Since Tom Hall was brought up earlier I've been thinking about him. Just looking at the overall decline in quality between Doom and Doom 2 makes me wonder exactly how much influence he had over Doom, and to what extent Doom 2 suffered from his absence. I know you can see who's credited with each map but I'm reading up on Hall's levels for the Doom alpha and it looks like the game's development was a lot more convoluted than it first appears, with Romero/Petersen/Hall all contributing to different maps at different times.
IIRC, most of the Doom bible is all him, and he was often the person who pushed making these places feel like real places. For instance, in Wolfenstein, he was the one who asked for the pots and pans sprite. Although that said, to my memory Hall's levels in Wolfenstein are not necessarily better, nor does Rise of the Triad strike me as something going for the design principles he seems to have set himself, feeling more like a more gamey or abstract level from one of the others. They really needed each other to rein in the other's more unwise aspects.
I wonder what it'd have been like if he'd gotten to do half the shit he wanted - he was already looking into an inventory system and Hexen-style puzzles instead of Wolf3D-style keys (eg using a severed hand to open a locked door).
Earlier, I said Elm Knight was what the story half of the Doom bible would have been like. Well, that might be an extreme since I don't know how much story there was supposed to be originally, but something tells me it wasn't going to be massively, massively long lengths of dialog like Elm Knight with token game bits between. I wonder if some other early FPS did something akin to what his vision of Doom was like. Everything I can think of that sounds similar to that vision is also way off that vision in other respects. Shadowcaster, for instance actually had the boys at Id work on it, but it's clearly not anywhere close to akin to Hall's vision. Other "intelligent" FPS of that time like Sleeping Gods Lie or Star Cruiser also have aspects that massively set them apart from this theoretical vision. Maybe Pathways into Darkness? It's a setting with modern-ish weapons and some oddballs, the player is late, and comes across his companions corpses, and it involves going deeper and deeper into a dark hellhole.
What are your all's takes on making throwback doom clones? Even with WADs, I think mouselook ruins things. I can't really put into words what makes Doom work, but the limitations in 3D environments work in its favor. If you take the same relative format and put it into a true 3D space, it suddenly gets boring - which is why I was never able to get into Serious Sam or Painkiller.
This is a more general bad game developer choice, but a lot of developers seem like they understand obvious flaws and good aspects of a game, but not more subtle things. It's very easy to tell me that Doom is good and Tekwar is bad, and it's not that hard to point out the obvious things. It's difficult for someone to explain the minor ways that Doom succeeds and Tekwar fails. It's very difficult for someone to explain in what way Doom fails and Tekwar succeeds. I want to point out I'm specifically talking about someone who likes Doom or at least respects Doom, and isn't the kind of genius who is running around screaming about having to find keys.
Look dude I might be one of the only people here unfortunate enough to play the delta force games (1,2,BHD). Those games sucked ass. Trust me there are plenty of corridors in DF, plenty of stupid buildings where enemies will 1 shot you around corners.
Eh? There are people who dislike Delta Force? Funny. I always thought they were pretty nice, at least the first two. Just realistic enough that it feels like reality, but not so realistic it negatively impacts the game in other ways. But I could just be remembering the good parts, I definitely don't remember getting 1 shotted all the time like that.
