“There is a lot of good to be said about Epic and Valve and the tacks that they’ve taken,” Carmack told me during an interview in Dallas last week during QuakeCon. “They’ve both grown to be much bigger companies than id Software was. And, you know, somebody could look at this and say I held id back, because I did not want to grow the company into a really big company at those times. And maybe we would have been better off to do that, but we came off pretty good, so I’m not going to kick myself over any of that.”

Earlier this decade, id Tech 3, the graphics technology used in Quake III Arena, was widely licensed in the industry, used in games like EA’s James Bond Everything or Nothing and the first Call of Duty. At the time, Carmack told me, id didn’t have the support team to handle a wide number of licensees. “Our technology licence stuff was, ‘Ok you pay this and you can have eight hours of technical support,” Carmack recalled. “You can come down and talk to me for eight hours. Mostly it’s, you’re on your own, because we didn’t have support staff.”

To do that better and for more game companies, id would have to grow. Carmack didn’t want that. “We knew that we didn’t want to have the big support staff like they have for things. And I didn’t want to give away the kind of freedom. When you have 50 licensees on stuff like that, you are handcuffed.”

Carmack couldn’t tolerate having to accommodate the need to minimise his own programming efforts in order to not shift code too much and unsettle the other companies relying on the same tech. “The work I’m doing now on id Tech Five is changing some fundamental class hierarchy stuff across all of our resources, and it’s the right thing to do. It’s better, because of that. It’s incredibly painful just doing it in our code base. There’s no way I would contemplate doing that if I had 50 other development teams that would have to go through and make similar changes on there.”

Money left on the table? Perhaps, Carmack said. “It’s a good business on there. We did great on the Quake III generation, tons and tons of licenses on that. But it does tie up your arms a little bit technically and it does mean you’re out of the game business and you’re in the technology supplier business. There are aspects to that that are admirable. There’s definitely a part of me that, as an engineer, says it would be great to try and document this really well, try and clean it up and make it as good as you possibly can, because there’s always this balance between making something really good code and rapidly exploring as many things as you can on there.”

Let the Epics and Valves sweat that stuff, he is happy to conclude. Let them worry about making sure Unreal Engine 3, Source or whatever else works for all the companies that pay to use it.

“I don’t gainsay anybody their success,” he said. “I’m happy to see everybody doing good work on there. I think it’s great to see Epic and Valve doing their thing. I like the industry. I like seeing the industry being vibrant and competitive. “

The game is “getting closer” the Fallout and Oblivion game director told me during our interview at QuakeCon in Dallas.

“I put some of that on hold, because I knew we would be doing some stuff with id.” That “stuff” was Bethesda parent company ZeniMax’s June purchase of the renowned first-person shooter development studio. id co-founder John Carmack has been aggressively working on the iPhone platform, now promising an iPhone game just about every other month. He remembers thinking, “I’ll wait and see what John has to say about it.”

The game is not a personal Todd Howard project. Think of it as a Bethesda game, though Howard wouldn’t offer gameplay details or subject matter. I asked if it would be a Fallout or Elder Scrolls project, but he’d only remind me that “those are things we really like.”

Carmack willing, it seems, the game will proceed. “It’s one of those things where I wish it would happen sooner,” Howard said, “But we’re definitely going to do some stuff.”

Yesterday, I posted about the greatest feeling in video games as determined by Splash Damage’s Paul Wedgwood. I explained how he hopes his studio’s next game, the team-based first-person shooter Brink will deliver more of it.

But when I interviewed Wedgwood at QuakeCon 2009 last week, he also told me about something that bugs him.

We were sitting at the far end of a hotel meeting room in Dallas that contained a long table surrounded by chairs. Wedgwood got out of his chair and approached the furniture to explain what I’d call the Table Problem.

“If I walk up to a table and the level-designer made it an inch higher than I’m able to jump, that’s it, I can’t get over the table,” he said. He and I sized up the table he was standing near. It wasn’t that tall.

“So even though I’m 200 pounds — maybe 210 and somewhat chubby — I can vault that table if I ran at it right now and get across that table,” he said. I agreed with him, but hoped he wouldn’t try it. There wasn’t much room for a running start, and who knows how much weight a hotel table can support.

