Cliff Bleszinski Leaves Epic Games

Liger88 said:
Quake III Arena defined Deathmatch.

Unreal Tournament deifned Team Deathmatch.

TFC 1.5/Half-Life redefined Capture the Flag and help push incredible game modes we see today.
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You are young, the way I remember it:

DOOM2 defined deathmatch (and PC games at all)./

Q2 LMCTF then Q3 RA3 were the best CTF and Team Deathmatch games ever made. Everything since has just been techno crap.
 
BBA said:
You are young, the way I remember it:

DOOM2 defined deathmatch (and PC games at all)./

Q2 LMCTF then Q3 RA3 were the best CTF and Team Deathmatch games ever made. Everything since has just been techno crap.
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^^.

Unreal defined deathmatch for people not skilled enough for quake. :p
 
Burticus said:
I like the way you think!!!!

But yeah Epic has been drifting for way too long... have they released anything in the last 10 years other than GOW and Bulletstorm (which sucked)? Methinks they have become a tad compliant milking the Unreal engine for every licensing penny.
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Some game companies primarily make games. Some game companies primarily make engines, and then mostly make games to showcase the engines so that other game companies can get excited.

Both iD and Epic fall into the latter category.

There's nothing wrong with that business model, especially if the games they release sell well.

I won't deny, however, that the original UT was one of my favorite multiplayer FPS games of all time, and I keep hoping Epic recaptures the magic.

Zarathustra[H];1039202753 said:
I don't know. I never really liked anything Epic released. The Gears games were kind of lame as were Unreal and Unreal Tournament.

Some good games have been based on The Unreal engine over the years, but for those games the Unreal engine has typically been their weakest point...
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I don't know that I'd go so far as to say that second part. Maybe for you as a consumer, but part of the reason people fall all over themselves to license UE3 is that it *is* comparatively easy to develop with due to the robust tools suite Epic built for it.

There is a lot to be said for that... less wrangling with a custom or undocumented engine means more time to spend on the other aspects of the game, and greater odds of staying anywhere near on schedule.
 
SixFootDuo said:
The PC format for games can easily be transferred all over the world via the internet or through HK silvers which can be found all over in major cities and shops. While the consoles have some piracy, probably a lot of piracy it still pales in comparison to the PC.

So, utter contempt? Absolutely. If you were in his shoes you I promise you and anyone else would shit their focus to where the most money is for YOUR HARD WORK.

So yeah, I totally expect him to have "utter contempt" lol
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You're not going to make it far in the business world.
 
Omophorus said:
I don't know that I'd go so far as to say that second part. Maybe for you as a consumer, but part of the reason people fall all over themselves to license UE3 is that it *is* comparatively easy to develop with due to the robust tools suite Epic built for it.
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Oh I agree.

The Unreal Engine is as popular as it is because of their great developer tools.

I just think it's not a particularly good engine from the runtime perspective. It's comparatively slow when compared to other engines running similarly advanced games. It's very poorly threaded, loading one core to 100% and only barely touching other cores. It technically supports DX11, but the implementation seems kind of poor.

And then there's the issue with textures (and entire models) popping in and out of existence with distance, which really ruins a lot of experiences with large-mapped outdoor games.

It also seems to be an engine that works in fits and starts.

During loads, you'll sometimes understand why its taking a while (HD indicator is lit up, so its loading data, or CPU load is evident so its computing something, or Video card RAM use is slowily increasing, so you know its transferring textures to the Video card, or there is some GPU activity.) Other times, it just sits there with a load screen doing seemingly nothing, but keeping you waiting.

I've also never had as many crashes to windows desktop with any other game engine.

I've had to deal a lot with the Unreal Engine as part of Red Orchestra II which has slowly become my favorite game, and it hasn't always been a good experience.
 
Liger88 said:
See, I come from the opposite perspective. Quake never got a hold of me. It wasn't until Quake 3 that id Software was even on my radar and the only money shot was via LAN/Internet. Never saw what most people did see in that series. Doom I was the same way. Only enjoyed the first and the others just seemed like a developer trying to rekindle what made the first so great.

