Interview with John Carmack

Overview

Date: Jun 30, 1999
Original URL: http://web.archive.org/web/20030515172424/http://www.cdmag.com/articles/021/004/jc_interview.html
Synopsis: id Software's owner and lead programmer talks about Quake III Arena

Other staff members have come and gone since the unofficial genesis of id Software in September of 1990. From the original four founders (John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, John Romero, and Tom Hall) who came together to create both id and the Commander Keen series, the company has grown only slightly in size -14 members currently fill the roles of the id staff. Their technological prowess and influence within the computer game industry have grown immeasurably, however, and now the powerhouse developer is working full steam to deliver their next first-person shooter. We cornered founder and lead programmer John Carmack in the halls of id's Mesquite, Texas offices to gather his thoughts on Quake III Arena.

Questions

Benjamin E. Sones: What are you most excited about in regards to Quake III Arena?

John Carmack: Well, one of the things is that because of the way the development schedule has gone this time, I've had a lot more time to make a lot of the technology really "well done" and robust. It's turned out that the game engine is not the leading factor in this project. Right now the leading factor is getting the bots and the single-player experience going. So that's really given me more room than I usually have to go in and make sure that everything not only works, but actually is pretty much doing the right thing and it's giving us a more flexible infrastructure to go for, which means that other companies that wind up working with the technology, and all the user community stuff is going to work out, and yet again be more flexible than anything that's been done before. I know that's not going to have any immediate impact, but as we look towards six months after release, or twelve months after release, that's where those things are really going to shine through.

Benjamin E. Sones: Will this game cater to the mod community to the same extent as your past projects have?

John Carmack: Ever since Wolfenstein that's been one of my primary design goals-to go ahead and make something that's going to be flexible and easy to add on and play with in different ways, because one of the things is, all game designs are elements of compromise. We have to go ahead and make certain rules that we think are going to be right for what we're doing but it really is something I like a whole lot, the fact that it is fairly straightforward for people to go in and change the game to suit themselves. I think that's a good thing. In some ways there's definitely a lot more flexibility than we've had before. Whether or not it will be easier or more difficult to take advantage of, I'm not sure yet. There is more that people have to think about in a few ways, because we have modifications being done on the client side as well as the server side. But it's definitely way more powerful, and it doesn't require a commercial compiler to go ahead and do the work with.

When we did Quake II there was kind of this dividing point where going to .DLLs lets you do much more advanced things, and it brought out things that you never would have been able to do in Quake with QC, but it did mean that you pretty much had to be pretty much a professional programmer with professional development tools and everything to work with it. Now we can use a freely available compiler for [Quake III Arena] that will be available to anyone and allow anyone to work with that. All in all, Quake II mods definitely did come out, and it was almost certainly for the best-we got more sophisticated mods with more development work. There was less of "here's my mods that will make more gibs" that we got with Quake, where everyone can just go in and do their ten line modification. That was cool because it did get a lot of people more interested in programming but it just wasn't a professional enough development environment to do some really major modifications. People did go ahead and bump right up against the limits of what you could do with Quake II, and those are the people who are going to be thrilled with what you get with Quake III. You actually can go ahead and build an entirely new user interface and complete client-side presentation. We've got an extremely elegant, orthogonal graphics engine that people can work with, our shading language is really great.

Really, Quake III-our game-isn't going to exploit most of the things we've got in terms of graphics. We've made a pretty specific design decision to focus on the fast action stuff. Speed is one of the most important factors in what we're doing right now. I do expect that other companies working with the technology-and even with mods-there's going to be people that do some really, really, neat things. As we [are developing] the technology, right now our artists are just getting into the swing of building procedural shader stuff and everything like that, but we can't go back and rework everything. Honestly, that's something that I'm a little bit disappointed with we have a bunch of technology in [the engine] that we aren't exploiting properly yet. We've got things like specular maps and detail maps, and these things just aren't in any of the levels. A lot of that does come back to the speed thing-people will put one of these things in at some place, and then they go over their polygon budget and they have to pull it back out.