“Walking into this room, I know to avoid the tables and chairs,” he said, reasonably. “I don’t get stuck on geometry. But in a shooter, I can’t see my feet. Even if I rendered the whole model, I can’t see my feet in this view I’m using.” As a result, people get stuck bumping into things in shooters that they’d never walk into in real life.

Solution, please.

Well, Wedgwood first shared what the old solution has been: “What level designers do to get around this is having boardrooms that don’t have furniture in them. In multiplayer games you have to have super-smooth clipped routes.”

And if there’s something to climb, maybe a wall or a table that’s in the room to vault, a game programmer inserts what Wedgwood called an “entity,” a programming instruction that produces a signal to players that that given wall or table can be clambered over. “If he forgets to put an entity there — or if the designer didn’t want you to [climb] — you suddenly have an invisible barrier. And, bam, your immersion’s gone. You’re out of the game because you find that so frustrating. Why can’t I climb up that wall, because the icon shows up, but not that one? Worse still: When you hit the button, you enter a canned animation until you get to the top. And that’s it, done.”

Wedgwood was exercised about this and described to me what Brink would do different. “We wanted a system that was real-time, dynamic, blended animations, full trace of the geometry around you, not faked, not clutched. In other words, if I decided that I’m going to mantle up that wall, if it’s a height I could climb or reasonably jump to, I can, irrespective of what a level designer wants. If it’s there, I need to be able to climb it. And, as I’m climbing it, as my first hand comes free, I want to be able to start shooting. As my second hand comes free, I want to be able to start re-loading. If I want to stop and take my finger off the button, I want to drop back down to the floor. If, as I’m dropping I hit jump, I want to kick away from the wall. It must be a completely dynamic, fluid system. It’s not on auto-pilot, but it is smart, which is handy because it stands for Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain [laughs].”

Credit Bethesda marketing for the acronym, he noted.

And he continued with what sounded like a furthering of the freedom of movement given to first-person gamers in last year’s Mirror’s Edge:

“The idea behind this is that, when I want to get where I’m going to, I’m holding down my sprint button, because I’m going there as quick as I can. At that point, I’ve given the game permission to interpret, intuitively what I want to do, which is to vault, step up, jump or do whatever. But I want some control over that. So, if I look up, I want you to go up the route that mantles me over something. And, if I look down, I want you to slide me underneath it. So, if I hit a security centre, I can make that choice in real time. I’m steering, I’m turning. And, if I let go, I stop what I’m doing at any given point.

“So, all it does is solve the problem of you not seeing your feet in an intuitive way that would work if you walked into this room, which is why you didn’t bump into any of the chairs or tables, because you can see them because they’re in your view. And this is great because our level designers can now flood our maps with tons of crap that makes it feel much more realistic. And the little routes and things are not based on complex player-clipping. And that just makes a huge difference.”

I saw some of this, particularly the player-character wall-scrambling, with my own eyes when Wedgwood played the game live on stage at QuakeCon the next day. I can’t vouch for the nuances he described about free hands being used to do things the moment they are free.

But I can vouch for the real Paul Wedgwood not bumping into any of the furniture in the Dallas hotel room. He avoided all of it.

Brink is set for release in the spring of 2010.

[PIC]

The August release of the fifth downloadable mission-pack for Fallout 3 wrapped up a hefty mid-year helping of new content for one of the most acclaimed games of Fallout 3. The game’s executive producer, Todd Howard of Bethesda Softworks, told me last week in Dallas at QuakeCon that he’s happy with the roll-out. “We knew we wanted to do three initially and we’ll see where that goes,” he said. ” I kind of had in my mind that the upper limit was five. Part of that was what I think people are willing to continue to pay for a game. And a lot of that is our own internal bandwidth.”

With the launch of Mothership Zeta, Bethesda’s met Howard’s goal. Five game-expanding pieces of content, each granting players about four hour’ worth of game time for $US10, are now out on the Xbox 360 and PC. The packs are planned for a PlayStation 3 release this next month, with, according to Howard, about one new one per week, starting with the game’s end-changing and level-cap-raising Broken Steel.

