When I was porting Quake 2 to MS-DOS, I have to admit that it's the most I ever played of it. It really fell into Carmak's view that stories have no place in gaming.
It's a shame Valve found a much bigger market than games, but it leaves the mantle for others to pick up.
What does this mean? Being told and participating in a story has always been by far the primary thing I play a game for. Interactive visual fiction experience inducing compassion and involvement bundled with moderate challenge, a degree of freedom and realism (that's why I don't like rail-nailed heavily scripted games) is what I want of a game. The visual part should be reasonable (mostly needed for the atmosphere) and controls should be convenient. In my opinion Half-Life and Fallout (all the parts) were the best games I ever played. The story unveiling and the sense of helping people in the imaginary world heroically (something that is a way too hard and dangerous for an average Joe to do in the real life where you can't save&load) and exploration are the things that make a game addictive for me.
> Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.
It's why DooM was such an incredible novelty of fast paced 3d shooter, and Quake... Well.. Its devoid of character.
It's why HL & Fallout are so beloved.
I'm 100% with you
When q2 had shipped out I was so busy working I never had time to play it seriously.
Quake 4 felt far more engaging to me. And q3.. I had the tin box set for Linux. Remember that push to make retail Linux gaming a thing? Shame it never panned out.
And iD did a great job of writing modular and portable code.
It was really exhilarating to get it running on a different platform with essentially no real changes, other than platform code and initially removing the DLL support.
Thankfully DJGPP had progressed far enough that its DLL support works great.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/hx-dos/
when the author disappeared from the face of the earth I uploaded everything I had regarding it. It's an incredible extender, sure, but it's nothing like having a native port.