"It feels like id has run its course"

Out walking the dog listening to this week's Bombcast, that one sentence from Jeff stopped me in my tracks a little and prompted a quiet 'woah' from me.

I'm not saying that it's not true, and empires clearly can rise and fall, but that seems pretty shocking to me - Doom 2 and Quake were PC gaming for me in the mid-90s. I guess it's all the more shocking because of the realisation that it could well be true too. I can't even remember the Id game that I was last excited about - maybe Quake 2? That was around the time I stopped having access to gaming PCs and switched wholly to console gaming.

Brad pondered if Bethesda could breathe new life into the company, but what does everyone think? Does that seem likely? And what does Id represent these days? Unreal very much seem to have won the engine fight, so are they just making their own games now? And if Carmack is off making funny video goggles and Romero is long gone, along with a whole host of other prominent names from the company's hey-dey, what kind of games are Id making now?

In summary, Supertextures.

Really interested to hear what everyone thinks...

Well, it's not really the same company as it was. And as you said, Unreal seems to have won the "engine fight". I think the last chance they had to get back on the map was Rage. While I thought Rage was a great looking, decent playing game for some reason I was just bored to tears playing it.

I'm really not sure what Bethesda's plan is with iD. Maybe like you said, they felt there was something still there and they could make it flourish, but there really doesn't seem to be much going on there. I mean, hey, there's always Doom 4... right guys?

I liked Rage a lot, and even bought Doom 3 BFG. I think a lot more could be done with both properties.

Yeah, it's a fair statement. id has been pretty irrelevant for nearly a decade. Doom 3 is the last time anybody really paid them any attention, and even then, that game was mired with complaints, and ultimately if somebody asks you "What 2004 game was better, Doom 3 or Half-Life 2?", few people will answer "Doom 3".

And yeah, since 2004, it's been a whole lot of nothing, at least in terms of "things directly developed by id Software". Quake 4 is hardly the high point of the series, and other than that, it's been a bunch of Quake and Doom rereleases, and RAGE, so excuse me if *snoooooooooooooooze*.

We'll see if anybody bothers using id Tech 5 (so far, very few bites), and hey, Wolfenstein: The New Order could be alright, but id isn't developing it themselves. I have little respect for id Software as a game developer anymore.

Honestly I don't think id's been relevant for some time now. All of the "never-before-seen" features they touted for Rage (different ammo types, open post-apocalyptic world) had been ripped straight from other games. It just doesn't seem like they've been able to keep up with a lot of the massive advances made over the last 7-10 years in terms of opening up game design and doing something different than corridor shooting. It's like you said, every empire has to fall sometime.

Well yeah, if you're gonna release one game in a decade that game has to be pretty special. Rage is like... the opposite of special. It's not even special in the sense of being actively bad. Rage is perhaps the median game of the generation.

I think Doom 3 was the last big thing to come out from them, and that was about 9 years ago. But yeah, I think the problem is that they've stuck to the same formula of simplistic FPS games sold by their graphics engine and it feels rehashed and, quite frankly, boring to gamers to see the same kinds of themes they were using 20 years ago, and it just doesn't hold up to a lot of people. I still enjoy games like Rage, but they never feel fresh anymore. Rage was basically Id's attempt to attract the Borderlands crowd. Except they forgot the cringingly lame humor, the boring environments and characters, and the wonky controls. But the point is, They try to take their established skeleton that's outdated to many and throw fancy new graphics on it, I love those old games and still enjoy their newer ones, but it's not a formula that sells in 2013

I feel that id are probably done as a game dev studio. I'd hope that they'd transition into being ZeniMax's in-house tech studio, developing their engine and tools for the other studios to exploit creatively.

@sycomantis91: but

but rage was in development before borderlands was

arrrrgh

Actually, I hadn't played most of id's games before 2011 either. Just some of Doom and Quake 2 and 4. And I think Rage is underrated, too. Maybe it just suffers from people being too familiar with id? But I thought Rage was at least somewhat different when compared to their previous games, too.

Anyway, like I said above (when typing on my phone), the developer definitely still has some legs on them. What they need is someone, or a few someone's, with some real creativity to bring forth. I'm not talking about some fancy new gimmick or an interesting new world, I think id has mechanics absolutely downpat and Rage's world looked and sounded pretty good. I'm talking about someone who can take those things and make something interesting out of them. I think that a lot of good could come from a Rage 2 if it had a good writer, solid storyline, and fresh talent behind it. Frankly, this is a big part of the reason why I think Wolfenstein could be interesting - Machine games is made up of Starbreeze guys and they've shown that they can do some pretty good things with linear first person shooters.

I think id still have some tricks up their sleeve. Rage had many great ideas and could've been an awesome shooter, if it just had better level designs and didn't feel so empty. The shooting felt so good and the AI was fantastic. They need to bring in some fresh talent, someone who knows how to make a great game with their tech.

It's true and has been for years. The vision for a great game in the modern age isn't even remotely there, and frankly it seems some of Carmack's tech ideas, while very interesting, only hampered the people actually trying to make the game even more. I'm glad he's leaving, his work might now actually be used on something besides a mediocre game put out ever 5 years.

Like they said in the podcast, there just aren't that many huge milestones to hit right now, like CD's, 3d graphics, textures, etc.

