hailsataneveryday

I've read about things like this happening, and if someone tried that with one of my projects, I'd just tell them what they could suck, start hosting the project in a country with lax copyright laws, and take all the the free publicity to the bank with coverage from various indie gaming press outlets and try to use the notoriety to my advantage. Kids these days have no guts.

I was pretty loopy when I made this thread. Been trying desperately to quit caffeine, cheated bigtime yesterday, and then went into a manic state where I decided I wanted to start a movement to make the Doom series open source and moddable again (last time this happened, I wanted to start a tax exempt charity to teach game programming to homeless people and started calling everyone I know trying to find a board of directors). Apologies for that, but it pisses me off how every other response has been about how "don't worry, the Doom community isn't going anywhere", or "don't worry, they'll keep making games". When I made this thread, I wasn't worried about that the future of the Doom games would no longer exist or that the classic community would suddenly disappear, I just noticed that id doesn't have the same ethos that it did when it game to making games, and I wondered why. For those of you arguing that nobody would ever want to make anything cool for the engine if it were released and/or modding tools were written for it, I still say you're wrong. But the spirit isn't there for it, apparently. You don't want nice things even if you could have them. I guess it's just a different era. I remember the days of Dark_AleX practically devoting his life to reverse engineering PSP's firmware and making it do ridiculous things, ROM hackers spending months or years to accomplish small things, and the like. And I think that when the Elder Scrolls VI comes out and the modding community begins for that, you'll all be eating your words. Fact of the matter is, it wouldn't really be too hard. People make games with Unreal Engine as a hobby and spend months or years on a single Skyrim project. A small dev team could easily complete a TC in a year. A mapper could make a basic map without too much hassle in a couple of months. But I guess nobody here wants that. Argue for your limitations, and they're yours. For the people saying it's impossible or that nobody would be interested, I still say you're absolutely, 150% wrong. If they released these tools, shit would happen.

People? Well, yeah, that's what I keep ranting about. Point me to the Rise of the Triad forum where I'm going to get 10 or 20 people responding to me within the hour. Fortune has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's because Doom invented a winning formula, and Quake and many subsequent games stuck with it. This community exists because of the new content that's continually being produced, and it wouldn't exist if the older games didn't have the things I want for the newer games, too. I want to see source ports of Doom 2016 or Eternal at some point, and I definitely want to be able to make levels for them, even if source release never happens. I'm having a hard time understanding why some people are actually arguing with me about this. Maybe I should have put my admittedly minor ("minor", as in, "I know none of these complaints are very serious and they do not seriously affect my enjoyment of the game") criticisms of the newer games in a different thread, because they're apparently throwing some people off. It is, in fact, entirely possible for me to like and enjoy something and still criticize minor aspects of it, and I'm not hating on the new games, for god's sake. I want to see more of them - that's what this thread is about. I'm on your side, guys.

And you can count me out of your lack of reading comprehension, dude. I can't say I fault anyone for not wanting to read my 800-page rants, but I feel like it's not too much to ask to have some general idea what they say if you're going to go ahead and generalize my entire worldview based on them. I don't really disagree with anything you said. I'm not sure how many times I said that I love the new games, but I'm sure it was enough times to wonder if repeating my concerns again to you here will actually guarantee that they'll be read, but I'll try: My primary complaints are not about the new games at all. They're about the lack of openness that id used to attempt to have with their games and which made those games great. You think it's a classic game now, but it won't have the legacy that the older games have unless things change. By "change", I mean putting creative power in the hands of the community. On the contrary, I am optimistic that such change can happen. Glad to hear it. I'll check it out. I'll upload a WAD or two at some point, myself.

