

Dear John Carmack. - swah
http://iloapp.quelsolaar.com/blog/news?Home&post=88

======
5hoom
I will agree with one thing from the article, he's _John freakin' Carmack_.

This is a man who has been pushing the boundaries of realtime graphics since
Wolfenstein3D. We owe him a lot, and I think he has earned the right to work
on whatever project he damn well chooses. People seem to imagine all the
amazing things he _could_ have done with his time _while glossing over the
amazing things he has done right here, right now_.

No, Rage is not the panacea of interactive entertainment. It is, however, a
stunning showcase of some amazing new technologies in the form of a fairly
conventional shooter. It is what it is, don't like it, don't buy it.

Nowdays, anytime an id game is mentioned you can't help but be overwhelmed by
the "id games are teh suck!" noise. Fine. Don't buy them. But concocting some
conspiracy about Carmack being held hostage by the artists or whatever is just
nonsense.

He has a team of artists who help realise the (visual) potential of the
awesome new tech he has developed. The gameplay itself comes second. Heresy, I
know, but this has been the pattern for a number of releases and if the id
team are happy with that then more power to them.

No gun to anyones head.

~~~
ary
> He has a team of artists who help realise the (visual) potential of the
> awesome new tech he has developed. The gameplay itself comes second. Heresy,
> I know, but this has been the pattern for a number of releases and if the id
> team are happy with that then more power to them.

What it really comes down to is that id games are basically showcases for
their latest engine tech. The licensing income from the engines (which they
call idTech if I recall) probably overshadows the games within a year of
release.

~~~
yannickt
I don't think they license engines anymore. I just hope their tech makes it
into Fallout 4 or whatever Bethesda (which is now under the same corporate
umbrella as id) ends up calling it.

~~~
wtallis
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech>

Still being licensed, just with less demand, and with the new restriction that
games developed with id Tech have to be published through Bethesda Softworks.
id Tech 4 is due for a GPL source code release sometime in the next few
months.

~~~
reidmain
Carmack definitely mentioned that they were not going to license id Tech 5 to
companies that aren't being published by Bethesda.

All existing licenses they probably have to continue supporting because of the
contracts that were signed before they were bought by Bethesda.

~~~
phaus
I really love most of the games they make, but Bethesda is a terrible company
and lately they have been actively attempting to destroy the game industry.
The only thing keeping Id software relevant is their ability to create amazing
graphics engines. They haven't made a truly memorable game since Quake 3
Arena. John Carmack designs 3d engines, not video games. If Bethesda is
restricting Id software's ability to license their engine, then Id software is
being left to die. I had high hopes for Rage, I watched all of John's
interviews and almost believed that this game would put them back on the map.
Unfortunately when it released it was just like doom 3, a good game released
in a market that is flooded with phenomenal games.