The DLC packs began development as work on Fallout 3 wrapped last year, about two months’ prior to the game’s late October shipping date. Howard recalled that he had two groups out of his 90-person development team working in parallel on the first two expansions, Operation Anchorage and The Pitt. “About half the team goes on to the next big game,” he said, making no attempt to hint at what their next project will be. “The other half, which is mostly a lot of artists and designers go on to DLC stuff.”

The creation of the DLC is the fun part, Howard said as the designers are freed from having to wrestle with technology and have fun. That liberation produced the early suggestions to throw aliens in, but Howard delayed that desire until Mothership Zeta. “That one kept coming up: ‘We should do alien abduction, we should do alien abduction.’ I thought it was hilarious, and I said, ‘We should wait. That isn’t like the classic Fallout. You kind of want to keep the footprint of aliens in Fallout small.” But once we got to the fifth one, it’s like: It’s really funny. It’s a cool concept. We should do it.’ And the reason I like it is I do like the DLC to feel like something new. And that one, just on the surface, is instantly: this is different. It’s not more of the same, I’m out in the wasteland.”

Howard called out Point Lookout, the fourth DLC, as one of his favourites, referring to it as “one of the biggest and best DLCs.” That one, which brings the player to a spooky new island to have an adventure that plays as a microcosm of the original game was developed by Joel Burgess, lead level designer of Fallout 3 and Nate Porcupile, one of the game’s artists. “We knew we were going to do a fourth DLC, I said to them: ‘I think you guys should do this,’” Come up with some ideas and pitch us. And that’s what they did. That was on the case that, on a bigger game, they wouldn’t have gotten that opportunity.” The single design directive for that one, Howard said, came from something he thought the first DLC releases lacked. “It it felt like the other DLCs didn’t do what the game does best, which is give me a wide-open area to explore. So let’s do a DLC that gives you that in a new way.”

The DLC’s now done, all available for PC and 360 users and soon playable on the PS3. Bethesda’s moving on. Five got the job done.

This room of humming computers, quietly clicking keyboards, and energised gamers is the throbbing heart of QuakeCon, id Software’s annual fan gathering held last week in Grapevine, Texas.

While the free convention, held in a Dallas, Texas-area hotel each year, sheds light on new projects in the works by the famed developers behind Quake, Doom and Return to Wolfenstein, what makes this gathering unique is it’s sense of camaraderie. Gamers from across the country, and sometimes around the world, bring their own computers to the event to hook them up in a massive network and game together.

It is, id Software says, three days of Peace, Love and Rockets.

This year the event drew more than 7,000 people to the Dallas-area and included a more than two-hour talk by id developer John Carmack. But QuakeCon hasn’t always been so auspicious. The convention grew out of a gathering of gamers in the summer of 1996 that was more pilgrimage than celebration, said id Software president Todd Hollenshead.

“A bunch of guys made a pilgrimage to Dallas to see if they could get (John Carmack) to talk at their LAN party,” he said.

The group all gathered at a hotel in Garland, Texas a few miles from id Software. They set up an impromptu tournament and then emailed Carmack asking if he could swing by.

On the last day, Carmack showed up and talked to the group in the hotel’s parking lot for about half an hour.

The late night parking lot chat and the days leading up to it have, over the years, blossomed into a gaming party of sorts, with tournaments, music, gaming and Carmack’s annual chat.

Although the event has always been held close to id Software’s Texas offices, that doesn’t stop a group of id developers from moving into the hotel for the show’s four days so they can check in as often as they’d like on the 24-hour a day gaming.

“People who come to QuakeCon are genuinely enthused about PCs,” Hollenshead said. “They lug their PCs to the hotel just to play for 72 hours.”

QuakeCon provides the tables, the chairs, the power and the cabling to hook all of those thousands of computers together, the gamers provide everything else.

“I think this is the largest free event of its kind in North America and the largest bring-your-own-computer in the world,” he said.

The lights in the massive gaming room go off Thursday and don’t come back on again until Sunday, and some people try to take advantage of every minute of that potential game time.

“There are people who will literally go down there and play until they are done,” he said. “We’ve had instances of people who pass out at their computers.

“People will bring pillows, lay them over the keyboard and go to sleep. We don’t encourage that, because it’s probably not the best thing.”

The computers, many modified into outlandish shapes like small coffins or Transformer Optimus Prime, light up the otherwise darked space.