Half-Life was great because of the amazing things they did with GoldSrc (aka heavily modified Quake 2 engine). The graphics they pulled off were half of what made the game memorable for those in that played from day 1. The other part was the incredible story, suspense, suprises, puzzles, and basically the mechanics. The game "revolutionized" because it brought great graphics along with a fantastic single player mode. It took the mindless mentality of FPS and brought it into another ball game.

I personally wouldn't stand by your Gears of War argument. The game has captured everything that made Half-Life great, except it happens to be mostly a console only title which I'm sure pisses a lot of people off (even myself). To think of Counter-Strike and Half-Life as godly and then look at Gears of War as complete trash says one of two things. Either you have a very narrow view of what makes such genre's great, or that you've just never been an Epic gamer. Neither is bad, it's your opinion, but I don't think it makes sense whatsoever to have that comparison experiencing both first hand, just does not compute.
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I see your point, just never felt that way about things.

I never was an Epic Gamer, you got me right there, but it wasnt because I didn't give the games a try. I did, and they just never sucked me in like some other games.

Liger88 said:
I was like you. Played Half-Life religiously and countless times. Counter-Strike for a 3-4 year binge non-stop 6 hours a day or more. TFC 1.5 to fill in the gaps. Unreal Tournament owned me prior to that, and Quake III Arena before that. About the only PC titles I could ever play and never get tired of.

Half-Life had a riveting single player. Not much on the MP until you include mods. Defined how a FPS SP should be done.

Quake III Arena defined Deathmatch.

Unreal Tournament deifned Team Deathmatch.

TFC 1.5/Half-Life redefined Capture the Flag and help push incredible game modes we see today.

Gears of War brought as much as all of those above and then added the most jaw dropping game mechanics like us shooter fans haven't seen from any other game since. Even now some are starting to emulate it.

(Honorable mention to Max Payne for bullet time)

That's just my opinion. I just find it incredibly hard anyone from the old school shoot em ups can knock on GOW so harshly. Not liking it is one thing, but throwing it down to the likes of just another Quake title is uncalled for and just wrong in my book.
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Well for me, it went sortof like this:

Ever since I stopped playing the last console I owned (original NES) when I was ~10 years old (same year I got my first PC, a 286 with 1 Meg of RAM and a 10 meg hard drive), I completely gave up on platform and 3rd person games of any kind.

For me, there only were three kinds of games. FPS (very limited at first, only Wolfenstein 3D, but Doom, DoomII, and Quake 1 eventually came a long), Adventure (loved me those Sierra and LucasArts games, but they died out over time) and turn based strategy games (Civilization!)

As far as FPS:es go here's my take (arranged in the order I first played them, years in parenthesis are launch years not when I first played them):