~~~
yannickt
Why do you say that Bethesda is a terrible company? They always struck me as
one of the few in the game industry that sort of "get it".

~~~
phaus
Their attitude towards the game industry in general. They have awesome
developers who continue to make some of my favorite games. Unfortunately the
people who manage the company don't understand the industry. They routinely
make stupid trollish decisions. Here are a few examples.

\- They signed a contract with Interplay, allowing the original creators of
Fallout to make an MMO based on the Fallout franchise. As soon as the deal was
inked, Bethesda regretted it and proceeded to do everything they could to
delay the game's release. Then they cited the fact that Interplay promised to
have the game finished by a certain date and used this as a basis for suing
them.

\- They tried to claim in court that the original creators of Fallout entered
into a licensing agreement with the new owners not to make a game based on
Fallout, but a completely different game having nothing to do with the
franchise that just so happens to use the exact same name.

\- As stated above, they are not allowing Id software to license their engine
to anyone that doesn't publish their game through Bethesda. This is idiotic
because as I stated above, the only thing that Id software is known for these
days is for creating awesome 3d engines. Their games just aren't as good as
they used to be.

\- They are trying to claim that any games using the words "elder", or
"scrolls" are deliberate violations of their intellectual property rights.
Notch's game "scrolls" isn't even a competitor to anything Bethesda is working
on, yet they are trying to sue a small developer out of existence.

\- They claim that their game "The Elder Scrolls" is commonly known by it's
fan base as "scrolls." This is a load of crap and I'm pretty sure that
practically no one is referring to any of their games as "scrolls." The PC
community commonly refers to the franchise as TES (The Elder Scrolls) and if
they ever refer to it as anything else, it is normally by the episode's name
(Daggerfall, Skyrim, etc.)

Disclaimer: I don't play Minecraft and I could care less about Scrolls. I just
dislike it when software companies adopt selfish, cowardly practices in order
to stifle innovation.

------
kennymeyers
This article is so full of incendiary bullshit, I'm surprised it even got on
the front page.

Some of the most critically acclaimed games, as well as highest selling games,
have stories.

For example: Grand Theft Auto 3. Final Fantasy VII. Ico. Metal Gear Solid.
Arkham Asylum. Mass Effect. Dragon Age. Dark Souls. Demon Souls. Starcraft.
Starcraft II. Modern Warfare. World of Warcraft.

Do you know what else made these games stand out? Art direction.

Give me a break.

~~~
brianobush
Yes, these games made it big and were good, but did they really push
boundaries and invent new styles of play? No, they are just a story with an
engine - the OP is talking about JC going off and doing something "different."

~~~
potatolicious
You're not serious.

Grand Theft Auto 3? The grand-daddy of open-world gameplay? It even gave birth
to an entire _genre_ of clones.

World of Warcraft? _Didn't invent a new style of play_? They took Evercrack
and distilled it into pure, fine weapons-grade MMORPGing!

Metal Gear Solid? Didn't have an _incredibly_ unique (and much cloned, and
much parodied) style of play? Whose story and art direction is so famous that
today we have people running around conventions with big exclamation marks
over their heads?

Ditto Mass Effect - whose conversational mechanics practically redefined how
all games do it today?

Arkham Asylum? Whose unprecedented combination of unique art style, stealth
mechanics, pitch-perfect voice acting, investigative gameplay, and open-world
format was _widely_ lauded by both players and critics?

Oh yeah, those games. I'm sure the stories were not at all core to the games'
success. It's all the mechanics, I'm sure.

~~~
brianobush
Fortunately, I haven't played a single game you mentioned. So I can be serious
and totally off base at the same time. However, I have played games by JC and
they are more of the same. Hoping his next gig isn't Rage++, but something
_new_

------
ja2ke
Carmack on Rage in his own words, when giving the QuakeCon 2011 keynote (most
important bit is probably after the ellipses):

"If you've seen me I've been spending a lot of time over there [at the demo
stations] just watching people playing, generally with a big old grin on my
face.

"We had so much that we set out to do on this that was different than what we
had done before. Id had been almost a stereotype of what you do - first person
shooter, run and gun, corridors, monsters jumping out at you, this type of
thing. We invented this genre and we followed it for a long ways, but people
thought that was all that we were doing.

"And with Rage we set out to be really pretty ambitious, to do a lot of things
that we had never done before, and in hindsight knowing that it took six
years, we would look back and say, 'Maybe we shouldn't have been quite as
ambitious, maybe we should have done a few more of the things we had plenty of
experience doing,' but in the end everybody gets the benefit of... we picked
hard battles, we fought all of them, and in the end we did a really damn good
job on it.

[...]

"It really is probably the most enjoyable id game, from my perspective, that
we've ever made. I've played all of our games to degrees, but I was never one
of the people who could spend eight hours deathmatching. I know there's a lot
of you out there, but that was never kind of my take on our games.

