WRATH: Aeon of Ruin - new Quake engine game from 3D Realms

[Jenkem]

click the embedded tweet if you want to read all of it. it just screams of bullshit excuses to me though.

 

[Bad Sector]

skacky posted on Twitter about it, here is the text:

Little thread about WRATH's delay and the future.
First and foremost, I'm very grateful to the people who are understanding and I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart. The team was dreading today's announcement and it went far better than we expected.

Second thing, moving forward we will post bi-weekly updates about the game. We are not exactly sure what they will contain but they will be more substantial than "X worked on Y this week". Hopefully this will show you what we're doing and allow you to offer feedback.

So, why isn't the game done already?

There are many factors, but the crux of the problem is the technology we are using. The thing you need to know is that every single thing must be done by hand, including processes that are automated in Unreal or Unity.

A concrete example: culling in modern engines culling is automated, you do not have to worry about it unless you do something very wrong. With WRATH we have to do it manually, this means hiding every single hidden face by hand and placing specific brushes to cull unseen geometry.

To give you an idea, this process took me 2 or 3 weeks alone, give or take, for The Priory. That is 3 weeks pretty much wasted that we could've used for something else with a modern engine. Now imagine this for 15 levels, not counting the hubs and boss maps.

We are literally counting months at this point spent doing this one thing that you can do at the press of a button in Unreal or Unity. And that is just one operation. Now imagine this but with animation, texturing, meshing and so on.

The technology we use is a voodoo combo of Quake 1 and 3, which means that not many people know it. We've been hit by COVID, we've been hit by severe burn-outs and illnesses that left positions vacant. Finding people insane enough to do the job for these is extremely hard.

On the subject of mapping, we also have no lighting preview and must compile maps every single time we make a change. Compiles can last hours with some of the biggest levels like The Priory, which makes modifying them quite difficult.

Another thing people don't realize is that, for the tech we use, WRATH is insanely ambitious. It may not look like it, but it really is. It's a very complex game that demands a large amount of care and attention during development. A wrong thing somewhere can break it completely.

The tech is also not suited for frequent updates, since modifying a system file (progs.dat) nukes saves. That means WRATH was a relatively bad fit for Early Access and I am the first to recognize that phase wasn't nearly as good as we hope it would be.

We have many incredible things in store with WRATH, we just ask more time to deliver it to you. The team loves this game, we are very passionate and extremely sad and frustrated when we can't make significant progress due to these problems and the rigidity of the tech.

I think (and may be wrong) that people assume making a game using the Quake engine is an easy task, and we probably went into this project with the same mindset, believe it'd be a walk in the park. Making maps for Quake is easy. Making a mod, a bit less.

Making a brand new game as ambitious as WRATH? Really, really difficult. The team is composed of some of the most knowledgeable people and we're having a very hard time with it, this alone should give you an idea of how challenging this game is to make.

I hope this thread helped you understand what's going with WRATH. We're very sorry we did not communicate more, but with every non-indie game out there, there are things you can and cannot say. Moving forward though we will have more to say and show. Thank you very much!

I think some of the issues he mentions can be fixed with better tools, e.g. LIGHT sounds too slow (based on a question i made, not shown above) and the hidden surfaces shouldn't really be an issue even with 10+ yo hardware, though it may need a bit of engine work to avoid any overhead they may introduce. Though i don't know how many engine programmers they have on the team, if at all (their public GitHub repository for the engine doesn't show much activity but they might be doing internal development).

 

[Wunderbar]

Basically, the meme-huge AD-style maps are to blame.

 

[Riskbreaker]

You're right that developers using the "blame covid!!!!" excuse for game development being slow is stupid, considering game dev is one of the few jobs (especially in indie) where you really do not need to be in Game Developer Industries Office Building HQ™, it really isn't affected by covid rules that much. Plenty of game devs have been missing deadlines since the indie/steam scene began, it's nothing new to be blamed on covid.

Yeah, I'm really not swallowing that excuse even tho there's obviously a tacit gentlemen's agreement to accept it whenever a dev invokes it.
Thing is, it would actually be believable in relation to mid-range and AAA games. It isn't at all believable in relation to indie titles developed by one or a couple of devs for whom the work on said title isn't even a main occupation. Meaning you being cut off from your day job and having to spend more time at home would actually have opposite effect on the speed of game's development. Or you'd think so, for to my knowledge this certainly wasn't ever the case during this year and a half and there sure were a lot of pandemic-excuses amongst various indie devs.

