If Doom didnt exist...

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Grandmaster Fap!

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Soldato
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If Doom hadnt been made do you think pc games would be very different today? hell even pc's in general? It seems pc hardware and fps go hand in hand, both pushing each other. Maybe if Doom had never set the pc market alight we would still be using pc's with much less power...do we owe Doom more than we think?
 
wasn't wolfenstien out before doom ?

anyway - i think it would have been inevitable - us humans just love shooting each other
 
I don't owe Doom anything - I mean jeez you couldn't even look up. What were you meant to be playing as, a dog?
 
Surely wouldn't it be Wolfenstein 3D? As Doom really followed on the technologies and made into a better game.

If neither had existed, I'm sure somebody would have come along and made something a little later.

There's quite a horrible chain of things that we would lose without Doom now:

Doom -> Wouldn't have spawned Duke Nukem 3D, or Quake.

Quake wouldn't have spawned Half-Life, or Quake 2

Quake 2, we'd not have SiN, we'd not have Quake III

No Quake III meaing no Jedi Knight II, Call of Duty, Medal of Honour, Wolfenstein ET

No COD, no COD2 etc.

Though these games likely will have still been made, we'd have them on different engines, playing differently.

Then you can look at it, we'd have no copycat style FPS games of each genre,

No Unreal when Quake 2 came out, no Unreal Tournament, UT2003/4/7

With no Unreal Tournament engine, we'd have no Deus Ex, we'd have no Unreal 2 Engine, meaning no Brothers in Arms, or no Americas Army.
 
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Where would we be without John Carmack? I think he was/is always pushing the envelope on fps engine design. Doom/quake really saw him push forward what the PC could do I think.

Also Wasn't doom the spawn of the modding generation? I mean I'm sure it would have come anyway but the massive amount of add-ons hadn't been seen before I think. I remember when you made levels you had to do funny things like draw the rooms in a clockwise direction or it all went pear-shaped :)
 
Some will argue Wolfenstien 3D, others will say Doom, but seeing as they were both developed by ID it doesnt really matter.

I dunno if the original Doom had many (if any) mods, but I used to play Quake 2 online and when it came to modding nothing else came close. There were so many!
 
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I dont think mods appeared for Doom until the source code was released a few years later. What made Quake 2 special was a "limited version" of the source code was release with the game, meaning mods could be created straight away. Something like that anyway..
 
skullman said:
Some will argue Wolfenstien 3D, others will say Doom, but seeing as they were both developed by ID it doesnt really matter.

I dunno if the original Doom had many (if any) mods, but I used to play Quake 2 online and when it came to modding nothing else came close. There were so many!
Click to expand...
I thought that W3D was bought by ID rather than made by em?
 
Before "Doom" and "Wolfenstein" there was "Corporation", from Core designs.
Corporation was a 3d fps with rpg elements, far in advance of doom in most areas it lacked only a coherent control system.

Make no mistake, we would still have everything from fps now , with or without doom and wolf-3d.
 
It really boils down to the vast majority of these influential games being created by one company (and its partners): ID Software. Do we owe them anything? Yes IMO.
 
What makes Doom so important is not that it was released, but ID's decision to release the first part as freeware. That meant thousands of people who didn't even know such games existed suddenly saw it and played it for nothing. How many here played the freeware version before they ever bought it?


M
 
maybe we would all live in some eutopia without the endless legacy of "Doom" fps clones which were/are in such abundancy...

perhaps we would have been better off with something else entirely?
 
Hmm. An interesting thread.

I think that Doom is one of those games which can genuinely be described as hugely influential, for various reasons:

-First quality mainstream 2.5d FPS (wolf3d had flat levels). Quake deserves credit too for going properly 3d.
-HUGELY popular shareware game (~10 million downloads within 2years, at a time when hardly anyone had the internet)
-Network gaming/deathmatch. This is probably the most important, in the mid90s Doom had people going crazy over this incredible new experience. Over 10 years later and the basic principles of deathmatch have changes little :) But, to be fair, it wasn't until Quake that we saw the client<->server model which we know and love.
-Mapping/Modding. People can bleat on about Q2 all they want, but the Doom WAD scene was what spawned we know today. Quake deserves a mention here too of course, as that really took things to the next level.
-Boosting the hardware market. Doom was the killer app, the game which made people sit up and say 'jeez, I thought PCs sucked for games, but this is something else!'. People even went so far as upgrading to 486s or more memory for better performance/visuals. Again, Quake did the same for the pentium and 3d accelerator markets.

As regards the networking/deathmatch thing however, I do wonder what would have happened if another mainstream game from a different genre had come out offering network multiplayer which was so much goddamned fun. Maybe instead of FPS another genre would have taken off. I'm neglecting online RPGs (MUDs etc) at this stage because they weren't really mainstream games you could buy in the shops.
 
Wolf had mods, Surely you played the barney mod?

Doom had ****ing loads of mods shortley after release due to WAD's which contained the maps/textures/sounds/etc that allowed people to open the game and change anything they bloody wanted :)

Doom also had the first texture mapped floors and cealings and dynamic lighting.

Doom > all.
 
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