If id still wants to be a big innovator I think they need to tackle the huge amount space games take up these days. I bought Max Payne and haven't installed it yet because it's a whopping 34 GB. Not only is that a big chunk of my 1.5 Tb of space, but it takes forever to download from Steam. I don't think any game should take up that much space, and I wonder how much of it is due to laziness;that is, they know people have the space for it, so why bother being efficient?

I really wonder why this idea never caught on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

These guys squozed about 300 MB of data into 95k.

If you can turn a 30 gb game into 15 it would be a huge accomplishment.

If I was Bethesda, I'd drop id like a hot potato. I loved Doom and Quake, but honestly, I haven't been excited about one of their products in over a decade and a half. Shooters and the industry have moved on. They haven't.

I don't think they were really concerned with story. It almost seems like John Carmack's crowning graphical achievement - a game that looks better than almost anything else released at the time and it runs at 60FPS on really old consoles? Yeah, that sounds exactly like a Carmack-ian ideal. From what I can tell, their goal was to make a technical marvel, and that's exactly what they did.

Unfortunately, id didn't seem to know what to do with that world from a creative standpoint. It felt like it fell somewhere between Fallout's bleak setting and black humor and Borderland's cartoonish wackiness, which is great post-apocalyptic niche to fill. And that's what I want someone to do with Rage 2.

On the topic of Doom, I really don't know if that name is better-viewed than Rage. I think Doom 3 is a very, very good game, but there are a good number of people who were bored by its dark environments and annoyed by its monster closets. I don't have any hard sales numbers on Doom 3 BFG but I kind of doubt that it proved much of anything. Both names are kind of divisive at this point. I brought up Wolfenstein The New Order because it's been just enough time for people to forget Wolfenstein 2009, and Machine Games are the kind of people that can do fun gameplay and good writing, if Syndicate proved anything. Armed with the Rage engine and proven talent, I really can't wait to see what comes out of that. Might be nice to see that do well and then see Machine get to do something with Rage.

I completely agree sadly.

id hasn't been relevant in almost a decade. Maybe if they were more concerned about interesting gameplay instead of the number of megatexture poly-shading buffer effects people would care again.

I was never that big into Quake and Doom, did enjoy Rage quite a bit start to finish though. id has and always will be John Carmack to me, a living legend.

As innovators, id hasn't been relevant for a long time.

As a game developer, I could see them potentially doing something. Maybe.

Well when Raven Software started handling the Wolfenstein IP and now Machine Games developing a new Wolfenstein game I'm starting to feel like either other studios could do it better than id with those IPs or those IPs are just too hard to adapt to what shooters are today. The face of multiplayer has changed and id were renown for creating the best multiplayer experiences more so than their single player, Doom 3, Quake 4 and Rage didn't dominate the multiplayer scene and competing with Call of Duty and Battlefield is a difficult challenge for shooters.

I don't think Rage was misguided. I greatly appreciate the focus on keeping a solid 60 frames per second in a console game, it's a figure that should have been standard at the beginning of this generation and seems like it may be this gen. Rage was just simply missing something. To put it pretentiously, it was missing some sort of artistic flair, something that a Ken Levine-like figure could have gotten in there. Not necessarily a figure that titanic, but someone concerned with the experience in the player's mind and not just the sensory feel-good that a high framerate, smooth controls, and good guns gives. I just want to see the world and technology laid out in Rage placed in the hands of someone who can do it justice, I think there's tons of potential there.

I guess Doom 4 would be a bigger announcement than Rage, but I still don't know if the final product would really "bring id back" at least in part because no new Doom game will ever rival the nostalgia of the old ones. It would either be too dark, too bright, too fast, too slow, too much like modern shooters, not enough like modern shooters, etc.

I honestly don't understand how id is still in business. They've been sporadically releasing games over the last decade and almost of them have been rereleases banking on their good name. RAGE was a shallow, aimless, albeit well-produced, first-person shooter that lacked serious direction and understanding of its own world. It's one of the few games that could benefit greatly from a sequel, but as of now it doesn't seem like id is working on one. Though I could be wrong...

Bethesda should have them pumping out games left and right and stop aiming for the always overambitious, underwhelming projects that they seemed to get themselves involved in with RAGE. Or maybe fold the talent into Bethesda and move on.

I've not cared about an id game since Doom 2, so I think it's a very fair statement to make. That said, I'd love to see them turn around and become a powerhouse developer again with some new ideas.

While we're at it, during the most recent podcast posted, as much as Brad says "not to idolize him or anything", he then proceeds to basically idolize John Carmack. The guy has got a heck of a work ethic and is all kinds of crazy smart, but Brad acts like Carmack's passion for problem-solving is some unique thing, when really it's something that a great many engineers share.

The idea of them becoming the in-house tech team for ZeniMax, freeing up the other teams to focus on the creative side of game making sounds like the best possible outcome to me. That or Id bringing in more creative talent to help with the 'fun' part of game design.

It's still worthy of praise, I'd say. And I'd also say Carmack's talent goes beyond that to an admirable work ethic, a broad range of interests and an ability to convey that passion and interest to others in an (almost) understandable way for us mere mortals. A lot of incredibly talented people out there don't get the recognition they perhaps deserve, let's not complain when one of them does.

They haven't released a good game in 14 years. Could not be happier that Carmack is focusing on something else.