Why Did The Devs Do This (locked: awful thread with question answered definitively in the first post)

[Zulk RS]

5 hours ago, Noomerdoomer said:

Didn't know final doom was not made by ID. Also the comment still stands because by the time final doom came to stores they could have realized the mistake and removed them. 

 If they where so dumb at ID how come we are the ones still discussing their creation 30 years later in a forum dedicated to their game instead them in a forum discussing our creation.

 

I'll tell you why. Because at the time, Devs couldn't just send out a "Bugfix patch" that people can easily download off the internet. At that time, if you wanted to fix a bug, you'd have to essentially release an updated version of the game on actual CDs/Floppy discs. I wasn't born at the time Doom 2/Final Doom released so I don't know how many of the bugs the guys at id learned about by the time of Final Doom's release but even assuming they became aware of every single bug/mistake plaguing the game, it would be too impractical to release a bug-fix version of the game at the time.

[Maximum Matt]

6 minutes ago, RHhe82 said:

Doom wasn't a niche game (but, in fact, *the* game "everyone" played at one time), and it's only the us handful that have remained throughout the years, that indeed care about specific challenges regarding Doom.

That sentence is a contradiction - of course there would be TONS of kids worldwide who would've wanted to 100% every level and were wondering why you could only get 90% on map15 and so forth.  Tallies actually WEREN'T tallies, they were a good way ensure the replayability of the game, and yeah, the carelessness of some of the secrets (plus the fact that some D2 levels don't even HAVE any secrets) would've been totally frustrating to any player who was trying to find them all.  

["JL" was too short]

9 minutes ago, Zulk RS said:

 

I'll tell you why. Because at the time, Devs couldn't just send out a "Bugfix patch" that people can easily download off the internet. At that time, if you wanted to fix a bug, you'd have to essentially release an updated version of the game on actual CDs/Floppy discs. I wasn't born at the time Doom 2/Final Doom released so I don't know how many of the bugs the guys at id learned about by the time of Final Doom's release but even assuming they became aware of every single bug/mistake plaguing the game, it would be too impractical to release a bug-fix version of the game at the time.

 

Eh, this particular objection doesn't hold much water -- id did in fact make downloadable patches available!  They just apparently didn't fix bugs like this one.  And the patches themselves were not impossibly large even for connections of the era. 
 

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/idstuff/doom2/

1994-96 may have been the era of dialup but it wasn't the absolute dark ages.  I downloaded stuff over my parents' AOL that was bigger than most of the patches on this page.

[Amaruψ]

 

20 minutes ago, Zulk RS said:

 

I'll tell you why. Because at the time, Devs couldn't just send out a "Bugfix patch" that people can easily download off the internet. 

 

Online patching weren't really a unicorn that crapped diamonds, in all fairness. A few games, which I coincidentally cannot remember the name of for the sake of my life did use online patching. Since these patching often just involved bug fixing, downloading a few kilobytes of a patch off the dial-up wasn't something painful to endure.

 

Only the games where an online patch was impossible to apply got re-releases, such as Capcom's several releases of Street Fighter II for both the arcades and home consoles.

[RHhe82]

12 minutes ago, Maximum Matt said:

That sentence is a contradiction - of course there would be TONS of kids worldwide who would've wanted to 100% every level and were wondering why you could only get 90% on map15 and so forth.  Tallies actually WEREN'T tallies, they were a good way ensure the replayability of the game, and yeah, the carelessness of some of the secrets (plus the fact that some D2 levels don't even HAVE any secrets) would've been totally frustrating to any player who was trying to find them all.  

 

I don't know. Maybe. I mean surely people wanted to have as good a tally as possible, but on the other hand I don't think it was that big of a deal, either, for the most people. Most games prior to Doom had a tally indicating a "score" (like in Wolfenstein 3D, although it had a end-of-level tally as well), and I think that was the mindset back then: players wanted to top each others' score, but I think only rarely people went for a theoretical maximum there, because it was practically impossible to kill everything in most arcade games.

 

But okay, I'm willing to accept that even then there were doomers that must have spent hours upon hours in MAP15 fretting over the one elusive secret.

[LoatharMDPhD]

9 hours ago, Guff dotD said:

Is this a troll post? lol.

 

Also, nobody can really help you understand which 'impossible doom challenge' you're talking about (Pain Elemental Secret on Map15? or 100% Kills on Map30 or E1M8?)

// or the monster condom secret-line def skip...

// They were bugs, now they're features...

 

Edited October 23, 2023 by LoatharMDPhD

[Shepardus]

Remember that vanilla Doom didn't report secrets as you triggered them, only giving you the percentage after completing a level, so if you had a broken secret it would have been hard to tell which one was broken, much less why.

[Zulk RS]

2 hours ago, jerrysheppy said:

 

Eh, this particular objection doesn't hold much water -- id did in fact make downloadable patches available!  They just apparently didn't fix bugs like this one.  And the patches themselves were not impossibly large even for connections of the era. 
 