"The pacing on Rage allows us to go ahead and have a game where you have
moments of abject terror and intensity, and it's nicely balanced by the areas
where you're going through, you're exploring, you're talking in town and doing
these things. And we learned a lot through this process. By no means are we
ready to be stood up next to Skyrim or something as an adventure game --
that's not what we're doing -- but it is clear at this point that there are
beneficial things we can add to the gameplay experience, where we take
everything that was fun and good about classic id games, and you can do these
other things that add additional layers to it, that don't take anything away."

(Watch the keynote at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28> )

Carmack's take on his own game seems to be a very very far cry from the parent
article's "blame the artists!" whinging. It sounds from what he says about his
own take on the game, and probably more importantly from how genuinely excited
he seems up on stage, that Rage's mixing up the tried and true id gameplay
formula was, personally for him, an exhilarating breath of fresh air.

------
staunch
1\. Carmack stopped making games for us PC gamers and started making games for
the true mass market: casual console gamers. Rage is a great competitor to
Halo or Call of Duty or whatever.

2\. He left a huge void in the world of FPS gaming. The "best" FPS games today
(Battlefield 3, Call of Duty) are graphically beautiful, watered down, crap
for console gamers. Their actual game play sucks.

Quake1 Netquake Deathmatch/CTF/Clan Arena/Rocket Arena is still more intense
and more a test of skill than any other game to follow in the ~13 years since
it was created.

Creating a modern replacement (for no other reason really than fixing a few
minor issues and bringing in new players) is on my list of Things To Do.

~~~
palish
> It's one of my fantasies to work on this.

Then why don't you?

No, really, why don't you? Right now.

<http://nehe.gamedev.net>

<http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/singlepage/bgnet.html>

<http://developer.nvidia.com/physx>

These are the (free) tools that I used to build something very close to Quake.
If a dummy like me can, then so can you.

And if it's your fantasy, then you owe it to yourself to make it your reality.
Go achieve what I didn't.

~~~
staunch
I'm living out my top-choice fantasy already: working on my web startup.
Gaming is a secondary love, but if no one else gets around to it I definitely
will.

~~~
palish
DaVinci tackled a dozen fantasies pretty much simultaneously.

I think you're more capable than you give yourself credit for.

~~~
burgerbrain
That's like saying that somebody should be pretty good at physics because
Einstein was. Juggling lots of ideas at once was pretty much Leonardo da
Vinci's thing.

~~~
palish
Discouraging people from having confidence in themselves (even when that
confidence is unrealistic) is one of the biggest tragedies brought about by
modern-day mediums such as HN et al.

I'd rather strike out a dozen times than watch from the stands.

------
grannyg00se
Excuse me but how is this person the authority on what games are and are not.

"Many games designers think its their job to tell stories, but games isn't a
story medium, they should go write books or make films."

Have you heard of Sierra? King's Quest? Or maybe Legend of Kyrandia? Or in the
FPS genre, Half Life? Or the Deus Ex trilogy?

These are all games in which the story has stayed with me much longer than the
game mechanics.

~~~
aw3c2
If you are interested in game design I highly recommend Warren Spector's
master class on Video Games and Digital Media. In his first lecture he talks
about how eg those point and click adventure games are no games to some
extend. Highly interesting and thought provoking.

------
jhermsmeyer
So poorly written, I find it hard to take seriously.

tl;dr Make fun games, not pretty ones.