All the mainstays of id Software products we do have-the best graphics stuff, the best networking, and I think it's going to have the best gameplay. It comes down to some design decisions, and I am happy with the ones we've made. We have been focusing on a general, broad appeal. There are a lot of more sophisticated games that you can make that will appeal very strongly to the people that are more serious about some things, and I think that games like Team Fortress 2 will fall into this [category]. The people that will be into that kind of gameplay will love it-they will love it more than they will love Quake III, but there's a larger base of people who just want to sit down and have some idle entertainment. I still immensely pleased that our secretary is addicted to Quake III Arena] now. She's been here since Doom, but this is the first game that she has started playing every day, and I think that's a real winning thing. We have also catered to the other side, the real hardcore tournament player that we are making a lot of design decisions around. Like the fact that you can configure Quake III to run as fast as Quake II if you're willing to have it look like crap. [Laughs]. That's just a level of flexibility that will be up to the user to decide.

Benjamin E. Sones: More than one id employee has made the comparison between Quake III Arena and fighting games such as Mortal Kombat is that a valid assessment of Quake III's gameplay?

John Carmack: Not really, because we're not focused on one-on-one or head-to-head. Tournament play will be like that, but most of the maps-900f them-are designed for 4 or more players. Being in there with at least small teams or a larger number of people in a free-for-all that is more the flavor of the game. We do scale kind of both ways, to one-on-one and also to the much larger games, but we've kind of looked at our sweet spot being in the 4 to 8 player range. That's the type of pick-up deathmatch games that I most enjoy playing, where you've got a reasonable number of people running around. It's a different game than the "cat and mouse" of head-to-head. Those are just pure judgement calls, there are other valid game styles to be had. In general the game is not about the one-on-one [gameplay] like fighting games are.

Benjamin E. Sones: But not as much about story, either?

John Carmack: No, not at all. We're still all about the experience of the combat in that way, yes, it is very much like the fighting games where there is some back story, but who the hell cares? The game has to be fun as you're doing your actions, as you're sitting there doing your "bob and weave," "duck and attack" that's what has to be fun-not the fact that you are progressing through a story to some end goal. That's something that I'm making no excuses about, no slipping around saying "Oh, there is a story" and all that. Yes, there is a little back-story, but that's not the point. The point is that the game is fun to play. There's value to be had in story-driven games-it's another valid style. It's not like we're saying "this is the only way to do games;" but one thing we absolutely are coming out and saying is that this is a valid way of doing games, and we are not apologizing for the lack of story.

Benjamin E. Sones: Some people have said that is one of id's strengths is Quake III Arena an attempt to strip away the non-essentials and focus on what you are best at?

John Carmack: Absolutely. I wanted to do this in Quake, where the last month somebody writes up a story for it-"blah blah blah,"-and I just wanted to say "whatever it's not the point." I would rather not attempt to do something when I know we're going to do a slipshod job at it.

Benjamin E. Sones: Was balancing weapons towards deathmatch a major issue in this game?

John Carmack: The major issue in designing weapons for single-player is that in single-player you have to start off with a pea shooter, because the weapons are the major cookies that you get as you go along. Your character gets bigger and more powerful by getting bigger and more powerful offensive capabilities. In single-player it's not as rewarding to get a weapon that has a different tactical benefit; you want to be able to just impart massive destruction. You just need to be able to go in and lay waste to everything. That is what gives you the good feedback, [that is] the "treasure" in single-player. That's not what you want in multiplayer. We've got one weapon that is the "massive devastation" weapon, and a lot of people will hate that it's in there when they get killed by it but a lot of that is the fact that people will argue about anything.

There is something to be said for the argument, what a lot of the Quake players said about Quake II was that they thought the weapons were too balanced. Different people could have fair fights with multiple different weapons, and we generally thought that was a positive step. In Quake everyone liked the rocket launcher, and people with good framerates and good connections liked the lightning gun. That was basically it-nobody cared about the nailgun and the single shotgun they might as well have not even been there. We're still of the opinion that we would rather have more weapons that tend to be effective, but there is a little bit more spread between them [in Quake III Arena]. In some cases you come down to different styles of games, where some people like a style of game that just isn't what we're making.