  • Wolfenstein 3D (1992), Doom(1993), Doom II(1994) etc.were early single player FPS:es. I played them, and they were good for their time, because what we have come to expect didn't exist back then.
  • Quake (1996), (and later GLQuake) is where I first got into multiplayer/deathmatch, (at first using a combination of null modem cables and 10Base2 BNC network cards). It kind of started defining deathmatch to me.
  • Duke Nukem 3D (1996) Started changing the single player FPS landscape, but really not to the levels we would later see. There was a hint at a story line and a little personality, but not much.
  • Team Fortress (1996) This defined for me how team based multiplayer FPS:es should work. Slowly deathmatch type games started seeming less and less interesting.
  • Quake II (1997), really did nothing to improve single player over the original Quake, but Deathmatch got better and I played it with my friends at the time, (and even played it a few times, Freshman year in college, before the Half Life mod based multiplayer games really started coming out in full force.
  • Unreal (1998) I tried it (for about a half an hour) and then never played another Unreal title. it just didn't speak to me or suck me in.
  • Half-Life (1998) revolutionized single player FPS and changed it forever. The graphics were nice, but that's not what made it special to me. The fact that there was a story line, and a level of suspense associated with it, not just a high speed running gibfest is what made it stand out and change everything.
  • Team Fortress Classic (1999) This game further cemented to be what team based multiplayer gaming should be.
  • Quake 3 Arena (1999) By the time Q3A was launched I had grown completely tired of anything deathmatch. I played it once or twice, thought it was lame and never fired it up again.
  • Counter-Strike (1999) This game changed the way I viewed multiplayer team based gaming forever. It became - with one exception (see below) - pretty much the only game I played until its replacement CS:S was launched. During this time I ran a couple of the most popular public Counter-Strike servers on the net (Yoda's Barn) for a few years, on linux boxes built from spare parts and hidden in the IT departments offices at my college.
  • Deus Ex (2000)Time for another round of revolutionizing of the single player FPS game. Deus Ex took what Half-Life did, and turned the level up to over 9000. There was a fantastic story line, lots of character development, and even threw in some small RPG style elements for good measure. IMHO, this game defines the single player FPS to me. Nothing has surpassed it in the last 12 years, including its sequels. I replayed it end of last year, and despite its now aging graphics, it still holds up. This can't be said for many games (even the original Half-Life which I tried replaying before Black Mesa was launched and gave up because I got bored)
  • Counter-Strike: Source (2004) A graphical update of counter-strike was welcome 5 years after its original launch, but at this point I was starting to grow tired of it. It seemed too simplistic and not realistic enough, and there were so many tards on the public servers just talking smack. Counter-Strike was waning for me. I had graduated college, was in my first year of working full time, and just didn't have the patience for it anymore.
  • Met my now Wife. Pretty much no gaming for the next 5 years. My brand new socket 754 Athlon 64 and Geforce 6800GT rig stood mostly unused collecting dust for 5 years.
  • Half-Life 2 (and episodes)(2004 - 2007) I actually didn't play this game (for more than 5 minutes) until 2009. It was good, had a compelling story line, but just didn't feel magical to me like its predecessor. I still played through the series.
  • Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 (2006)[/b] Got into this game, loved it for its team based play and relative realism. Didn't play much else for a long time.
  • Metro 2033 (2010) I'm a sucker for a futuristic post apocalyptic world, and because of this, enjoyed this game. It still felt kind of consolized and dumbed down though.
  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R series (2007 - 2010) After getting sucked into Metro 2033, I looked around for other post apocalyptic ex soviet games, and was immediately sucked into the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. universe. While not necessarily better than Deus Ex, they did set a new bar for open ended single player games to me. Spent more hours in these games than any other single player FPS I also wanted to get into the Fallout series, and bought Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas but only X-Fire 6970 setup they never worked quite right, and I never got back to retrying them after I switched video cards.
  • Red Orchestra 2: HOS (2011) My current guilty pleasure. It feels less realistic than the original Ostfront game, but it is still a solid team based realism game, and I love it. It's all I played from launch in September 2011 until the recent launch of Black Mesa.
  • Black Mesa (2012) A well made remake of the original Half Life, even though it itself feels a little dated, it is still a solid, fun game, and it brings back some of the experiences from playing the original Half-Life in 1998 that I didn't experience when replaying the original more recently. Well done. This is what I am currently playing.

And there is my entire FPS history. I didn't intend to get that detailed or go on for that long, but there it is. Note that anything Battlefield or Call of Duty is absent. I never got into these games, and kind of find them silly (and wish I didn't cause BF3 looks beautiful!) Once you get addicted to realism team play games like Red Orchestra, it's very difficult to go back and play anything else. I used to love Counter-Strike. I just can't play it anymore. It feels childish and dumb. So do CoD and BF.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039203766 said:
Well for me, it went sortof like this:
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My experience is pretty similar, obviously not starting CS servers, but I do recall seeing yours in the list.

My only deviation is that since getting married, I left gaming for awhile, and returned to console based games due to the simplicity and low cost of entry. I do play portal/portal 2 on my work PC on break though, which brought back that "magic" feeling that Half Life brought to FPS in the day. Obviously in a different way, but still pushed the envelope of what a "shooter" could be.
 