The problem is that it is never obvious when mechanics make a game great, and
when art direction does. See Bioshock for the latter. See something like
Everquest for the former (and which was later eclipsed by a game with better
mechanics AND art direction). Great games are rare. You need both of the
above, and more.

~~~
panza
> So poorly written, I find it hard to take seriously.

English is not the author's primary language.

------
babebridou
> I don't even feel the need to save my progress when I play because I know
> rather just replay it next time.

As an amateur game designer, this sentence hits home like none other. This is
the embodiment of the fine line between a short-lived game and one that will
stay in history books. Quake, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D had it for me. Starcraft,
Super Mario Bros or Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo had it for others. When you
enjoy every single second and wish you could do it again the minute after,
then you know you have a true immortal game in front of you.

One of my prominent design patterns when I try to work on games is to focus on
very elementary satisfaction and a promess that doing it once more will still
make the player smile. On FPS games for example, a cool and straightforward
way to achieve that is to design levels so that they would work in all of
single player, cooperative and deathmatch modes. Unfortunately, such good
practices were lost in translation when we entered the third millenium and the
era of in-game cinematics.

------
z92
Since 90s John Carmack wrote games for hardware planning two years in the
future. During his planning and development stage, those games were barely
playable on standard gaming machines of the time. But he correctly knew that
by the time these games will be released, hardware will get two to four times
faster.

Thus for long he was the fist to come up with games that demonstrated the full
capabilities of new hardwares. This formula worked until around mid 2000s when
suddenly processors weren't getting the yearly speed boost as usual. Doom3 was
it's first casualty. It was designed for a hardware that never appeared in
market. Game designers had to trim down on-screen characters to make the game
playable and released it late.

And rest is what we see now. That's my understanding of the situation.

~~~
5hoom
While I would agree that Doom3 was a casualty of the effect you outline, most
of the stuff Carmack is working on now is very much within the realm of
current & future hardware.

The megatexture tech is a clever use of 'clipmaps' or virtual mipmaps and runs
on current-gen hardware. They are currently looking at a sparse voxel octree
technique to create a megatexture-like (theoretically)infinite LOD system for
geometry. This is also intended to be used on current (or near future)
hardware.

A lot of the graphics techniques used by id aren't invented by Carmack, his
genius is making them run in realtime on consumer computers. And yes it can be
a guessing game :)

------
83457
On a related topic, the author's game LOVE is worth checking out -- a very
evolutionary and programmer oriented (no surprise here) approach to game
development. Check out this demo a few years ago of the tools he created and
of the game. I haven't followed the game in over a year and when I played it
was a bit broken and made me lose my vision for a few days but still worth
checking out. Reminiscent of Minecraft actually and released around the same
time.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPIA2g8T6Hw>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-A8xvFKaRA>

~~~
walrus
> made me lose my vision for a few days

What?

~~~
83457
The visual style is such that it looks like a painting viewed through a sand
storm through a camera with a lens smeared with vaseline. It looks amazing
initially but literally is painful to look at for any significant amount of
time. I think the developer essentially takes very basic geometry at low
resolution then layers on graphical affects.

You may think that looking at the gameplay demo that the game was simply
recorded at low resolution but that is not the case. Bump the video to 720p
and full screen then that is actually what it looked like at the time. Not
sure if it has changed since the last time I played.

<http://quelsolaar.com/love/screen_shots.html>

~~~
jamii
Love is beautiful in still shots but the actual game gives me motion-sickness.
Even Mirrors Edge, which is renowned for being vomit-inducing, didn't have
that effect on me. I think it's because the background just won't stay still.

------
petercooper
This article definitely puts the random thoughts I was having tonight after
seeing Rage into words.

In the as-close-to-an-id-biography-as-you'll-get _Masters of Doom_ , Carmack's
preference for avoiding story and focusing on industry-busting gameplay and
technology is stressed many times, yet something does seem to have changed in
this regard since Doom 3. In terms of blowing the competition's efforts away,
Rage isn't a Doom, Quake, Commander Keen or even a Quake 2.

------
frou_dh
The RAGE tech and artistry is great, but my opinion of the game is cooling as
I play it. The character seems to essentially be a dogsbody courier who
sometimes gets to shoot things.

Edit: Good snippet from the Ars review:

> The sense that gamers are being trolled extends to many of the missions.
> Some of them go so far as to force you to drive to a location, hit a button,
> and then drive back to tell someone you hit a button.

------
wmf
An interesting perspective. The industry needs some people to blaze new trails
and other people to pave the successful trails into roads. A really successful
person like Carmack could do either if he chose to; it seems like he's happy
with his current role of engine development. Would he be more effective
designing new game mechanics? It's not clear.

------
jilebedev
Off-topic: I could not click back in Firefox - I was redirected to the current
page. While I felt the points in the article were well stated and poignant,
the 'forcible no BACK' feature left a sour taste in my mouth. I won't be
returning.

