What Carmack Must Do to Succeed
August 6, 2007, by Erlog iD’s John Carmack is a rare genius. You can tell he’s a genius by the weird robot ‘uuhm’ sounds he makes every minute or so. In this case, it’s either genius or early model evolved cylon; not quite human enough. This isn’t to insult Mr. Carmack but it’s important to note that he is a quirky guy, and it just so happens that among his quirky interests is video game technology development.
Know Thyself
Carmack likes games, but he’s far more interested in the technology behind them. He’s interested in the unique challenges that don’t exist elsewhere in the technology sphere. Video games have developers working to push constrained and finite platforms further and further every year to impress gamers. That is his idea of interesting and fun, and we thank him for that.
Unfortunately, because Carmack is so interested in pushing platforms further, some of the video game elements fall by the wayside. The much hyped Doom 3 has dynamite lighting effects, and is better and more convincing at it than most other games released even today. But Doom 3 had its problems. The lighting was even one of them. Developers said that for it to be possible to add the number of lights they needed to light the game’s scenes appropriately, player computers would have to be much faster. This is the genesis of Doom 3’s darkness.
Doom 3's impressive lighting...
Carmack is a genius, and he has his quirks. It is very important to realize that this is what he is. He is not some gaming developer god. He’s mortal (or cylon with bugs), and gave gamers experiences that were thought to be impossible at the time. Though, technology only takes games so far. iD was breaking new ground by breaking in with new technology. This is harder to do today, and because of all this he has the very real problem of not developing the gameplay in his games as much as he develops the technology.
Catch Up
Carmack is late to the party. We don’t know when Rage, the game built with iD Tech 5, will be released. Developers don’t know when they’ll be able to sit down and thump the melon of the new technology. It’s going to be hard to sell developers on an engine they’ve only seen snippets of in low-res videos. In comparison with the Crysis engine and the new Unreal Tech, you might say that there almost isn’t any information aside from some announcements vaunting Megatexture technology.
That’s cool and all, but it’s going to be hard to compete when other engines have nearly 2 years worth of publicity to inform developers and get them on board. Cry Team has even demo’ed their development tools as a specific point of their Crysis demonstrations.
Carmack needs to catch up; and fast. He needs to show developers what it is about Megatexture technology that makes it better. He needs to show off the development tools, and hopefully how easy they are to use. iD needs to show people that they have something for developers akin to Crysis’ real-time level editing.
Make a Game
Games contain technology but are not, themselves, technology. There needs to be a reason to play Rage other than the shinier graphics factor. I’ve already gone to see Ratatouille. I paid $10. I’m not paying $60, on top of whatever it costs me to get a machine capable of playing it, to see Rage’s graphics. I’m not down with that. It doesn’t make sense.
Rage shown off at QuakeCon
There needs to be something to play. I don’t want to play Doom again. I’ve played it a zillion times, and a zillion more if you count Doom clones from other companies. I want a new experience. iD needs to come up with something that makes people want to play this game. Bioshock might not seem like the best game in the world, but at least those developers took some chances. It has unique things that make me want to play it. The same can be said for Crysis.
According to Carmack and the press announcements, this is what iD wants to do. They want to develop new technology and a new IP to go with it. Let’s hope this isn’t Doom by any other name.
Update:
It seems as though the new iD Tech does have real-time level editing, but my point still stands. It needs to be shown off non-stop until Rage is released to make up the ground they’ve lost to the Crysis and Unreal engines.
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