You're absolutely right. All of the founders are gone, and most of the original team no longer work at id Software. It is effectively just a brand name at this point.

Well, mostly, but I think that was a period where they also lost several other key players in their early success. I'd love to see those folks get back together sometime and work on something new. I saw that anniversary video for Doom with Romero's commentary during it and he put a ton of love and work into that game, I just don't think that developers put that much care into level design these days.

Well, I think developers (at least the big ones or the really ambitious small ones) put more care into level design these days, just into the wrong areas, so I kinda agree. I honestly think that the engines' limitations made the level designers far more original and they tried to get *everything* out of each thing the engine could do and didn't let a nonsensical pursuit of realism stand in the way. IIRC a look at the Doom Bible suggests that at first the levels were meant to have a high degree of real-world logic to them (plus there was supposed to be more plot and actual characters) but the ID designers simply must have understood pretty soon that that would have meant serious sacrifices in playability, certainly not worth the "realism" they could have achieved with the tech. So we got the amazing and insanely original stuff that Doom and Doom 2 gave us (the Doom 2 level design being even cooler and more original IMO), with all those fantastic experiments in geometry and mechanisms. Nobody does that kind of stuff anymore, I think also the same people responsible for the amazing level designs of the first two Doom games would be bound to end up with boring "realistic" environments where any originality is put into scripted "dramatic events" these days. I think modern tech with its few limitations simply makes people think that way.

The reason is because now days developers work for specific targets that are meant to gain maximum profits. When id worked on Doom they were working on something THEY love and want to do and thats why you see a lot of care was put into the game. When you work for a mega-corporation you are put under a lot of limits and guidelines that you are not necessarily happy about working on a certain project.

Similar love can be found in current day indie projects.

I tend to agree with you there about priorities. A lot of games wind up being ugly simply because they don't bother to prioritize the basics. One of the reasons why FO:NV is such a pretty game is that the designers did their homework and spent the time to make most of the game harmonize with itself. The times when they broke out of that were done mindfully and it all sort of worked.

Same definitely could be said for level design. I don't think that realism is appropriate in all genres, I think that realism works well for RPGs and similar where there's a cohernent storyline as the focus of gameplay,b ut I think for FPS games that tends to subtract far more than it could possibly add..

I really do think that iD has lost its way over the last 15 years or so. It's not so much that they lost Romero, Hall and McGee, it's that they weren't really able to properly adapt to their loss, and I don't believe that those people are particularly replaceable either.

But, it's easy to look back with hindsight, and I'm not really sure what the correct response would have been. Now that Carmack is gone as well, I think the likelihood of a renaissance is basically zilch.They should have just let him figure out how to integrated that 3D technology into the gameplay as innovation seems to be what he does best.