Suppose the Johns never left Id.

[Mr. Pogo]

Hypothetically, Carmack and Romero had stayed with Id.  Or perhaps even left and went back.  What do you all think the state of DOOM would be?

 

I personally think that DOOM 4 would have been another Duke Forever scenario, where overall it would have been a decent game, but panned badly because it was just more of the same old thing.

 

Any thoughts?

[seed]

Honestly I think that even if the Johns wouldn't have left id things wouldn't look much different.

 

After all Carmack left during D2016's development and worked on SnapMap so...

[Soundblock]

 

[CyberDreams]

Quake II would of actually been a sequel to Quake? I don't know.

[famicommander]

Then we wouldn't have gotten Sigil.

[VGA]

15 hours ago, Mr. Pogo said:

Hypothetically, Carmack and Romero had stayed with Id.  Or perhaps even left and went back.  What do you all think the state of DOOM would be?

 

I personally think that DOOM 4 would have been another Duke Forever scenario, where overall it would have been a decent game, but panned badly because it was just more of the same old thing.

 

Any thoughts?

Noone said that Duke Forever was a decent game but more of the same!

[famicommander]

Duke Nukem Forever is like 6 different games of wildly varying quality duct taped together.

 

Overall I consider it an okay game. But okay is not nearly enough to justify well over a decade of hype. 

[Taurus Daggerknight]

If Romero had stayed, Quake 2, or for that matter Quake 3, would not have been a thing. 

 

Daikatana would have been an iD software production in a very different form. Or maybe that would have also not happened, and we'd have seen something else entirely. 

 

I suspect Doom 3 would have been an actual sequel to Doom 2, rather than a reboot.  Hard to say what exactly it would have looked like, but my idle guess? Not -too- different from where Doom 2016 and Eternal are going. Wasn't Romero involved in the Heretic/ Hexen business on some level? Forgot where I saw that, but I could have sworn I read somewhere that he was helping out with them. Add to that his earlier wish to make Quake more fantasy/ gothic, and Daikatana's melee stuff...well, Nu-Doom's interest in melee slaughter suddenly doesn't seem so out of place, IMO. Nor does its inclusion of more high-fantasy stuff really. 

 

Either way, I think the bigger impact on Doom's status specifically would be Romero. Carmack was around far after he had left, so we already know what "the state of Doom" would have been; exactly what it is now. As has been pointed out, he was even around up to a certain point of 2016's development. Romero, on the other hand, had some ideas of his own that diverged from where iD was going back in the late 90's.

 

How good or bad things would have been is anyone's guess really. Figure the only thing we can emphatically say (or even just agree on) is that things would look different.

Edited January 31, 2020 by Taurus Daggerknight

[Chezza]

The hypothetical question of what the next Romero Doom installment would look like was asked a few times.

 

Romero suggested he would have been interested in working in other ips to keep his interest but if he did work on another Doom he would have taken it in another direction, possibly more open world with light rpg elements if I recall correctly.

[VGA]

Quake would have been delayed to add a more meaty single-player experience instead of a barebones selection of maps. This delay would totally change the landscape of PC gaming ... a lot of significant games were based on the Quake series engines and people started mapping in 3D with totally new tools. And what about the multiplayer scene? It would all be set back.

[Graf Zahl]

1 hour ago, Taurus Daggerknight said:

If Romero had stayed, Quake 2, or for that matter Quake 3, would not have been a thing.

 

I think Quake 2 would have been a thing - but it wouldn't have been a completely different game with just the name being grafted upon it. Or maybe Q2 would have been named Doom 3. Who knows?

 

[Mr. Freeze]

Quake 2 and 3 would be radically different if they even existed at all. I think Quake 2's engine would be integrated into Daikatana and that would be id's flagship title of 1997. 

 

Doom 3 probably plays a lot more like Classic Doom, but given how influential Half Life 2 was id probably still throws that stupid fucking gravity gun into it. 

[Aurelius]

I doubt we can say whether things would've been better or worse. Or what kind of games they would've put out and what they'd look like.

What id Software made in the early 90s was revolutionary, but there was much more luck involved than what people might think. They just happened to all be working for Softdisk, Carmack happened to have a knack for combining research with game development and Romero happened to have really interesting ideas that could be turned into games. Not to mention the artistic skill of Adrian and goofy storytelling expertise of Hall. All of that being in the same place was pure happenstance.

 

This group of "misfits" made really popular games, but like I said it was mostly just out of luck. Considering the first ideas published out about Quake had things like RPG elements, I seriously doubt that it would've been as good of a game as what Quake ultimately became had those elements been left in. So in a way, Romero's ideas being pushed aside in favor of a "just another shooter" and him being kicked out of id may have in fact just allowed Quake to thrive. And, as we can see, Daikatana backfired miserably, so I'd say that the "genius" that is Romero is just another game developer who happened to make just the right kind of games at the right time, and had the expertise of people like John Carmack there to help him achieve that. The "Johns" were a powerful duo (not undermining the output of the rest of the team), but it's not about some otherworldly talent that is at play here. It's luck. I'm not saying there is no talent, I'm saying that there surely were plenty of other developers with talent, who had no such success.

 

In other words, pondering what would've happened if the Johns hadn't left is somewhat of a pointless exercise, since the dynamic between the two had reached it's creative peak with Doom, while Quake marked the point where the growing differences ultimately pulled them apart. Had these differences not been there, they would not be the Johns we know.

[Taurus Daggerknight]

11 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

I think Quake 2 would have been a thing - but it wouldn't have been a completely different game with just the name being grafted upon it. Or maybe Q2 would have been named Doom 3. Who knows?

 

 

Kind of what I meant, yeah. I mostly just doubt that Quake 2 would have been about fighting cyborg aliens, and more likely would have either been a sequel to Quake 1, or just flat out Doom 3. 

 

...of course, this whole discussion is making me wonder about what ever happened to Blackroom... 

[Hcoop111]

Probably 100x better than what it is now *shrugs*

[jazzmaster9]

4 minutes ago, Hcoop111 said:

Probably 100x better than what it is now *shrugs*

Well good thing this isn't the case, iD was able to put the Doom franchise in the right direction after Doom 3

Edited February 1, 2020 by jazzmaster9

[Hcoop111]

Anything past 1-2 was crap tbh ...maybe 3 was good for going through 1-2x but otherwise..yea...it was a hallmark back then for graphics and all..and at the age i played it it was scary with little jump scares..but meh...4 was meh as well went through once and sold it ..it was interesting and was kind of like a modern brutal doom...but not much in the area of replay for me ...eternal looks the same  just a extension of 4 in many ways...maybe they will get it right with 6 ? Fingers crossed..i just really miss how good games were back then...rarely do you find games nowadays where you can play over and over and over without getting bored of it ..sigh graphics for playability 

[jazzmaster9]

3 minutes ago, Hcoop111 said:

Anything past 1-2 was crap tbh ...maybe 3 was good for going through 1-2x but otherwise..yea...it was a hallmark back then for graphics and all..and at the age i played it it was scary with little jump scares..but meh...4 was meh as well went through once and sold it ..it was interesting and was kind of like a modern brutal doom...but not much in the area of replay for me ...eternal looks the same  just a extension of 4 in many ways...maybe they will get it right with 6 ? Fingers crossed..i just really miss how good games were back then...rarely do you find games nowadays where you can play over and over and over without getting bored of it ..sigh graphics for playability 

Its less them being crap and more of you not liking them. 

Im very luke warm with Doom 3 but even i would not call it bad.

 

Doom 2016 is amazing but my nostalgia will always prefer the classics.