“It’s a cool thing to see – the monitors and the neon,” Hollenshead said

While QuakeCon is returning to its roots in some ways, it’s also moving forward in others. Earlier this year id Software was purchased by the company that owns developer Bethesda Games.

Last week Bethesda Games attended their first ever QuakeCon, remaining quietly in the background of the show typically dedicated to id. But that is something that could change in the future.

“The potential is that we could have a bigger and more exciting QuakeCon” with Bethesda’s help,” Hollenshead said.

It makes sense for QuakeCon to try and expand from an id-centric experience to one more broadly dedicated to PC gaming in all of its forms.

The current stable of cutting-edge consoles have eroded the home computer’s already failing gamer-base and groups like the PC Gaming Alliance are bringing groups together to try and draw that audience back.

Hollenshead believes that as this generation of consoles age, PC games are regaining their advantage.

“As consoles go into their fifth Christmas the technology advantage of the PC is going to become an important factor,” He said. “It’s likely over the next couple years that PC gaming will have a a bigger competitive advantage.”

Wedgwood’s means to this end is Brink, the squad-based shooter he showed to attendees during a stage demo at QuakeCon in Dallas on Friday (Brink preview here). A day earlier, I spoke to him about the game and its planned deployment as a tool that can blur the lines between single-player and multiplayer gaming.

As Wedgwood walked me through his answer and discussed a conversation he has had with Brink’s creative director, Richard Ham, he brought me to this monument of a statement:

“I’ve convinced him that the buzz you get from coordinated team play is beyond and above just about every other experience that you can have as a video gamer,” he said. “But the jump from single-player shooter player to my end of the spectrum — which is the high-end tournament clan combat — is one where you have to have such a thick skin and such dedication to your aim that most people are put off. What we’d love to do is just help people find that route to the incredible buzz that we get from coordination by giving them a system that allows them to coordinate with strangers to get things done.”

Wedgwood described the way his game will do that and how it compares to the efforts of other designers in great detail. I’ll share his concept below.

But, first, I must note that listening to the audio recording of my chat with Wedgwood today, Sunday brings to mind an unlikely parallel development to his stated goal: the creation of Rock Band.

The New York Times Magazine’s glowing cover story on Beatles Rock Band — one of the most prominent stories I’ve ever seen about a video game — quotes Harmonix co-founder Alex Rigopulos discussing the missed opportunity so many people have of playing instruments: “They spend the rest of their lives loving music, and listening to music, and playing a lot of air guitar, but not having any outlet for that innate urge they feel.” Rigopulos has said as much to me and other reporters that Harmonix has been driven by the desire to use video games to give to those who don’t have the skill to play music the thrill of playing music. Rock Band, evolving the idea further, simulates the nirvana of playing music in a group.

What we’ve got in Harmonix and, it seems, in Wedgwood’s studio, Splash Damage, is men and women in game development who are engineering the medium to transport a person — a player — into a situation in which they’ll find themselves suddenly skilled to do something they never thought themselves capable.

To get us there, to the sublime peak of coordinated group play, Wedgwood and Brink’s Richard Ham had to confront a formidable obstacle, the ugliness of playing online games with other people, when you’re not good at such games. This is possibly the analogue to getting on stage at a concert, guitar in hand, without knowing how to play at the speed of the rest of the band.

Practicing alone doesn’t help much.

“If you play through a traditional single-player shooter — the kind of mine-cart-style ones — the enemy’s always in front of you, and you’re witnessing canned cinematics,” Wedgwood said. “It just doesn’t prepare you for being out-flanked when you go online. If the first thing that happens is that, not only are you out-flanked, but it happens five times in a row, he teabags you at the end of each one and shouts “Homo!” over the VOIP [voice-communication], you just quit and can’t be bothered. It’s just no fun. And Richard Ham, our creative director, is just obsessed with solving that problem.”

The Brink guys yearn for their players to be skilled online team gamers but have to worry about things like racial epithets scaring their players from the stage. That’s a challenge.

