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Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

> Before beginning work on Half-Life, I encountered a lot of comments to the effect that a first person shooter didn’t need a story—that hardcore gamers didn’t want one, and that anything more complicated than a bunch of moving targets and some buttons to push would be lost on them.

I remember reading a long time ago that John Carmack insisted that Doom and Quake needed nothing more than one interact button and the depth of level design of finding keycards to unlock doors.

Considering how ID Games have been received after Half-Life, i.e. criticized for their lowbrow gameplay and story, I wonder if he ever really understood how wrong he was.

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John Carmack wasn't wrong: Those games are still legends, and rightfully so. A focus on gameplay is a blessing and a curse: when you strip away all but the most basic context and themes, there's a certain sense of purity which, much like HL's innovations did for it, give a distinct feel to your games. OTOH, if you rely on gameplay and level design alone, your game lives and dies how how good that gameplay feels, how tight those mechanics are, and most of all, how solid the levels are. Doom, Quake, and Quake 3 all pulled it off. Doom 3 and Quake 4, ironically id's most story-focused games... didn't.

It may not be a coincedence that all but one of id's best games came before Romero left, and the other one was a pure multiplayer gameplay experience, rather than the standard story-driven affair.

I'm tempted to say that what gave the likes of Quake1 longevity was mods rather than the base game itself.

It was so damn easy to mod, and so damn easy to stick mods on magazine covers. A single individual was able to turn Quake1 into a rudimentary flight simulator after all.

Later games have become more complicated to mod because of their adherence to realism in rendering, thus requiring the mod makers to be as skilled and equipped to make anything worthwhile.

That was certainly part of it.

OTOH, the actual language that Quake mods were written in, QuakeC, belongs in nightmares.

And you might say it's not that bad. You might say that it's okay, given its domain. And then you realize that Xonotic is still, to this day, written largely in QuakeC. And then you start to feel a bit ill, just contemplating a codebase of that size in a language that actually has less abstraction powers than C.

And then you realize they gave me the ability to steer rockets and remotely detonate them on command.

Combine that with the fact I grew up with Descent 2.

Disclaimer: I've been banned from Nexuiz/Xonotic servers. For winning. Using their rules. Written in QuakeC.

Well, yes, but the language itself is a mess, so the codebase is a bit ugly.

> I've been banned from Nexuiz/Xonotic servers. For winning. Using their rules. Written in QuakeC.

Botting?

That would be me immediate idea. It's unlikely you'd be banned for winning if you weren't suspected of it. It's a community mostly consisting of migrants from Nexuiz, Quake, and Quake 3: Very competitive.

Nope, but repeatedly accused of it even when the head developer of the engine said I wasn't.

That community has infinite salt, but it made my day^Wweek^Wmonth^Wyear.

Ouch. Well, I guess it's time to move to QL, Q3, or QW. That sucks.

QuakeLive is basically dead due to id mismanagement (which QuakeLive is essentially Q3 + a CPMA-like mod), I switched to Nexuiz/Xonotic because QW died, and Q3's community is finally dying off.

There's Reflex, but that community never really seemed to form, and there's also the newly announced Quake Champions game that is basically a QuakeLive-esque game via Doom 4's multiplayer engine (whereas Doom 4's multiplayer gameplay as-is is a lot like classic Doom/Doom 2 multiplayer).

I'm looking forward to Quake Champions, but I'm afraid all the younger kids are going to bring too much salt to make it worth investing time into.

QW and QL are livelier than you seem to think.

God, I hope it's not actually through Doom 4's MP engine: Doom 4 MP was pretty bad.

And there are other small scenes scattered here and there: Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball, Quake 2, Sauerbraten, Warsow, and so on.

Seriously, have you tried Warsow? That might be your sort of thing.

Was he, though? There were actually quite a few very complicated first-person shooters at roughly similar times. System Shock was released in 1994, Quake 1996. One could argue that System Shock is currently held in higher regard (and you'd still be having an argument, it would not be universal agreement, although I'm firmly in the System Shock camp), but System Shock sold 170,000 copies to Doom's millions and Quake's millions.

Sometimes gamers have to learn to walk before they can enjoy running.

Perhaps you can make a successful game without a decent narrative, but I think he underestimated how much of the enjoyment comes from developing an attachment to the avatar.

You can develop an attachment in a game like Doom or Quake just by feeling amazing acquiring a new weapon and being terrified when entering a new room on low health.

The player is supposed to be the avatar. You aren't playing Gordon Freeman, you are some space marine fighting the hordes of hell or dimensions incomprehensible.

You have an emotional investment in your character because your success or failure in combat dictates if you live or die. It is surely a simple connection, but it also certainly exists. It is implicit to almost any video game.

I guess I've never gotten that vibe before—the only thing tying me to the protagonist is being human, which sometimes doesn't even hold true. The idea that I would even want to be a space marine is absurd. Why would I want to get shot at?

It makes much more sense it you view it as a target practice game instead of one with a narrative.

The pinnacle of the genre arrived in 1995 with William Shatner's TekWar.

1) Half-life owes a lot of its legacy to add-one like Team Fortress and Counterstrike, which have nothing to do with story.