That's pretty much my point. If Doom Eternal is anything like Doom 2016, I'm going to love it, but my main concern is that, again, the openness that makes the games endure is disappearing. And there is no reason to take a defeatist attitude on this. My entire post was filled with speculation on id and Bethesda's profits not because I, personally, am worried about how much money these games will make for some company in the future, but because profits are their main consideration, and they have every reason to listen to autistic rants like these and make the games more open source and moddable. These things don't enter into their calculations because they're not thinking about it, because they're used to doing this a certain way. If we get into their faces about it, they might come around. We might see source port releases and level editors and the like once they realize how much they mean both to the community and to their wallets. Their profits in the short term are good because they made a good game, but if they want this game to keep selling 20 or 30 years from now, they'll let us turn it into a great game... We need to get them to re-examine their calucations. They aren't idiots. They care about the future, I think. You get it. My point is, I want to see that sort of community springing up around the new Doom games, too. I've been trying to quit caffeine. I cheated today. I worded this wrong. I get that the game itself doesn't take itself seriously, and I like the game, but the lore does, and you know what? I don't like the lore (there, I fucking said it). It's not even so much what they did with Doom 2016 itself as much as the fact that I don't want to be playing Doom Eternal IV: Legend of the Crystal Blade in 2027 where Doomguy is trying to find the titular item to foil a civil war in Hell because the dark elves started an insurrection against Methuzallikar, the Demon God of the 18th Era, even if all that is just relegated to subtext. I just want to shoot demons, and I want them to remain scary and not have their mystique spoiled by too much fruity stuff spoiling the atmosphere in the background. I'm not saying we're already there, but it's clearly a potential future. The expansion for DE being titled The Elder Gods does not exactly inspire me with confidence in this regard. I just hope they don't take this football and keep running with it, and I hope the lore gets a reboot every so often so that we can see different takes on this. Also, I went ahead and peeked at the bosses on Doomwiki, and I hate when game developers think that ending a game filled with zombies and demons with a fight against a shiny, sci-fi looking, relatively normal-looking weirdo is just the greatest idea in the world. It sucked when House of the Dead 2 did it, and I'm worried that boss fight will be just as anticlimactic. I'm sure I'll come back and bitch more about this when I've finished the games (currently on the Necropolis boss fight). tl;dr: I'm just sort of hoping that they know when enough is enough, and I hope they don't ultimately make the enemies more fantastic than menacing. Oh, yes, I have kept up. New doom isn't doing as well, though, as another commenter put it. I just want to see the new games succeed as much as the older ones. I love Doom. I fucking love all of it. Let us hope it never does. You can read my above rant in this comment for my opinion on the lore, but I do get that the game itself is not too serious. The lore, on the other hand... I dunno. I feel like some of it doesn't quite fit, and it's not that much of an issue if they just have the self-awareness to reboot it every few games. I dunno. I think we could make it happen if we threw enough of a collective temper tantrum. I want to make levels for the new games. Someday I want to play a source port of Doom 2016 on my Galaxy Tab 3,287-Z with support for tactile VR and five-dimensional bridges. And they'd have nothing to lose by humoring us on this. They'd make more money than they already are. Everybody wins. Agreed. I just think these games are not going to become what classic Doom became, which is even some of what they're aiming for. To clarify, I'm under no delusion that the Doom community is somehow shrinking and that its very existence is in jeopardy. I just think that these newer games are going to be forgotten without the potential to become what the classic games became. Better stuff comes out every month than anything that's ever been done on SnapMap. Why does it have to be that way? Can't we try to make the future just a little brighter? I never said or implied anything close to "Doom is a big fat waste." I don't know what this is supposed to mean, but I found this band recently and they're great. I don't usually like country. I think they're good (not as good as the classics, but good), but agree 100% on the rest of it. That's the problem, though. The new Dooms aren't attracting creative types. They can indeed be easily ignored. That's not the future I want for Doom. And I think Bethesda is trying really hard to get this right. And all they have to do is put the power in the hands of the community, and we'll take that extra step for them. Some really cool things could be done with these newer games. The potential is being wasted. It is a good game. But it won't ever be a legendary game if things continue the way they are. I know I keep harping on Skyrim, but it's a prime example. It's a good game, but not a great one, on its own. It's cheesy, formulaic, unevenly written, and half-broken, but the mod community turned it into the experience of a lifetime. The fact that I may never see the newer Doom games remixed and expanded upon years later is really sad. I doubt they'll crash and burn, but they might not ever blossom into a legendary stepping stone in the history of gaming. They'll just be another momentary blip across the screens of modern gamers. And those four letters deserve better than that.

