The fall of id software's game engines.

[Ric Flair]

Everyone remember when id was the king of the newest, greatest game engines? I do. I'd be willing to bet that more games have been based on the Quake 3 engine than any other engine. I always used to look forward to new games desgined by id, at least from a tech standpoint. Now it seems that no developers use their engines anymore and with good reason. The competion has them beat, big time.

Wolfenstein the new order is a perfect example of this. While the game doesn't look bad, it looks like a game from 2009. There's texture popping everywhere, no aa support unless you use console commands, poor performance on high end hardware, a 60 fps cap, textures that look like crap given the amount of video memory the game uses, etc. What the heck happened over there? Did John Carmack leaving really have that much of an impact? My god. I remember when doom 3 came out that he said id tech 4 would power games for the next 5 years. 2 games used it in those 5 years, doom 3 and enemy territory quake wars. Now they develop id tech 5 and again a handful of games, wolfenstein and rage so far. Both have looked and performed like crap compared to the competion. Honesly I think they're on the way out and had it not been for they're massive successes in the early days with doom and quake they'd be gone already.

[amerika*]

John Carmack was the one who wrote most of the engine. He's also the one who has strictly enforced a 60fps cap since Doom3. They had to patch the game later with some hack that allowed more FPS out of the game and then still had 60fps at the launch of Q4 (and who remembers Q4?). And all of the pop-in issues is a DIRECT result of John Carmack and that super texturing (I think that was the word) that he developed.

John Carmack is one of my heroes but he's definitely made some bonehead decisions during his time. However, with that said, he made an engine that can be played on iOS at 60fps and also the XB1 and PS4 @ 1080p at 60fps. At the cost of the PC version though since they didn't feel like optimizing specifically for what PC users want.