I think it’s easy to look back now and say “all ID games are shit” but at the time of release, quake was a completely new POV. Compared to Rise of the Triad for example that was still using sprites.. (and actually, was fuckin awesome multiplayer)

If you can’t hack the RMB config, wait till you hear the rest of them!

GHJ (Left, Back, Right, respectively)
Y – Jump! Yes, JUMP!
K – reload
T – Melee
Space – Use
N – Crouch
M – Prone
U – Any alternate fire mode
567 – Weapons Switches

YEAH BABY!, middle of the keyboard! – That’s just how I roll.. (and it means that I don’t interfere with the Windows Key or those crappy shift/tab keys…)

WASD for example, I don’t remember that being the default on Quake. The first time I used it was HL.

Key bindings? If they predominate nowadays it’s because they were always going to do so over time, or of such little consequence that the first choice stuck if it was good enough.

Network optimisation? Again, it was always going to happen and giving ID the Nobel Prize for Network Gaming should be a join award to people dating back to the networked games that predate ID.

Tiny design decision make some impact sure, they are necessary ones and ones that would have been made eventually because they were needed. At best, ID take the small, obvious things and implement them. That still doesn’t add up to game design and certainly doesn’t explain the woefull gameplay of Doom 3 and Quake 4 nor the stagnant – wait, make that “rotting” – multiplayer (i.e. exactly the same as all of their previous efforts ignoring the lessons of countless other, superior efforts).

Whatever they did, it was a while ago and added nothing to the art and very little to the experience of gaming. Enabling others is great but it evokes “those who can, do, those who can’t, teach” and ID are at best, teachers.

Doom 3. It’s sole contribution; direct interaction with monitors. I appreciated that, it has been copied and something I had been waiting for in games.

…and how long was Doom 3 in development for? The gameplay sucked mokeyballs. It takes quite a poor game for me not to play it through to the end.

As for RMB. Jesus. Learn WASD, use RMB for meleeing zombies and get your lady to feed you sammiches and cookies while you play. It’s that simple.

Id invent technology that gives other teams the ability to make great games. Without the trigger->response idea that Id developed, none of Half Life could have been made.

Saying “Id are not relevant” isn’t necessarily true, to this day when people go on about games and design, they still say stuff like “Make the auto aim work like Halo”, and ten years ago, people used to say “Make the default talk key “T” – or somesuch from the Doom/Quake era. Their legacy is the tiny design decisions they made that stumbled into other projects simply by the next team inheriting their engine.

And it did take a genius to make 16 player deathmatch back then – pre-dating TCP/IP and working on IPX (although I think Quake was TCP/IP enabled too) – but it did take a genius to make QuakeWorld work over 56k modems, it just didn’t take a genius to design it.

RMB = Foward – Why? So I can play one handed when I used to play quake. Why did I need to play one handed? Because I used to Eat Sandwiches whilst playing. (and invariably winning)

Deatchmatch, CTF etc. are less about gameplay than they are balancing and map design. The real skill in game making is the marriage of technology, design, narrative and gameplay. From these, ideally emerge immersion, investment and ultimately the lofty ideals of “entertainment” and “art”. Multiplayer (competitive, not coop) only serves two of the fundamentals and mas as much in common with non-specator sports as it does the future of computer gaming.

It didn’t take a genius to come up with a game where you stick 16 humans on a server and let them fight it out.
It didn’t take a genius to take two teams of 8, a couple of flags on a server and let them fight it out.
It took a brainless moron to keep repeating the formula when it had been done countless times already, better.

I’m certainly going to stand by my original statement and add this,

“ID are essentially irrelevant to the progression of gaming as a form of interactive entertainment”

As for you, binding your right mouse button to “forwards”… dear god, man.

Although I agree that ID ARE a technology studio, people do tend to overlook Quake as a dirty son-in-law, when in reality that game single handedly defined a genre. And not all from a tech point of view.

It’s deathmatch slant spawned Unreal Tournament, it’s very controls defined nearly every game in that lists W A S D configuration. (Even though I still map Right mouse to “forwards”)

But people skip over Quake because it was an actually good game from ID.

Quake two, for some reason was shit.

Quake 3, again, back to it’s routes and what it did it did well, unforutnately it was urinated on from a great height by UT.

I think for every good game that came from Quakes loins, there are twenty bad first person games that didn’t. (And some that did, Diakatana, SiN for example) – And each bad game surely goes to emphasis the things that ID did do right…

And then ID went singleplayer, and it all went wrong..

*Sad Smiley Face*

But look at the games that came after it:

Duke Nukem
Half-Life
Half-Life2
Deus-Ex
The Thief Series
System Shock 2
Halo
Battlefield 1942
Battlefield 2
The Call of Duty series
Alien Versus Predator
Farcry
Counterstrike
Tron 2.0

So there you have it, a list off the top of my head. These are the games that advanced first person perspective gaming landscape, these are the games that are pressed against the idea wall. They are the source of your inspiration, examples of what can be done in the genre.
The subtlety of story telling, the wax and wane of excitement, gamut of gameplay, breadth of emotion conveyed, control schemes, firing mechanics, stealth ability – so much is containted in that list. So much innovation and wonder that so massively extended the original idea that Doom spawned.

And what do ID come up with?

Doom 3.

Then Quake 4.

Resplendant with gameplay that had barely evolved from the early 90s.

ID make great, GREAT engines, just like you say.

They do not however, make games, they make glorious tech demos. They never have and probably never will, understand gameplay.

Whilst I agree ID are about as good at telling a yarn as a paraplegic dog. I won’t hear that ID are shit at gameplay.

Admittedly, they’ve become a bit shit recently, but Quake, come on.. Doom? Cooommeee onnn..

I think Romero’s leaving and ID’s gameplay shitness is too much of a coincidence in timing to be completely bullshit.

The reason I love ID is because they invariably make the tools for other people to make great games with…

(Quake, Call of Duty, Half Life, etc etc etc)

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/56772

“Doom 4 Story Writer Revealed”

If there is any game developer who in their history have proven time and again their inability to deliver any kind of narrative whatsoever (let alone gameplay) it is ID Software.

But if you look at it, the only really good thing about the game was the look; bright single-colour theme, bleached whites, sterile shiny over exposure. It’s like what the world would look like if everyone went Mac but it was never really more than moving wall paper – you never really got to explore which is surely the core principle of being a runner? Freedom.

But that’s a DICE game for you; always something good in there but they’ve yet to make a game that isn’t riddled with either design or technical problems.

Best free-running game is still Playman Extreme Running for J2ME.