 

[soulburner]

Is the team using vanilla tools to build the game? I haven't built maps for Quake in decades, but the vis and light tools probably still run as a single thread. The tools would need some significant changes to make them run multithreaded and the whole build process could be reduced to a few seconds on a Threadripper. Also, the huge maps might be a problem. Size doesn't equal quality. Cut them into loading screens, like in Half-Life or Quake 2 even. Everybody knows this is a retro game using a retro engine, so the team shouldn't try and exceed the limits of this engine so much, unless they are willing to spend a big amount of time modernizing the code to a point of calling it their custom engine. They should work on Wrath like it's 1999 and not try prove at all costs they can make a game technology from 1996 be impressive 25 years later.

 

[Jenkem]

they are using darkplaces iirc

 

[Bad Sector]

the vis and light tools probably still run as a single thread. The tools would need some significant changes to make them run multithreaded and the whole build process could be reduced to a few seconds on a Threadripper

They're using the Quake 3 mapping tools and map formats which do support multithreading (on a Threadripper you'd need to manually specify the thread count to fully take advantage of it but that's about it).

 

[geno]

Delayed to 2022.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1000410/view/2948156118200289059

Official statement regarding the status of WRATH: Aeon of Ruin


Greetings, WRATH Community!

Most of you already know this from watching Realms Deep 2021 where we made this announcement live, but some of you might have missed it - so here goes.

We’re not going to make the summer deadline for WRATH: Aeon of Ruin. Right now, we can’t give you a precise date on when this might happen, other than it will be sometime in 2022.

The team is working every single day. We’ve never seen anyone work as hard or as dedicated as these people. We are working so hard on it because we want it to be the very best game possible - that’s what you’ve been waiting for, after all. But we also don’t want our team to crunch. We all know and agree that crunch is bad, and is a problem in our industry. But we don’t have to make them crunch; these devs are working their butts off every day regardless. We know the meme is tired by now, but the whole “a delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is forever bad” thing is true. We want the best game possible, while not making our devs break their backs over it.

For those of you following the WRATH news on our Discord, you might already know that the team has been severely affected by the pandemic, and we had to make a lot of internal changes in order to even get to where we are now. These changes will continue. We are in a much better place now, thankfully.

One of the changes we are going to make is to give you bi-weekly updates on our community channels (Social Media, Steam etc.) . Many of you have written to us, asking “Are you still working on WRATH?”, and the fact that you feel you have to ask us that simply breaks our hearts. We never want you to feel like you are in the dark - we realize we haven’t been doing a good job of it up until now, and we want to remedy that.

These bi-weekly updates will tell you some of the things we’ve done since the previous bi-weekly update. It will be just a few lines saying, for example, “Fixed an enemy bug, changed the lighting on X map, re-worked a weapon” - sometimes we will include screenshots, but this cannot be promised for every update. It will be like a little treat!

We will do this because we want to be as transparent as possible moving forward, and we would rather give you small, consistent status updates than sporadic big status updates.
These updates will be posted to the official WRATH Twitter, @wrathgame, our Discord Channel, and on our Steam Community

We know this is a bummer - nobody is more bummed out about it than we are. But the game is coming. We are working every day. And you have so much to look forward to.

Best,
3D Realms, 1C and the WRATH team

 

[Ash]

they are using darkplaces iirc

Which still shits the bed a little on overly large Quake maps in my experience. But I use an older build thanks to Q1.5...maybe it's much improved since then.

I would imagine they will add loading screens. Only absolute retards make a big deal out of loading screens (unless they're ridiculously long in which case it does put a dampener on things).

 

[Retardo]

skacky posted on Twitter about it, here is the text:

blahblahblah bad tech blahblahblah bad tools blah blah ambitios blehblah covid blahbleh we didnt shit in our collective pants, the shit magically appeared there by itself blohblah GAMEDEV IZ OMG TEH HARD

So, uh, if quake engine and tools are so bad and unwieldy, maybe they shouldnt have used them in the first place?
Like, that guy with Dusk, who made actually pretty good quake-ish shooter with unity, or those guys with Amid Evil, who made godawesome boomer-style gfx and movement with UE4.

Seems that's the common problem with "new" 3D Realms, lots and lots of old-style shooters in the making, and only one properly released.

 

[Bad Sector]

So, uh, if quake engine and tools are so bad and unwieldy, maybe they shouldnt have used them in the first place?

Yes, this is what he wrote in a reply:



Though TBH IMO this isn't some inherent issue with the Quake engine and tools, they could fix the issues they have if they had an engine programmer in their team, but at least judging from the GitHub history of their published code they've done almost no work on the engine itself and from what i understand they've also used the vanilla tools with no modifications at all. The Quake engine, even with the improvements made in DarkPlaces, was always meant to be modified at the source level to do what you want - there is only so much that you can do with QuakeC.