A lot of people in Quake liked the kind of "blow out" matches where you get control of the level, and it's not even a matter of fair fights, it's just a matter of maintaining your dominance, and you get scores of 50 to 1. Some people really enjoy that, but I don't think that in general that is a fun game for most people. We have tried to build in changes that prevent that from happening. A perfect game is where the relative rankings of players is proportional to their skill, and Quake was not terribly balanced like that. You would have somebody, who was definitely better, but they would just completely wipe the floor with somebody who was only a little bit worse than them, and we don't feel that offers a real good sense of proportional advancement. You still want a game that's fair, where the better players always wins, but you don't want it to be completely demoralizing to the person who gets really close, but just doesn't quite get into that niche.

Benjamin E. Sones: Tell us about the single-player game.

John Carmack: I'm really happy with the elements of the single-player game where there are two axes that you're advancing on-you have the opening up of new levels, and then you have your relative ranking to all the bots in the game. That has some nice feedback characteristics to it where if you're going in and you're not that great at the game-you just don't have massively wonderful reflexes-you will get in and reach your plateau, and the game will keep putting in relatively appropriate bots for you. Even if you've plateaued and reached the extent of your skills, if you keep going at it, you will eventually get to see all the levels. Even if you reach a level that you really are no good at, if you keep losing your rank will eventually start to go down, and if you do that long enough eventually the game will put in the bots that essentially stand still and let you shoot them. Persistence will get you through the game, if you are having fun. There is also the other axis, where even if you don't care about seeing all the levels and you want to fight to hone your skills, you can pick your favorite level and just keep playing on that until you work your rank up above all the other bots. I think that's a really nice thing, because in all of our games-since way back when-there has been this demoralizing aspect that even though we make 30 levels of the game, most players never see all those levels. Each level takes the same amount of time to create, we've got designers making things and putting all this effort into making things that most people will never see. I don't have any hard numbers to back it up, but I would bet that only a minority of people played through all the levels in Quake II.

Benjamin E. Sones: Are there any incentives built into the single-player game that give the player reason to play all the way through, or do you feel that it is not even an issue?

John Carmack: Seeing new levels-that is a reward, to open up and see new environments to play in, and seeing new models for the enemy bot characters. We have ranking awards as that kind of cookie thing that we present, and I am really happy with the reward things we've got like the "impressives" and "excellents" that you get while you're playing the game that was a perfect thing to add because it brings a smile to everyone's face every time it happens, and it's not taking something away from other players. It's a really great game design aspect, because if you give the player a cooler weapon it takes something away from the other player-they get killed more easily, and it's more frustrating for them. But it's a free cookie when you can give something away like [verbal accolades], because the other player is already dead. We've tried a few things like that, but we haven't come across many that are worthwhile-the "impressives" for accurate railgun hits and the "excellents" for multiple deaths within a short amount of time we think those have stood really well. We're going to track all of those, and in the single-player game you will get little merit badge-type things to track your achievement there. If you've been playing the game a long time you can have a big row of awards like that.

Benjamin E. Sones: Will there be a ranking system in the multiplayer game?

John Carmack: No. We considered doing that, and in my original Quakeworld experimentation I had global ranking on everything, and it was a really interesting issue because that split the community almost down the middle. There were people that like it and thought it was a great idea, and the other half thought it took away from the game, and there were valid arguments for that too. There were behaviors you would start seeing from people where, a lot of time when you are playing on servers you're kind of just goofing off, having a good time, trying goofy stuff or just playing casually with you friends. When every frag was logged, people got a lot less friendly. You'd see people who would abort out of games they saw somebody tough enter the game, because they didn't want to risk having a fair fight. There was a lot more whining and complaining. The right way to do it would be to have it optional, where servers would be logged or not. As soon as you're into people setting up their own servers with their own rule modifications, it's just a huge can of worms. I would rather allow more diversity to happen by just allowing people to change the rules on their servers and run modifications and things like that, rather than to have it be "here is the game, in crystallized form, which we are going to be ranking people on." I think there are going to be servers that have rankings for just the people who play on those servers. You're not going to be able to say "I'm the best player in the world" there is definitely value to that, but what it would take away from the community as a whole, it's just a non-optable thing.