I'm a long-time lurker. I'm 28 years old, been playing Doom since I was 10, and have been lurking these forums since I was 13. So I've been here (albeit in the background) for more than half of my life at this point. Anyways, I am just now getting around to playing Doom 2016. (I got it not long after it first came out, but the only computer capable of playing it died when I was a couple levels in. I also have Doom Eternal and pre-ordered its expansions, but I haven't played it yet.) And it's a good game. It's a major step up from Doom 3 (and I like Doom 3!), and seems to combine the best elements of classic Doom, the Quake series, and Doom 3. Tonally, I have a few minor complaints. Now, if a major game development company has to own id, I'm glad it's Bethesda, as they make more modern games that I actually want to play than most. At the same time, I'm wary of some of the decisions made of the general direction of the series. Some of the in-game narration is cheesy beyond comprehension, when classic Doom didn't bother taking itself so goddamn seriously and while, yeah, Doom 3 was a dead-serious game, the atmosphere was one of things nobody could really complain about, and the story was well-written, standard-issue horror fare that at least managed not to stick its too far up its own ass. Basically, I don't really want them turning Doom into The Elder Scrolls (even as much as I enjoy TES). Hearing a booming, distorted voice actor ham it up about "the lord of the fourth era of Hell" or whatever for the entirety of three levels that actually do bother to feature Hell doesn't sit as well with me, the second boss looked more like something I'd find at the end of an underground cave somewhere in Skyrim, and some of the in-game lore descriptions sound more like an edgy sci-fi D&D campaign than the Alien/Evil Dead roots of the series. And from the looks of it, Doom Eternal goes even further in this regard. I'm not saying the new Doom games aren't great, but I do hope they reboot the series now and again (which would fit into the game's allusions to multiple universes/timelines, right?) instead of trying to establish this smorgasbord of cheddar and mozzarella as hard canon long-term. But, again, those are minor concerns. The gameplay is solid, and they really worked hard to make the game fun for those of us who have been there since the beginning. There are more pressing matters at hand. They did a good job emulating some of the things that made the classic game great, but while they're smothering the game in seasoning, they've really forgotten the meat. One of the things that made Doom truly great was its openness. Every new iteration of the id Tech engine was open source, but they discontinued that a few engines ago. I'm aware that some companies are very deadset against even making older engines open source for some convoluted legal reasons, and I'm aware that this decision was a hard sell even for id when they started doing it, but it's done great things for the legacy of the series (and for id's profits). If it has a screen, it plays Doom, and am I supposed to believe that I will just never ever see a source port of the 2016 game? The other thing is the modding community. I've played around with SnapMap, and it's cool, but, as far as I'm aware (?), beyond the inherent limitations of the feature, it's a very centralized and closed environment. There'll never be a site like this where people can share new SnapMap projects on the forums and upload them to DropBox for everyone to play. It feels a bit like an afterthought, because while... I don't know, it just doesn't feel like you own your SnapMap creations the way you own your classic Doom creations, and I don't think they understand how central that feeling is to inspiring creators. It takes most of the fun out of it. And Doom Eternal has no level editor available at all. Unthinkable, this. Long-term, they're going to be losing money with this direction, too. One of the reasons why Skyrim has remained on the list of the top 100 best-selling games on Steam since its release is because people still make some incredible content for it. That game itself is worth a romp through once or twice, but the reason a lot of us are still playing it and still buy it when new versions come out is because of the mods. The entire reason why Doom is one of the most recognizable and well-loved games after all these is years is because the modding and mapping community just keeps going, and the game gets ported to anything that could run it. It's why people are still buying classic Doom after all these years, and why not as many people will be buying Doom 2016 in 25 years if no source or level editor is released, or if (at the very least) SnapMap is never decentralized and put into the hands of creators. Never mind Doom Eternal not having any level editor available at ALL. Bethesda isn't looking at the future and the legacy of the series. It might seem cool now, but nobody is going to love Doom 2016 25 years from now the way we love classic Doom. We really need to get them to see the light in this regard. We need to push for them to make Doom an open-source series again (even if we could convince them to release the source under GPL after waiting five years after the game released or something and the engine has no market value, this would be satisfactory), and even more important that we get the power to create new content back into our hands. This is a little long-winded, but I only wrote 20 paragraphs about this because I actually care about this series. I'm passionate about it, and I know I'm not the only one. Does Bethesda want to keep people like us around for another 25 years, or don't they?