To appreciate their planned path past that obstacle, it helps to absorb a description of how varied and complex the activities in the game might be. Wedgwood explained to me how this squad shooter, which can be played alone or with friends, put the player in the role of a fighter of change-able classification and skill-set. Bear in mind that the Brink player always has squad-mates in the game, whether another person is playing with them or not:

“At any given point you could be playing one of four different combat roles. We have this squad commander, essentially an AI mission director. Based on the combat role that you’ve chosen and your location on the battlefield and the status of these big objectives that you’re trying to pull off, it generates a bunch of missions on a rapid-access objective wheel. And you have segments which represent how difficult they are. Each one that you do can take you on a completely different route and the end result will be very different gameplay. Sneaking behind enemy lines and interrogating an enemy with a taser is nothing like hacking into a back-door and opening up a route for your team, which is nothing like trying to get to a security gate, when all focus is on that gate and it’s an absolute choke point — and you’re the one who does the touchdown with the heavy explosive charge. So as you play through the game we have this branching mission structure which leads to a highly re-playable experience because it rarely feels like you’re doing the same thing that you did before — unless you choose to because you had fun doing it last time.”

That’s the gameplay structure. Here’s the scheme for getting the player to that sublime peak of coordinated group machinations:

“What we want to do is create something where, if you bought it, didn’t have an Internet connection, never went near cooperative gameplay it was still a really fun, compelling squad-based game. But if you happened to go online, your friend can join you.

“Let’s say you have a friend who has already finished both campaigns and he’s at work. He’s recommended the game to you. You’ve been playing for a couple of hours. He gets home. You can invite him and he can just jump straight into your game with his badass character all decked out in cool gear and everything and play alongside you.

“When you’ve got some experience playing, the game’s going to say to you: Why don’t you go online and try playing with some strangers? Just cooperatively and we’re not even going to turn on VOIP [voice-communication] — there’s no point, you don’t need to talk to anybody, the game coordinates for you, you’re not going to get put off by what they’re doing.”

By default, Wedgwood told me, that VOIP is turned off for anyone who isn’t on the player’s friends list. That AI mission director will ensure they have the opportunity to have a productive and un-harassed co-op play experience. Players will be able to play with humans without having the uncomfortable consequences of sharing an open mic with strangers in an online shooter. Ideally, the game will enhance the player’s skills to a level that makes them competitive and interested in team tactics.

All that would bring players of Brink to the level of coordination of a well-tuned band.

That’s quite a climb. And it’s a heady endeavor.

Brink’s out next spring on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. We’ll know then just how high it can take us.

(QuakeCon ‘09 may have wrapped this weekend, but Kotaku still has more to share from it, even for gamers who don’t consider themselves the target audience for QuakeCon material. Expect more from Carmack, Howard and more in the next couple of days.)

Carmack made those comments on Thursday, during the id co-founder’s QuakeCon 2009 keynote speech in Dallas (the event that spawned the Longest Liveblog In Kotaku History).

Early in his address, he admitted that Quake Live, the multiplayer in-browser web remake of Quake III Arena that went into open beta early this year, was not up to id’s standard yet. Leaderboards and more community functionality around the game need to be improved, he said. Later, he fielded a question from the audience about the future of the game.

Carmack said he did not think the game could survive on internet advertising alone; the only revenue generator currently in place. Instead, he believes it will be necessary for the financial wellbeing of the project to offer a premium version of the game, which might allow players to host games on their own servers. Web ads won’t suffice.

The Quake Live project is grander than Carmack said he had envisioned, which may be as much a factor in spurring this need for player payment as a weak online ad market. But the game, at its base, will remain free, he noted.

Carmack said the “beta” tag will be removed from the game soon, as problems with leaderboards and other technical issues are resolved. Mac and Linux versions are planned to go live this coming week.

Early in his talk, Carmack said that the next year would prove whether Quake Live is a success. Later, when answering that audience question, he said the game wouldn’t be able to be deemed a failure for two years. He hopes such a pronouncement won’t be necessary, of course.

He said the game has been popular, with half of those who register for it returning to play it at least once a month.

This experiment will continue with some tinkering that users may need to pay for.

Brink is the Bethesda-published game from the makers of Enemy Territory Quake Wars, Splash Damage. The studio’s chief, Paul Wedgwood, took the same stage from where John Carmack addressed the QuakeCon 2009 faithful earlier this week to drive the first public demo of the game.