2) id games after Quake 2/3 really weren't id games. id wasn't even really id anymore. The guys from the gold old days had moved on except for Carmack and a few others, they became more of a technology company instead of a game company - not that there's anything wrong with that.

Your first point is flat-out wrong. CS had a degree of significance in HL's success, true, but TF was a quake mod first, and both only really hit the mainstream when valve picked up the developers and made the games standalone.

HL made its own legacy, and it's for a large part due to its mixture of story and gameplay. To paraphrase Yahtzee on the subject:

"The thing you have to understand about half-life is that in most shooters at the time, guns still hovered three feet off the ground, spinning gently like Barber's poles, and nothing else had ever felt so absorbingly real"

Doom and Half Life (and other such FPSs of its time like System Shock 2) seem to me like two entirely different genres. I think Carmack was wrong but you can still have fun with a simple shooter + puzzle game like Doom.

System shock 2 is not a shooter.

It is if you want it to be.

Vids or it didn't happen.

Given the lack of ammunition, and the overall design, I find it hard to believe that there's a way to play it on which a significant amount of time would be spent shooting.

Games don't have a minimum "bullets per minute" quota they need to fill to be considered a shooter. Sometimes I go on a melee spree in Halo, does that make it "not a shooter"?

SS2 lets you use projectile weapons as your preferred way of disposing of enemies. In my mind, if you choose that path, it could be described as a shooter. That isn't all it is, but it is one word that describes a particular way you can choose to play the game.

Side note: SS2 is probably my favourite game so I certainly don't mean to "degrade" it by implying it is "just" a shooter.

It's first-person. There's always a gun poking out of the bottom of the screen. Sure looks like an FPS to me.

It's a stealthy horror FPS, not a bulletstorm.

go up the energy weapon tree

unlimited ammo!

"Lowbrow" is more of a design style than a criticism. Someone else mentioned "loud rock": Doom is explicitly a metal game, to the extent of ripping off Pantera tracks in the music. Doom is fast and loud. Like a first-person Robotron: http://vectorpoem.com/news/?p=74

Doom 3 kind of forgot this, but Doom 4 has definitely brought it back.

The modern niche for lowbrow shooters is filled by pseudo-simulationists CoD and GTA.

Half-life was always more cerebral and science-y. Valve took FPS in an even more scientific direction with Portal. You could argue that that limits their audience by being highbrow.

Funny you'd mention those two (CoD and GTA); CoD started out as an authentic (or, authentic-seeming) WW2 shooter, preceded by the Medal of Honor series that had the same 'genuine' feel to it. GTA started out as a comical top-down shooter and became more serious / realistic in a lot of ways. Well, until GTA Online came around anyway.

>CoD started out as an authentic (or, authentic-seeming) WW2 shooter

I seem to recall the draw of CoD vs MoH was that you weren't one lone soldier vs the axis of evil. You actually had teammates! And scripted events!

Indeed Carmack was wrong. And the game that proved it was Quake, not HL.

Wolfenstein and Doom were both great, eye-opening games because their rendering gave us a visual experience we hadn't seen before. Nobody cared if they were the gaming equivalent of dumb, loud rock. Besides Doom's art had a terrifying -- if brainless -- grandeur.

Quake also delivered a step up in rendering, a great feat that I admire as a software engineer. But as a game, it was dull.

It was no more brainless than Doom, but we had already seen that particular kind of dumb-horror before, and the full 3d really just felt like an incremental improvement.

>as a game, it was dull

My guess is that you only played single player. Single player Quake is indeed less exciting than Doom, largely because of lower enemy counts. The people correctly praising Quake as a classic played multiplayer. In multiplayer the 3D environments really matter. It's more than just an incremental improvement because full 3D gives you so many options for movement. Quake has very high skill ceiling and mastering movement is a big part of it.

You are right that I am thinking only about single-player. Which is a big limitation on my thinking.

However, in terms of an argument between story-driven vs. just-shoot-em-up, I think single-player is the most relevant.

Quake and its mods (Team Fortress!) were pure magic for me as a young kid. I can't imagine how many hours I spent in that game. The multiplayer community was a big draw, and services like Mplayer that had voice-enabled chat rooms were also amazing at the time. Lots of Quake LAN parties. It was a total game changer.

I still love the atmosphere and total weirdness of the game.

> But as a game, it was dull. I disagree. The art, skybox (not really a skybox; I spent so much time just looking at that grim-looking moving purple sky), sounds and music made it incredibly immersive.

> I wonder if he ever really understood how wrong he was.

Wrong how? Lots of players don't give a damn about story in games (me being one of them).

I'm on Carmack's side, and the overall sales of his games suggest we are not alone.

Id has ended up doing poorly while Valve has flourished. Steam was justified by HL2 being a good game in the first place people wanted to play. ID s legacy is rather in its past.

And one of the most popular games on steam is a game where you kick around a ball with RC cars. Another is a game where a team of counter-terrorists and terrorists fight with no context, made by Valve itself. A hit game that is claimed to be partly behind the modern roguelite resurgence is a game where you fly forward across several systems, to escape the dastardly rebels and save the federation, and that's all the story you're given. In what has been hailed as one of the best shooters in years, all you need to know about the plot (although there is more to it) is that you kill demons from hell. Gameplay over story, every time.

I think Carmack wins this one.

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