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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

there's a new OG doom release or whatever

tbh i think it massively sucks that a massive corporation — which is now owned by fucking microsoft — bought a GPL game and started working on it again and made new releases no longer under the GPL and on fewer platforms (windows only! how do you fuck this up), when the game is only belovéd in the first place because of the staggering amount of work the community put in for free over the last thirty years

doom was like the one grand success story of an open source commercial game. without the GPL release it would've ended at doom 95. there would never have been boom or mbf, never have been any such thing as a limit-removing port. even sigil would not exist. a handful of people would still play it in dosbox and that'd be about it.

they even reimplemented boom from scratch. feels weird. most of the original boom authors aren't even alive any more. maybe i'm a hypocrite for feeling uneasy about that since i reimplemented chip's challenge, but i did that to make it more free, not to make it proprietary. i'm not using community work as a marketing bullet point for my paid product. (chip's challenge 2 did that though)

they hired some doom community people for this, and, good for those specific few people, i guess. that doesn't feel worthy of applause though. like you'd be stupid not to hire the only people around who've worked on this game recently

and no one on doomworld really cares? they care about the thing they get in their hands right now. jingling keys. people are excited that more unreleased doom beta stuff is included and all i can think about is how bethesda got mad at romero and told him to stop posting that kinda thing publicly. now we know why! they can't sell john romero's doomworld posts, but they can sell adrian carmack's unused sprites

just feels sad. thirty years of stuff built on the back of an open source release and no real appreciation for how powerful that was

thanks for all the free labor, everyone, but now it belongs to microsoft. look how magnanimous they are, with all their embracing and extending


soulstuff
@soulstuff

It colonizing. It feels like its colonizing the Doom community.

Like sure idc im from latam Im used to the feeling and im happy some people on the community are making well deserved bank but idk it still feels wrong somehow and the game is on my library so im gonna try the new episode but i dont think i will change dsda and gz for this


lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

the phrase "enclosing the commons" comes to mind


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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

The new release is developed by Nightdive, whose whole shtick is updating old games and preserving them. Really weird to get upset at this when they do usually do stellar work.

nothing here was about the quality of the work??

also like. the game in question has already been preserved quite a lot. i have multiple different preservations of it installed. i have patches in at least one of them

The argument could be made that the game is less preserved in it's microsoft form because if they, for some reason, made some changes to the game engine code, we wouldn't know about it. In it's current form the source code is open source and freely available, which is basically endgame for Actual Preservation and not just "make sure people can still buy it".

I heard the argument that "well it's easier for normies to install now" and, idk do we need to make a graphical installer slash package manager for doom now or something? Am I finally the old man yelling at the cloud that closing the fucking license is more important than being able to buy it on steam (when it was free before) and people should learn how to use their fucking computers a bit? idk!!! Probably!!!

doom is fucking infamous for being ported to everything and it's not because microsoft is so generous with platform compatibility

also like you can put an open source game on steam! these things are not incompatible!!

Lots of people (not implying anyone here, but you know the type) think that "preservation" means it's still able to be bought, new or used.

Which Says A Lot About Consumerism I Think

I'm cautiously positive about the new updates and is seems to be an improvement on the previous bethesda'ised version. And nothing seems to be locked up in a way that stops you just taking it into your sourceport of choice. And IMHO it's way more usable than trying to run bespoke wad combinations in any modern sourceport. (Leaving aside that it seems a bit broken...)

That said, I'm also much more cynical about the new version. The previous one always looked like a cheap cash-grab and any actual improvements were a nice "not as bad as I thought!" bonus. Where this one seems to be almost laser focused to appeal to "Doom can do this!?" crowd who haven't played since the 90s, while putting up a brick wall to the actual current community developments and discouraging players from looking outside sanctioned outlets.

Personally, I associate this more with Bethesda's weird insecurity than generic Microsoft corporate behaviour. I think the actual people who made this intended to make an improved product. But I can imagine Bethesda marketing/corporate that approved all this seeing it only as an opportunity to further canonise Bethesda's idea of Doom.

i mean the reason it's slightly clunky to load wads is that they're just files, not something from a blessed list of specific wads that you need a fucking bethesda dot net account to download in-game

and that is the sort of thing that a single source of truth is good for improving upon, but even then they could still improve it in a way that's good for the ecosystem and not just them. like, invent a lump that contains a title + author + date + intended compat level, and a lump for a representative screenshot, and also some mechanism to sideload those things for old wads, i don't know. then anyone can write a browser for idgames?? now the community has something to do, too?

idk. i'm sure it's a solid Product. but taking community work and packaging it into a Product is exactly what i take issue with

You've pretty much nailed my issues with the current version. Though I'm less concerned with the inclusion of some community work (assuming the creators approved), than I am about the exclusion of everything else.

Also, The GZDoom launcher adding a dialog box to load additional wads would do wonders for usability IMHO.

My understanding is that a lot of the community work that's been reappropriated is being credited to the uploader rather than the creator, and a lot of said community work is from individuals who have become deceased or otherwise can't consent to its inclusion.

in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

yeah i saw "bethesda account required for persistent online features" or however it was they phrased it, and immediately knew this was some bullshit. all the other stuff is valid of course, but just skimming the info before anything else had time to set in, i knew putting an online account fence around fucking DOOM was the red flag that signified everything i had to know about their intentions

nobody really cared anywhere i've mentioned it, though. sadly, things like licensing and the commons and preservation are Nerd Shit™ that it's probably impossible to get anyone who isn't already suuuuuper skeeved by this release to care about

yeah the steam text implies you need a fucking bethesda login? to download free fucking wads?? excuse me???? i don't know if that's true, it seems ludicrous, but it's also the literal text they wrote