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/idstuff/doom2/

1994-96 may have been the era of dialup but it wasn't the absolute dark ages.  I downloaded stuff over my parents' AOL that was bigger than most of the patches on this page.

 

2 hours ago, Amaruψ said:

 

 

Online patching weren't really a unicorn that crapped diamonds, in all fairness. A few games, which I coincidentally cannot remember the name of for the sake of my life did use online patching. Since these patching often just involved bug fixing, downloading a few kilobytes of a patch off the dial-up wasn't something painful to endure.

 

Only the games where an online patch was impossible to apply got re-releases, such as Capcom's several releases of Street Fighter II for both the arcades and home consoles.

 

Huh. The more you know I guess.

[Finnisher]

Online patching was certainly possible already back in the early to mid 90s but definitely not the common practice it is now, not everyone had internet and devs couldn't assume people did. So the point about having to essentially re-release a game to fix bugs is still sort of correct and definitely a factor to consider.

 

Physical media was the most common and expected format at the time. You would often find patches and updates for games on the demo floppies or CD-ROMs bundled with PC magazines as that was a decent way of getting them out to people.

 

Also because of the internet being in its infancy and gaming industry being way smaller then, dev teams were smaller and there weren't playtests available to public (think early access of today) so mistakes could slip through.

 

That said, especially since post-launch patching wasn't really a feasible option, games tended to release in a finished state, more or less. Imagine that!

Edited October 23, 2023 by Finnisher

[Gez]

13 hours ago, Noomerdoomer said:

My question ìs these are secrets so why did the creators of the game on do this. I mean I understand making the obscure an a bit hard to find but not impossible to get what is the point in doing that?

The point is the same as why they very very deliberately built in all these neat little Easter eggs: so that we'd have things to talk about 30 years later. Thanks, id!

 

Or maybe they're errors and bugs because they didn't have a giant Q&A department for finding and fixing every single problem. Nah, too boring of an answer!

[Lila Feuer]

@Finnisher And it became something of this vile headache when they would release a pretty mandatory twenty meg or so patch for a game that had issues on launch (Blood II, SiN to name a couple 1998 blunders) which is important to mention because the internet becoming mainstream that very year the majority of people, myself included were stuck on dial-up connections so just moving something like STRAIN.zip for Doom II took a fucking hour on a 28.8k modem. Patching your PC game was out of the equation unless you had one of those discs.

[Finnisher]

37 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

@Finnisher And it became something of this vile headache when they would release a pretty mandatory twenty meg or so patch for a game that had issues on launch (Blood II, SiN to name a couple 1998 blunders) which is important to mention because the internet becoming mainstream that very year the majority of people, myself included were stuck on dial-up connections so just moving something like STRAIN.zip for Doom II took a fucking hour on a 28.8k modem. Patching your PC game was out of the equation unless you had one of those discs.

 

Yep downloading files wasn't exactly straightforward either and surely most had dial-up even late 90s if any internet.

 

ISDN and ADSL became more of a thing early 00s.

 

So in other words why weren't such small oversights fixed? Because not feasible to do so.

[Gez]

Internet was not common spread, but gaming magazines had floppies and then CD-ROMs shrinkwrapped with them. This was the way a lot of people got patches and demos before ADSL made Internet access fast and cheap.

[SpaceCat_2001]

Why did the devs accidently put secrets in the wrong sector? Are they stupid? Is there a Lore reason for it? They should go into Aslume 

[NoXion]

18 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Final Doom was not created by id software.

 

Back then very few people cared too much about not being able to 100% every map. Because of the fact that everyone at id software had the intelligence of an inbred troglodyte, they didn't stop to consider that people might care about it in the future. They were mistakes, it's very simple.

 

Maybe even... dead simple?

[Jayextee]

3 minutes ago, NoXion said:

 

Maybe even... dead simple?

Nah, they actually put a token secret area surrounding the exit switch so players could get 100% secrets in Dead Simple.

[OniriA]

Why did Bambi's mother have to die?

 

Whyyyy!!!????

[NoXion]

6 minutes ago, Jayextee said:

Nah, they actually put a token secret area surrounding the exit switch so players could get 100% secrets in Dead Simple.

 

Interesting. So if there are no secret sectors, you finish the map with 0% Secrets on the tally board? I know next to nothing about programming and game development, but would it really have been that difficult to set it up so that a map with no secrets shows 100% on the final tally?

Edited October 23, 2023 by NoXion

[Jayextee]

Once more y'all are ascribing more importance to secrets than id Software likely did, or than they deserve.

[NoXion]

I didn't think I was ascribing anything, I thought I was asking a question?

[Jayextee]

19 minutes ago, NoXion said:

would it really have been that difficult to set it up so that a map with no secrets shows 100% on the final tally?

I gleaned from this a dismissive "it's not that hard" attitude that probably wasn't there. To wit, it could've been a single extra line of code to do this. But no, secrets were not that important. Still aren't.

[NoXion]

9 minutes ago, Jayextee said:

I gleaned from this a dismissive "it's not that hard" attitude that probably wasn't there. To wit, it could've been a single extra line of code to do this. But no, secrets were not that important. Still aren't.

