John Carmack on the Next Generation of Gaming

           I’ve never been one to join in the cult worshiping of the various ID programmers, especially since I’ve never been a big fan of the Doom and Quake series. But in a recent QuakeWorld talk, John Carmack had a lot of interesting things to say. First, I was happy to see that he was excited about the Xbox 360 and was full of praise for how easy it was to develop for. And secondly, I agreed with his assessments about the fact that the loads of sequels in the game industry and pumped up graphics in games is not a cause for worry. Sequels obviously get green-lit more often, that doesn’t mean that they are not innovative. Graphics are an important part of creating an immersive game world, and there are better and better tools (like the soon to be released Quake 3 source code) for hobbyist and small game shops to create graphics that can stand up to those of commercial releases. In my opinion, the current complaints of “every game released is a sequel” or “only games with $20 million dollar budgets can survive anymore” is just filling people obsessive need to complain about the current state of affairs, whatever they may be. Just chill with the worry-wartism and enjoy the great games that are out there (currently Knights of the Old Republic for me).