Back in the day I played a lot of online FPS games, but one really stuck with me and earned most of my devotion: Enemy Territory, the free (and now open source) team, class and objective-based game. I remember during a late night session, one of my clan-mates said:

congusbongus always goes for the objectives eh?

It was the first time I really thought about how people play the same game in different ways, and enjoy different aspects of it. Later I would learn about Bartle’s player types and how that applies to all sorts of multiplayer games, and mechanics like different player classes or even weapon types clearly caters to different kinds of players. But herein lies a problem: how do you get different kinds of players to come together and interact, instead of running off doing their own thing? Players like me would do the objectives because that’s the goal of the game, after all, but what about players who don’t care about that, and instead might grief, camp or just mess around?

Plenty of mechanics prevent the most antisocial of behaviours. Spawn protection prevents the worst kinds of spawn camping, and limited ammo prevents players from camping advantageous terrain indefinitely. But I want to look at how map design can focus the action, provide good pacing, and enable dynamic gameplay so different kinds of players can shine and enjoy the game in their own ways. For that we need to first look at the classic Enemy Territory map Supply Depot.

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Everyone loves game maps. Especially when it comes to large game worlds, there’s nothing quite like looking at a mesmerising map filled with awesome detail, and imagine (re)inhabiting parts of this virtual world. When studying a map of a game that I’ve spent dozens if not hundreds of hours in, I often get a sense of both familiarity and strangeness. It’s not just that the map shows a different perspective of the same world I experienced as a game avatar, but that the map misrepresents the player experience world in fundamental ways.

My love of game maps drove me to hand-draw this map of the obscure DOS roguelike Magus recently. From https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@congusbongus/111900901099931635

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There are two good reasons why almost all travel itineraries for first-time visits to Japan will involve Tokyo and Osaka: they are very well served by high speed rail, and both are large cities with lots of things to see and do. While starting a tour in Tokyo makes sense, there are many good travel locations much closer to Tokyo - in Greater Tokyo or not far out - that often get neglected. This discrepancy becomes apparent when you start looking at a map of Japan. Of course, the reason is obvious when you consider transit, and the personal experience of actually doing the travelling, but the map won’t make this apparent at all.

With few exceptions, first-time Japan travel itineraries will include the Tokyo-Osaka rail corridor, occasionally including day trips from either city. Destinations outside these areas sadly get neglected. From: https://www.voyagedmagazine.com/how-to-plan-your-first-trip-to-japan-travel-guide-itinerary/

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In the 2022 book Goldeneye 007 by Alyse Knorr, interviews with the dev team reveal the incredibly unlikely success of this groundbreaking game. An inexperienced hodgepodge team left to their own devices produced an industry-changing, record-breaking game, despite many odds going against them. It was truly a lightning-in-a-bottle story. One thing that stayed with me however was how insanely hard the team worked. 12-hour days, 7-day weeks, high even by industry standards, but the team was young, talented, loved their work and wanted to prove themselves, so they sustained this workload for years until the game was done. And they were richly rewarded for their efforts.

“GoldenEye the movie and game featured an OMEGA Seamaster watch like this one. In the game, the watch serves as a laser weapon and pause screen. Rare gifted each member of the GoldenEye team one of these watches after the game’s release.”

Excerpt From GoldenEye 007 by Alyse Knorr

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In the closing days of 1993, id Software released Doom, and the gaming world was changed forever. A landmark title that arguably established the first person shooter (FPS) genre, it was technically and artistically foundational, became one of the top selling and critically acclaimed games of all time, and even sparked a moral panic over its violence. And recently, as Doom turned 30, its cultural impact can still be felt. It’s hard to overstate what a big deal Doom was.

Yet Doom was not the first big deal by id Software, nor was it the first FPS. Little more than a year prior, id released Wolfenstein 3D, an action-packed and immersive 3D shooter that many consider the “grandfather of FPS”, and topped many game-of-the-year lists. Compared to Doom, it was clearly inferior, but through its frenetic pace and ultra violence, it was easy to see where Doom came from. Even as id slaved away at breakneck pace making Doom, competitors saw Wolfenstein 3D and the possibilities of immersive 3D gaming and rushed to make clones and their unique spins on the emerging paradigm. Some knew that id was coming up with something big but few anticipated how utterly massive Doom would become.

And thus we are left with the gaming and cultural behemoth that was Doom, and in its wake, lie numerous could-have-beens, hopelessly overshadowed and forgotten. Some were quality games that could have enjoyed great success, some were decent and could have sustained the budding studios behind them, and some were, well, forgettable me-toos that nevertheless could have built modest followings. In this post, as we look back on 30 years of Doom, let’s also look back on the the losers of history, the games that deserved more love than they did, in the shadow of Doom.

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Having big and interesting game worlds has been a holy grail of games since the beginning. In the early years, technical constraints meant that big worlds were simply infeasible, without heavy use of procedural generation - Elite in 1984 for example boasted thousands of planets - but nowadays, the main constraint is dev effort. Put simply, to create lots of interesting content, you need to put in lots of work.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t use clever techniques to get the most bang for buck.

Bigger is not Better

When we look at lists of biggest game worlds, space games like Elite Dangerous and Starfield dominate, but that’s not particularly insightful when you consider they are mostly empty space. A bit lower in the rankings you’ll find Daggerfall, which dwarfs other Elder Scrolls game worlds while being much older than them - notably having “the size of Great Britain” - but again, isn’t interesting as most of the game is empty wilderness, sparsely filled with randomly generated towns.

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