 

I would have thought that prefacing my question with a note about my lack of knowledge about programming/game design would have forestalled such an interpretation, but apparently not. My apologies. For all that I knew, it really could have been something that was possible, but just not worth doing for whatever reason. I'm approaching this from the angle that nothing about creating a game is entirely accidental. That is, if a line of code exists, then there must have been some sort of reason or rationale for someone putting it like that, instead of otherwise.

Edited October 23, 2023 by NoXion

[Xaser]

re: "is it really that difficult to do [x]?" questions: for those that drive, is it really that difficult to remember where you put your car keys? You drive all the time, it's a simple task you do over and over again, maybe every single day, there's a place on the hook next to the door where they always go, so why do people ever mess it up? Why are the car keys not always on the hook 100% of the time, every time?

 

Or, in other words: People forget stuff, especially if it's a small mundane detail.

[Jayextee]

13 minutes ago, NoXion said:

I'm approaching this from the angle that nothing about creating a game is entirely accidental.

Ideally speaking, everything in game development is done with purpose and for a good reason. Realistically-speaking, things get overlooked; or hacked-together in a rush; or were deprioritised; or any number of reasons you'd end up with a silly little bug quirk like "no secrets on map = 0%".

I do apologise for my tone earlier. We've had an influx of, well, rather poor posts on the technical side of DOOM's behaviour of late and I think I was riding a wave of frustration from all of that.

["JL" was too short]

9 hours ago, Finnisher said:

Online patching was certainly possible already back in the early to mid 90s but definitely not the common practice it is now, not everyone had internet and devs couldn't assume people did. So the point about having to essentially re-release a game to fix bugs is still sort of correct and definitely a factor to consider.

 

Physical media was the most common and expected format at the time. You would often find patches and updates for games on the demo floppies or CD-ROMs bundled with PC magazines as that was a decent way of getting them out to people.

 

Also because of the internet being in its infancy and gaming industry being way smaller then, dev teams were smaller and there weren't playtests available to public (think early access of today) so mistakes could slip through.

 

That said, especially since post-launch patching wasn't really a feasible option, games tended to release in a finished state, more or less. Imagine that!

Yeah, this mostly isn't wrong.  I rarely downloaded patches in the 90s even when I could have, simply because they usually weren't necessary for any of the reasons that they typically are today.  But in any case there are two possible questions here:

1) How likely was an early 90s developer to release downloadable patches?

2) If a developer did release downloadable patches, which bugs did they care about taking note of and fixing?

 

#1 is irrelevant to the evaluation of #2, because we already know, as a matter of historical fact, that id were in fact arsed to release some patches to fix some things.  It's valid, at least from a position of initial ignorance, to ask why id fixed this thing and not that.  The answer, however, seems most likely to be the boring "their testing/community feedback process had holes and so nobody had any idea it was something that needed to be fixed" and I rather doubt we'll ever get a more satisfying answer.

Edited October 23, 2023 by jerrysheppy

[Jayextee]

If games were patched in the '90s it usually would've been for crash bugs, hardware conflicts and incompatibilities. Non-egregious mapping errors were likely left in, especially secrets, because:
 

1 hour ago, Jayextee said:

Once more y'all are ascribing more importance to secrets than id Software likely did, or than they deserve.

 

[Noomerdoomer]

First of all to all those thsybsay back then people didn't care based much about getting 100% completion in a game where wrong I had in friend from high school in the 90s who would not move on from a game until he got everything there was to get in the game. So if he ever got into doom this would have made him insane.

 

Yes it was a lot harder to get get patches and updates to people in the 90s but that was good thing because it made developers really make sure their game store ready before they released. Because you basically had one shot to impress the consumer market with product because if games came out as broken as some of the games are now they would have been written off as junk and no would have really bothered with them. Also because of this you could go to the store and buy your game with confidence knowing you getting the game the developers want you to play.

I cannot recall at all during the nes and snes era of gaming of hearing about patches needed. In this way the ease to get fixes out to costumers now have made game devs a lot more lazy and not put in the work they did back in the day and push out games that made not be as ready for ready for the market because they can just push a patch out week later to fix it. 

 

[Jayextee]

There are like a dozen fallacies and false equivalencies in that screed so I'm tapping out and not engaging any further.

[Noomerdoomer]

2 minutes ago, Jayextee said:

There are like a dozen fallacies and false equivalencies in that screed so I'm tapping out and not engaging any further.

I am not understanding what you're trying to say not argue just trying to understand

Edited October 23, 2023 by Noomerdoomer

[Lila Feuer]

5 minutes ago, Noomerdoomer said:

I cannot recall at all during the nes and snes era of gaming of hearing about patches needed.

 

I'm just gonna respond to this and say games were indeed rereleased with revisions, sometimes two, it wasn't at all obvious to regular consumers however and the last copies sold were the most up to date versions. This continued well into the fifth generation as well, with those greatest hits for the PS1. Even Turok 1 for the N64 has two revisions and it's still got some strange rare bugs.