~~~
zobzu
it happens if you hit back on a redirect. just long click back and select
previous page

------
cavalcade
Carmack needs to be paired up with a real gameplay/product/market counterpart.
His Steve Jobs so to speak. But if he is happy doing it his way then he should
continue. I just hope Bethesda won't punish him for Rage's commercial
disappointment.

~~~
yannickt
He needs Romero back. I think if these two were still working together, we
would see some amazing games being made.

~~~
palish
I'd say Carmack cares more about rockets than about games, at this point. Who
wouldn't?

~~~
yannickt
His interviews after he received the gdc lifetime achievement award suggest
otherwise.

~~~
palish
Really? Interesting. I haven't kept up.

That's... Well, that's ironic. I wonder why he decided to pursue gamedev with
more passion than rocketdev?

~~~
yannickt
He actually said that "there is more opportunity for technical innovation
[...] in gaming than practically anywhere else I can imagine". A modern game
like Rage can stimulate one's intellect for a very long time.

[http://www.mytweetdreams.com/learning-twitter/inside-
gaming-...](http://www.mytweetdreams.com/learning-twitter/inside-gaming-plus-
john-carmack-interview-at-game-developers-choice-awards)

------
exDM69
> With Doom3 something happened

I agree. Doom3 didn't start with a gun in your hand. It's DOOM, for hell's
sake, you gotta have a piece in your hand, right from the git-go.

The article goes to a very wrong direction when he starts blaming artists for
the decline of FPS games.

<http://gamovr.mx981.com/post/2654>

------
jeffool
Games should be about story the same way a painting should be about story.
Gameplay mechanics are the paints, and should be applied with intent for best
results.

Sure, some abstract painting is great. Tetris is as well. But that's not the
norm.

As for Carmack, we all know he's the tech guy and great at it. What's
important is how the tools he creates are used. I've not played Rage yet, but
I hear it's mediocre. I'm not brokenhearted over that.

What does hit me though, is QuakeLive.com's irrelevance in id's/Bethesda's
planning. I'd love to see them first add a second game with worthwhile
teamplay to compete with Team Fortress 2 (which is something id/B should've
been ahead of.)

Secondly they need to provide a strong modding API and let players rent
servers to host their mods on, and even let players run ads or charge for
access if they want. Become the platform.

Finally, since I now realize I'm just writing a long id wishlist, I want the
original team back for one more romp... I want them to be leads for Bethesda
in relaunching Quake. Only this time, do it as an open world FPSRPG a la
Fallout/Morrowind. Base it off of the old pen and paper rpg sessions that they
all used to play that Carmack DMed, and Romero destroyed when he took the
Diakatana from a demon. (All wonderfully discussed in the Masters of Doom
book.)

... God this post got a little crazy.

~~~
Wartz
I'm having more fun with rage than I did with crysis 2 or CoD campaign.

vOv

------
bazoom
Carmack Didn't design the game. He built the engine.

He also didn't design the id games of the first half of the 90s. John Romero
was the driving force behind those game-mechanics. Romero was the one who
decided that Doom and Wolfenstein had to be all about speed, and everything
that slowed the games down had to be cut out.

Romero left id after Quake, because of conflicting design visions for the
game.

