Doombringer wrote on Apr 26, 2016, 09:03:
ForgedReality wrote on Apr 25, 2016, 20:53:
Remember back when Quake was first announced, and it was supposed to be all about this dude with an axe in like medieval times or whatever, and you were supposed to be able to hit things with your axe and you could chop wood and lop off limbs and stuff and if you fell, you'd tumble realistically and stuff... All this crazy Romerohype that basically never saw the light of day. It was to be this crazy realistic shit, and look at what we got instead. XD Romero is full of shit.
I have to set the record straight here, because Romero gets crap he doesn't deserve, but if you did some research you'd know. Quake's development cycle went way off the rails, and it wasn't because of Romero's design doc. Yeah, he had plans for it... they weren't any more or less crazy than what they came up with for Doom. The id guys cribbed ideas left and right from Dungeons & Dragons, which they played. So an axe or hammer-wielding warrior with fantasy elements wasn't that strange a concept for Quake.
Quake's engine took too long to sort out, and they had to rush the "creative" side of it toward the end of development. Any truly interesting ideas were stripped out and what we got was more of a tech demo than an actual game... I mean really, who remembers Quake for any of its design i.e. enemies or weapons, like we remember Doom or Duke 3D?
And Daikatana... the game had some great ideas, but execution was flawed. They aimed too high with too green a team at ION Storm. It definitely could have and should have been handled better.
Yah, from Masters of Doom (really good read), they talk about the trouble during Quake's development. A lot of it was the fact that they never really had an engine to develop for until the end, and they were stuck churning out assets that ultimately had to be scrapped. However, Romero was also in the middle of his "rockstar" phase, so he takes some of the blame. It's not like it mattered in the end though, since everyone was so awed by the Quake engine they didn't care about the schizo game design.
Speaking of schizo design, it seems to be what Romero loves the best. I wish he'd nail down a style and stick with it all the way through a game, rather than coming up with these scenarios so he can design anything he wants and glue it together into a game.