I also was never into Quake or Unreal.

Everything Carmack and Crew did / does has the same tired ol' feel to it. Bought a few of the titles that ended up just collecting dust.

I thought Rage could have been an awesome game had they not just given up and put their heart into it. Oh and if the world would have been open with ZERO linear game-play.

Most of these veteran studios, game designers, coders, etc have clearly given up and are tired / burned out. It shows in their work. There is no way any of those guys are proud of the same ol' tired shit they put out on the console or what gets ported to the PC.

Now Half-Life and Half-Life 2 .... mind blowing. I cannot wait for Half-Life 3 to come out.
 
Though I don't feel like looking it up, I think Gold Source, the half life 1 engine was based off a heavily modified quake 1 engine. I could be wrong on that, and I'm not sure it matters now-a-days.

Someone had mentioned that consoles are near death, and they're right. Most of the large companies think the xbox 720/WiiU/PS 4 may well be the last generation to get released.

Everyone thinks the next step is cloud or streaming gaming to set top boxes. I'm not so sure.

In my experiences, when everyone thinks it'll move one way it often rarely does.


Either way, kickstarter and the indy cottage game industry has revived the PC platform. At one point in 2009 or so I thought as a platform it was now finally fading away, but it's obvious it isn't.

I think Microsoft will soon be pumping out games for the PC again. From a business standpoint, they have the new metro steam wannabe for games. Knowing this, they're going to be porting over a lot of titles that won't be available on steam.

I'm going to guess all this has something to do with him leaving.
 
Wixard said:
Someone had mentioned that consoles are near death, and they're right. Most of the large companies think the xbox 720/WiiU/PS 4 may well be the last generation to get released.

Everyone thinks the next step is cloud or streaming gaming to set top boxes. I'm not so sure.
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One way to look at it is that console gamers don't care as much as PC Gamers, so console gamers who just want pretty graphics but don't care as much about response time, etc will be will served by cloud streamed gaming. Most just want Wii-type games that will be well served by convergence devices/set tops that can render locally.

Those who care will turn to the PC. So in a way there's a chance that the PC industry may turn around a little... but just slightly.

Or I'm full of crap like most people are with these predictions...
 
c4v3man said:
One way to look at it is that console gamers don't care as much as PC Gamers, so console gamers who just want pretty graphics but don't care as much about response time, etc will be will served by cloud streamed gaming. Most just want Wii-type games that will be well served by convergence devices/set tops that can render locally.

Those who care will turn to the PC. So in a way there's a chance that the PC industry may turn around a little... but just slightly.

Or I'm full of crap like most people are with these predictions...
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I see what your saying, but didn't ONLive just lay off their entire staff and go out of business?
 
Cliffy B can no longer be constrained by Epic, and has decided to branch out and design more Gears of War and UT clones on his own.
 
Spire3660 said:
Everything Epic has put out since UT2004 and Gears 1 has been utter shit. Cliff has shown nothing but comtempt for PC since he got his console-fueled swimming pool of money. Im not sad to see him go.
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This + 1 billion

I used to love Cliffy B but then he took a dump in a box and sold it as UT III and started blaming all of his failures on piracy. He went from being one of the biggest pc gaming advocates to a total sell out over night with the success of gears of war.

I would prefer if the article was about leaving Epic by means of jumping of a cliff to his death.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039204896 said:
I see what your saying, but didn't ONLive just lay off their entire staff and go out of business?
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Im pretty sure there was an article saying that was a business move to mess with their books while selling the company and save some money. Pretty much every one was rehired IIRC
 
Kardonxt said:
Im pretty sure there was an article saying that was a business move to mess with their books while selling the company and save some money. Pretty much every one was rehired IIRC
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The OnLive service is still functional, and they're not the only streaming gaming company, just the biggest perhaps.
 
Oh and they would not let him make jazz jackrabbit again either.

I would leave too


Jazz_Jackrabbit_2.PNG
 
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