For example in another tweet he made he mentioned how despite the issues he had with DromEd, he liked that you can get into the game from inside the editor - this is something that should be quite easy to implement with some minor modifications to whatever Quake editor they're doing and some of their game code.

Considering they're very experienced with the Quake engine (which is why they picked it up in the first place), it'd make much more sense IMO to do that instead of trying to recreate the Quake feel in something else (and besides even some other modern retro Quake-like games, like Dusk, are still using Quake's tools for their map making).

 

[randir14]

They're now looking for "a few" level designers. That doesn't sound right for a game that's supposedly late into development.

 

[Curratum]

Probably Skacky got sick of 3DR / KillPixel's (is there even a KillPixel entity anymore) bullshit and packed his shit too, so now there's literally nobody left to work on the game's levels! :D

 

[Melan]

This is going to get handed over to incompetents, and shipped out in an incomplete state. Fuck.



Never trust the game industry.

 

[toughasnails]

3DR definitely fucked up all the good will they accumulated with Ion Storm's release. Between this, Graven, Kingpin HD... If it was just Wrath then you could say that the problem was just with KillPixel, most sympathetic reading being that they are small team and were hit hard by the pandemic and had hard time coming back together afterwards. Given however that p much all new 3DR projects suffer either from interminable delays or are MiA, something is definitely wrong up there.

 

[Riskbreaker]

There's also that RoTT remaster, another one that fell off the face of the earth. Zero communication as to what, if anything, is going on there.

At least skacky might've escaped from whatever dank basement in the depths of rural France he was kept in, slaving on trenchbroom with a pack of malnourished rats for playtesters and under threat of some scenario outta "Martyrs" if he fails to oblige. I can see him now, running thru the fields, shouting his thanks to Allah as any good Frenchman would.
This of course means that we can now track him down, drag him to another (more secure) basement wherein, for the foreseeable future, he'll be refreshing his acquaintance with DromEd. Oh yes, I see The Black Parade's development gaining steam soon.

 

[Curratum]

RoTT remaster has been passed on to Apogee, in an official statement from the absolute incompetents running 3DR.

I also hope that them looking for Quake mappers means Skacky has fucked off and abandoned this trainwreck as well, so now we can maybe, hopefully see Black Parade this year. I wish I could have spent the money I spent on Wrath on Black Parade, really...

 

[LESS T_T]

Well this too. With all that Embracer money, I think.



I'm guessing Duke Nukem Forever 2 in both literal and symbolic sense.

 

[randir14]

"Our" most ambitious title since xxx. I hate how neo-3D Realms tries to claim games they didn't make. They're a Danish studio who bought the 3D Realms name and IP's, none of the original developers are involved. And maybe they should be hiring to actually finish their current games. Wrath, Graven, Ion Fury expansion and Kingpin Reloaded are all MIA.

 

[Riskbreaker]

Well this too. With all that Embracer money, I think.



I'm guessing Duke Nukem Forever 2 in both literal and symbolic sense.

This could explain much. Them diverting their resources into whatever that project is could also mean cuts in financing of the teams working on their various titles which would explain both why the people are leaving said teams and why their titles are stuck in limbo.
4-5 titles, two of them in EA, potentially sacrificed in a greedy (and possibly suicidal) bid to enter the AAA space.

 

[Hines]

RoTT remaster has been passed on to Apogee, in an official statement from the absolute incompetents running 3DR.

I also hope that them looking for Quake mappers means Skacky has fucked off and abandoned this trainwreck as well, so now we can maybe, hopefully see Black Parade this year. I wish I could have spent the money I spent on Wrath on Black Parade, really...

His twitter lists 3D realms under his previous employer, so Black Parade could very well be a possibility.

 

[SharkClub]

While it's not good to see a talent like skacky lose/leave a level design job that was actually (I hope) paying him for once, my excitement for The Black Parade is far too great to really feel bad about him leaving 3DR.

 

[Curratum]

While it's not good to see a talent like skacky lose/leave a level design job that was actually (I hope) paying him for once, my excitement for The Black Parade is far too great to really feel bad about him leaving 3DR.

Imagine thinking the horrible hacks at 3DR actually PAY anyone. I think all their indie projects, including Ion Fury and Wrath, are not actually funded the way most games are - devs aren't on a salary, they just work on the game until it's done, whenever and however they can, and then they do a revenue split with 3DR after the game launches.

Ion Fury's devs certainly didn't get a dime before the game released and I suspect Wrath is the same.

 

[toughasnails]

Where are you getting that from, some ex Ion Fury dev let it out or something? At this point I wouldn't even be surprised by that being true given the rest of this shitshow.

 

[Curratum]

Ion Fury devs shared that shortly after launch, I think, and I suspect it's the same setup with Wrath.