The magic happened when Romero and Carmack were building games together.

~~~
phaus

       I mostly agree with you. Quake II was a decent game, but it didn't leave a lasting impression. The original quake was the last single player Id game that mattered.
    
       I think Id was able to recreate the magic for Q3A though. When it released it wasn't considered phenomenal, but now that I look back over the years, it is one of the top 3 shooters of all time.
    
       I think Id could be great again if they got together with some of the designers from fallout or the elder scrolls. Some cross training would be beneficial to both parties. The character animation in Bethesda's games are terrible; Id software can't write a decent story.

------
bigsassy
The author says we've been robbed of 3 John Carmack games, but he must have
forgot about id Software's iPhone games. He's been playing with the platform
for a while now, and has been shipping smaller games with a fast turn around
for a few years now.

<http://www.idsoftware.com/iphone-games/>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orcs_%26_Elves>

Here's an interview with him talking about iPhone developmenet:

[http://mobilegames.about.com/od/gamecompanies/a/intcarmack.h...](http://mobilegames.about.com/od/gamecompanies/a/intcarmack.htm)

~~~
phaus
He actually stated in an interview that his contract requires Bethesda to
allow him to work on mobile projects every year. He enjoys mobile development
because it reminds him of what game programming was like before the $100
Million budgets existed.

------
eridius
> Many games designers think its their job to tell stories, but games isn't a
> story medium, they should go write books or make films.

Couldn't be more wrong. In fact, lack of compelling story is one of the things
that's wrong with gaming today.

------
bnegreve
> Build an engine based on Raytracing, Voxels, particles, Signed Distance
> fields, vorenoi patterns, or something else we haven't seen.

Yes, back then graphics and gameplays were carefully designed in consideration
of the 3D engine limits (eg. doom and its raycaster, or outcast[1] and its
voxel-like engine). Today the polygon-based rendering seems to be the only
viable technology (and it is hardware accelerated). I believe it's taking away
all games' originality.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_%28video_game%29#Gamepl...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_%28video_game%29#Gameplay)

------
xarien
The great thing about opinions is that.....

Anyhow, games are merely products. They have a target audience and are
generally designed to appeal to that segment. For many, being immersed in a
virtual [believable] world, holds high value when trying to wind down from
stress.

For someone like the OP, I'd suggest checking out a game like Demon's Souls or
Dark Souls. These are very lite on story, but heavy on game play. Be warned,
the games are not easy. I think Demon's souls took me close to a year to
finish with an hour or two here and there.

------
rit
Keep in mind as well that id Software was sold in 2009 to ZeniMax Media (The
company behind Bethesda Softworks which did Oblivion/Skyrim and Fallout 3).

Obviously I don't know any internals of what happened post-acquisition but
it's likely that John has a lot less control over the game shipping. More
specifically, with a huge company behind him the likelihood is the artists etc
will continue to have influence in a way that will perpetuate the OP's
frustration.

------
seletz
While one could argue that his post is just a "rant" and poorly written,
methinks he knows what he's talking about.

<http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/video.html>

I find this game visually very appealing and different, and it seems to me
that the gameplay is quite unique, too.

------
dsl
The author seems to miss the fact that id Software didn't make Rage.

id Software made id Tech 5. Bethesda was tasked with making a game on top of
it that would be a well rounded showcase of the engines capabilities and a
good game.

Before Bethesda was Raven, Nerve, Gray Matter Interactive, etc. I believe
Quake III Arena was the last "pure id" game.

~~~
bigsassy
No, you're wrong. Bethesda bought id Software when rage was well into
development. Rage is a "pure id" game, as well as Doom 3.

~~~
dsl
You might want to check your facts. id Software is owned by ZeniMax, which
also owns Bethesda.

~~~
aphistic
While they may have been wrong about Bethesda vs ZeniMax (and it's an easy
mistake seeing as Bethesda is doing the publishing) they were right about RAGE
being an id game. Doom 3 was also a "pure id" game released after Quake 3.

------
puredlx
Start playing minecraft, it has all you desire.

------
suivix
Marathon was the first game with mouse-look, not Doom.

------
jc-denton
Wtf Rage is amazing and I've never seen a game that looks better. I would say
that getting Rage done is quite an achievement. If hoped that JC would do a
different game then you can doit yourself.

~~~
vitalysh
Probably he is talking about Rage on PC. Rage on PC looks alright, but not the
best looks ever. Quite often it looks like it is 2000 outside (the textures
are meh, they are not crisp at all).

