itch.io

Interesting manifesto, though I’m confused as to why you bring Doom 2 into this.

Historically? Someone we knew when we were writing this was a fan of Doom 2, and a conversation with them about Doom 2 and system requirements was a big part of what inspired the manifesto.

Artistically? It’s kind of clickbait, I think? “why are you using so much computer?” is a less attention-grabbing question, and I think it makes our argument feel less extreme than it is. We are, in fact, saying that the makers of Overwatch and Fortnite and Alan Wake 2 should stand up and explain to the general public why they were so arrogant as to reject using Doom 2 as their game engine. Even if that didn’t really come across in the rest of it.

Especially considering the part on “Low-poly 3D environments” which depending on the old engine used could use about as much hardware power as Doom 2.

Or more hardware power than XCOM: Enemy Unknown (the Firaxis one). With Doom 2 we’re pretty sure it’s not gonna be a slideshow on Harriet, our Dell Latitude E6410 with 4 GiB of RAM that we mentioned in this manifesto, but we’ve seen low-poly 3D games that were slideshows on it.

I dunno, I hope that answers your question. It’s honestly not just about mindfulness to us - it’s about the computing industry wanting to landfill our computer specifically - but I guess it is also about mindfulness.