gets to choose which properties are relevant? Next, who decides what makes a property good or bad? And what about art? You can surely measure the build quality of something in this way, but what about taste? And finally, when you have all your properties, there's the problem of weighing them appropriately.

Frankly, I don't think that there always is a way to objectively measure quality. Surely, some things that have clear and quantifiable properties (like practical objects, or maybe even software) can be measured that way, but others, like the artistic quality of a piece of art, can not.

Btw, getting back to your example - surely a student who is good at maths would say "My math teacher is good because he teaches me a lot of new things, and I can learn more than in other classes.", whereas someone who has his or her problems with mathematics might say about that same teacher: "My math teacher is bad because his pace is too fast and I can't follow.". Both students are commenting on the same property, and obviously their arguments are entirely subjective. My original question was how one would measure quality in an objective way (or at least, that's what it should have been). 

I wasn't saying that popular equals good. And you know it. But when something is so wildly popular as the half-life franchise is, well - that's a hint people might actually like it. And that, makes it good. A whole bunch of people look at it and go "Good - me want more." Yeah, it's good. Doesn't mean I personally have to agree, but if I'm a developer or publisher, I'm going to think to myself, maybe these valve guys are on to something here.

Counterstrike did not. Honestly, who here will say that Counterstrike is a good game? One, maybe two people?
I haven't played that much CS, mostly on a LAN with some friends. But I can honestly say I've gotten more hours of fun out of that mod than I have from many full price "triple a"-projects.

Likewise, Half-Life 2 wasn't a good game. 6 years for facial animation and physics? 6 fucking years for that? The actual game development took something like 9 months I heard, and the rest of that was just tech.

You usually don't design one engine to handle just the one game. You design it to be a base for several games down the line, games you don't even know about yet. You design for versatility. And you design it to be expanded and reshaped when you have the time to do it. Procedural content, streaming content, both things coming at us looking ahead. If we can't get it in now, I wan't it to be as easy as possible when we can. I'm pulling this out of my ass, of course, but I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the next tech-cycle for valve is substantially less than six years.

OR;

Wow, HL2 content in just nine months. Those guys are good.

Take another example. UT200X. WTF? Why do they keep coming up with the same game with 2x better graphics every few years?
The same reason EA churns out new sports titles every year. It makes them money. The fans buy the latest itiration, the newcomers do the same thing. Win-win.

In the case of epic, they also get to show off the engine that is the hottest thing to license right now. Do you know why it's popular? Not just because it's got great specs. Dev teams look at epic and go "these guys have produced alot of content, really quickly, and to great acclaim. I want to do that too." The game is a product for consumers, and an ad for the engine.

Gameplay is severely lacking.
Halo's gameplay is severely lacking? Now you're just being plain wrong. The Halo gameplay is severely streamlined, and sticks very close to the story. In many ways, they are indistinguishable from eachother. You are one guy in a big conflict. You drive cars, shoot guns and bluw stuff up.

Sure, it's not rocket science, but what it sets out to do, it accomplishes. It keeps people playing the game.

What you need to understand is that not everybody is like us here on func. We're halfway into the industry, we're not joe sixpack. Joe sixpack doesn't have time for 20+ hours of engrossing storylines, he just want to have some fun. Joe sixpack doesn't care how long a game was in development, or what physics API was used to simulate the ragdoll-effect. He just goes "cool, I can kick around the dead guy!" He definitely doesn't care about pushing the envelope the way we might.

Do I wish epic and id would use the independence they've earned to make something different? Yeah, sure. That would be cool. But they are one trick ponies, as long as they chose to be. So I'm gonna get my fix from Japan, like everyone else. Wanda and the Colossus is on it's way. But in the meantime, I'm having quite alot of mainstream fun playing HL and Halo, games that might strive not for innovation, but for solid craftsmanhsip and well-formulated fun. 

Hit me with it baby.

To be honest this discussion is so exciting I wish metl had left the viagra spam uncensored. 

Check out my PANTS! 

Wanda and the Colossus

Is that what Shadow of the Colossus is called in Japan?

I saw a trailer for that game; it showed Aragorn on horseback holding Gandalf's shining sword up at the sky, and then he climbed up the side of an Oliphaunt and stabbed it in the head. Looked quite good :} 

is Fitzquake the right engine to play DM ? I assume so, but am not sure if its DM compatible.

Also, what bots ? Are omicron bots still the way to go (even without routes) or is their better bots with waypoints for newer maps now ? 

who keeps deleting my viagra ads?!?

Just kidding :) 

Zwiffle, you say you judge games on mostly gameplay, then you go and pretty much talk about only tech aspects in your rants... =)

That's because that's all there is to talk about those games. 

Prodigy SE 4 is awesome map 

oh and I would like hl2 more if it had more shooter to it and less driving and messing around with grav gun 

QUAKEWORLD is the thing for QUAKE multiplayer in the internet. Main reasons why it is so, are prediction and 72 fps server.

Use FUHQUAKE client executable.
This is included in the EQUAKE PACKAGE. The package contains a lot of other useful things too, get it from quakeworld.us.

HAVE FUN! 

http://www.quakeworld.us/?a=downloads&d=equake/ 

I <3 Boobs 

hey folks, where can I get World Craft1.6 ? 

only interested in solo play with bots, not netplay. Thats why I was interested in normal quake DM, not QW. 

with the same settings as I have for sp and omibots. It's a bit choppy, especially whenever someone dies and respawns. Any ideas how to resolve this ? 

http://www.mybarbarian.com/mb-web/video/unicorns_hi.mov 

It has been already posted, but I suppose the website has been updated... just check the end of the trailer... ;P

http://www.doommovie.com/ 

You could try my engines, I've done extensive testing with loads of bots (frogbot, omicron, qbot, reapers and zeus) in big maps to make sure it works well. I've also fixed quite a few engine crash scenarios with bots, e.g. reapers on dm3. 

And i thought the video for Lucifugum's "Dukoso 3Bepr" was the most hilariously bad D&D based video out there. How wrong i was. 

there are bots for qw too 

It all sounds a bit silly to me.

Right, it is. Assisting a Quake mod team doing free content while employed at a game company could be construed as conflict of interest (not that a Quake1 map could infinitesimally dent the sales of Quake4).

scamp is right, after mapping at work you dont really want to do that in your free time

Well, speedy, I guess you'd be the authority on what all other people think and feel. I've been fixing script bugs and making performance adjustments to the same four or five maps since I was hired. I, for one, still have map ideas of my own I want to explore, that wouldn't fit into Quake4 or Wolf.