Included in that was “voxels = bad,” which was entirely built on my distant memories of the Delta Force franchise aging badly. Then there was the EverQuest Next reveal this past weekend, and the word “voxel” and a flood of memories. And other titles stepped in, so that every year we hear about another Call of Duty when it comes to shooters, but nobody mentions NovaLogic.
MODs on Battlefield 1942 made it more exciting. They did okay with Joint Operations, which continued their traditions of lots of players on big battlegrounds, but other franchises did better. That was the end of NovaLogic’s dominance. It also made 3D configurations so common that the NovaLogic forums were often full of questions and complaints about why somebody’s brand new TNT2 card did not improve Delta Force‘s performance. This alone pretty much killed 3dfx, marginalized Matrox and S3 in the consumer market, and could be said to have started the trend that eventually sent ATi into the arms of AMD. The introduction of nVidia’s TNT2 chipset, made reasonably priced and performing accelerated 3D video card readily available. While ignoring 3D video cards was a good plan in 1998, by 2000 things had changed. NovaLogic followed success with more success, bringing out Delta Force 2 and so forth, creating a whole series of games.
Over the local network, using the phone system for coms, battles raged. But it was when we all brought a copy into the office and found that it played well enough on the standard 200MHz Pentium Pros that were common at the time that the real fun began. There were some attempts to play as a group from home, which lead to my first voice coms experience when we tried using Roger Wilco. One of our IT guys brought a copy into work to show us and I am pretty sure that most of us bought a copy of the game on the way home that night. Absolutely the right move in 1998 when the game shipped and undoubtedly one of the factors leading to its popularity. But the key to the whole package was that NovaLogic’s engine gave you all of this without requiring a 3D accelerated video card.
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