Quake3World

They took a shot with crackdown 3 and fucked the pooch on that one.

Eraser wrote:

MKJ wrote:I do feel that id Software really lost its position as technology pusher since Bethesda bought them out.

I suspect that's down to Carmack leaving.

Not necessarily that any one man can be solely responsible for the complexity of a modern game engine; no, rather that with Carmack's influence gone, Bethesda back-tracked on a lot of what made previous id games special. No community tools, no open-sourcing of the previous iteration's code, that sort of stuff.
Granted, we've seen a lot of very good games come out based on id's IP since the takeover, significantly more than id would have released in the same time period with their "when it's done approach".

But Bethesda very noticeably circled their wagons and shut down relations with the community, while favouring the monetary value of the intellectual properties over the positive feedback loop of open source and modding communities.

It'll be interesting to see if Microsoft re-introduce some of that culture back in to id. At the enterprise level, they're incredibly supportive of FOSS.
But I suspect that culture isn't company-wide, which can be seen in how games downloaded through their store are incredibly anti-mod, retaining none of the games' folder structures.

We've also yet to see if Microsoft will keep up Bethesda's onerous legal behaviour. I suspect not, as the man responsible for much of that is now dead (Robert A. Altman).

But even so, having multiple developers owned by one massive mega-corporation can't be a good thing. While I'm not convinced this is the case with Microsoft quite yet, it's beginning to look very anti-competitive.

Eraser wrote:I do feel that id Software really lost its position as technology pusher since Bethesda bought them out.

I'd argue that Carmack was one of the reasons some of ids games were not that good. He was all about the tech and the game played second fiddle to it. Don't forget he did the RAGE engine (id tech 5) which was all about the mega textures. While they were first introduced in id tech 4, they did really get put to work until RAGE came out. In theory they are a great idea, but in practice actually lots you a large amount of visual fidelity. It's why id tech 7 looks so much more crisp than id tech 6, the last of id engines to use megatextures.

Doom and Doom Eternal were much more focused on the gameplay and it shows. For all of Carmack's skill, I don't think id miss him, especially given they have Tiago Sousa in his place.

I believe Rage's (lack of) qualities as a game was mostly down to Tim Willits. I think Marty Stratton and Hugo Martin are two very positive influences on game design within id Software.