Set in the future on Earth, Brink depicts two factions — resistance and security — at war over the floating and failed eco-paradise city of Ark. Maps from that city are the battlefields of the game, with major objectives associated with each map that comprises the game’s two single-player campaigns. Any part of the game can be played alone or with other players dropping in to take control of squad mates.

Wedgwood entered yesterday’s demo in a map set at the so-called Container City, the one seen in the second screenshot here. An in-engine cut-scene quickly established the arrival of his character and two AI-controlled members of his squad. I entered the hall where Wedgwood was doing the demo too late to catch the main mission objective, but it was obvious that the squad was going to infiltrate a hostile zone with orders to proceed inside. The Container City was full of corrugated tin walls and toppled shipping containers, a mess of a sector inspired by the favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Wedgwood was playing as security, decking his character in a blue uniform, face-paint and shades; accoutrements that may be among the cosmetic unlockables that will show other players who is good at this game.

As an operative-class fighter, Wedgwood plunged into a firefight, using his sub machine gun to shoot at resistance fighters in the region. He didn’t have to be an operative. And he didn’t have to keep playing one. The essence of Brink is playing as a multi-class squad, taking on class-specific missions and changing class in the heat of battle if need be. An individual player’s missions — tasks, really, that the player does within the context of the larger battle they’ve entered — are generated on the fly.

In the situation being demoed, Wedgwood pulled up a radial menu that showed several available missions for his character class, specific to the current fight. Missions grant experience points which can be used to get better items. One mission, for 300 experience points, involved interrogating an enemy. Selecting it produced an arrow at the top of the screen that guided Wedgwood to a downed enemy. Finding the enemy, Wedgwood’s character produced an iPhone look-alike in his left hand and transformed it into something that looked more like an electric-shock device. He extracted his info; his character’s right hand popped a thumbs up, and Wedgwood pulled up a menu to browse more missions.

Throughout the demo, the game sported the visual signatures of a first-person shooter, like the on-screen barrel of the player’s gun. Less common was its adoption of a visual element seen in last year’s first-person free-running game, Mirror’s Edge. Wedgwood’s character could amble up a crate, vault over a wall, his hero more athletic and acrobatic than most first-person shooter protagonists.

Remaining an operative, Wedgwood selected a 10xp second mission to escort a bot. This led him to a large, golf cart-sized rolling robot. The longer he stayed with it, the more points he gained. Then he took a mission to change into an engineer for 250 points. To do that mission, a guide arrow led him back to a controlled command post. He arrived, changed to an engineer and immediately selected a mission to repair a crane (500xp). Engineers have repair and construction abilities, and can lay mines. At this point, two other developers joined and took control of Wedgwood’s two squad mates.

Wedgwood explained that the game would keep generating contextual missions that suited the classes of the three controlled characters. They assisted each other until reaching a narrative choke point that cued an in-engine cut-scene and a cliffhanger — the three troopers discovering something surprising that we couldn’t see.

Brink already looks very good. It boasts the level of graphical detail up there with Call of Duty and approaching even Killzone 2, but with a more diverse colour palette than Sony’s drab first-person shooter. The area Wedgwood was fighting in was densely packed, a tighter theatre of war than seen in some of the flashy games just mentioned. It’s a compliment to the art direction and graphical prowess that it was surprising to hear the game runs on modified id tech, Wedgwood said, evolved from what his studio developed with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

Wedgwood’s demo concluded to rousing applause. It was fitting given the heritage of the project and the new corporate reality of the company behind QuakeCon 2009. Brink’s development studio, Splash Damage, has long worked closely with id. And, months ago, Brink was announced to be published by Bethesda, the company that subsequently bought id weeks before the big show.

This may have been the ideal game for QuakeCon ‘09. The crowd loved it.

Brink is set for release in the spring of 2010 for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Answering fan questions on the subject, Howard said that there are “no current plans” for a fifth game in the Elder Scrolls series.

A little disappointing, true, but remember, “no current plans” only means no current plans. Plans change. And hey, maybe he’s just being coy, and they’re working on Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion II!

QuakeCon 2009: Todd Howard keynote highlights [Big Download]

Glimpsed from a distance QuakeCon’s “Bring Your Own Computer” conclave looks more like something NASA, than frag related.