Quake 1 gets its first major co-op content update in 25 years
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
There are other mods / paks like DOPA, Arcane Dimensions, Copper, and Alkaline. Just to name some of the pretty damn good ones. Somehow, Quake ended up in a sweet spot. There's a rhythm to the way you fight, and a lot of tools in stock Quake to make varied situations in a single-player level. The level design doesn't ape reality like games from the early 2000s started to do.
There are tons of things Quake did wrong, but enough things that it does right.
Things Quake did "wrong" mostly boil down to game design and level design problems. Most base levels and episode 4 suffer from various problems... poor layout, inconsistently sized spaces, samey areas, unnecessary teleporters, too many corridors, overuse of traps, under-lit areas, etc. Chthon is boring. Shub-Niggurath is obtuse. Vore missiles track too perfectly. Spawn (the blobs that explode) are just no fun. Ammo balance could be a lot better (e.g. Ogres give you grenades). Weapon balance could stand some tweaks (e.g. between the two nailguns).
I think a lot of these problems could have been fixed if Quake had been less rushed--but may not have been fixed. The development team had a bunch of ideas for Quake that were questionable. Quake 2 was worse in many ways, except when it came to multiplayer and the mod scene. The Quake 2 engine fixed so many of the technical problems with the Quake engine, but the game is saddled with an awful story, and some of the slight slant towards more "realism" in Q2 level design did it a major disservice.
Various Quake 1 mods address balance issues, and the single-player maps you can find these days are simply phenomenal. Some of them would not have been possible in 1996 (like Tears of the False God in Arcane Dimensions) but then there are level packs like DOPA which just seem like, well, better levels, and there are mods like Copper which directly address various game design issues.
So I think it's interesting to ask "What did Quake do right, so that in spite of its flaws, people still like it?" I think that it's an enjoyable game as a game, not just as a retro game you play for nostalgia.
This was a reflection of the issues and internal squabbles ID Software had at the time, especially between John Carmack, the (in)famous programmer, and John Romero, the (in)famous game designer.
The story goes that John Carmack tore down walls at ID offices to keep an eye on everyone since John Romero was just coming at work to slack off and play games all day instead of working on Quake, and the other employees were burned out and irate by John Carmack's iron-fist leadership and working style.
That's pretty much the epitome of toxic work environments. I'm surprised that Quake came out as good as it did, all things considered.
>The Quake 2 engine fixed so many of the technical problems with the Quake engine, but the game is saddled with an awful story
After John Romero left and they lost their top game designer, ID Software's released games were basically tech demos to showcase John Carmack's cutting edge 3D engine tech wrapped up in some improv story so they could be sold as games.
Not sure if that was a piece of fan-fiction or whatever, this was ~30 years ago so my memory is very fuzzy. It was also passed around in the BBS days so who knows the veracity of what I read. I imagine this document has been lost to time.
I was a little disappointed at the final release that I didn't get the above but it was nevertheless extremely cool.
Maybe you weren't blown away because the games you tried were not great or your PC had bottlenecks, since if you do a side by side of PC games of the era that were also ported to the N64, they look obviously worse on the N64.
Goldeneye engine was written bespoke for the N64 hardware and the devs were absolute wizards to make it look as good as it did on that limited hardware, but if you look without the rose tinted glasses, you can see the rough edges of the N64 HW limitations.
Bizarrely I don't think perfect dark was as good. Even worse, I kept waiting for an FPS that took Goldeneyes lessons onboard. Only thing that was timesplitters 1 and 2 (though that's because free radical were ex Goldeneye staff).
If someone could recommend an FPS that plays as well as Goldeneye I'd really want to play it :)
People you meet on HN or at FAANG companies had $2000 PCs back in 1998, hooked up to a LAN. You get a distorted perspective if you work in the tech world.
Agreed. People just love to exaggerate the drama. It's clear that it was there but I think not at the level that people keep claiming it was.
This is an unfair generalisation. In addition to being a great game designer, Romero was an extremely skilled programmer. He just didn't measure up to Carmack in terms of pure graphics--technical solutions. But since when is that a fair comparison for anyone?
I think the primary reason the original Quake idea never bore out (not at id, and not at the studio Romero started after id) was that Romero had some misconceptions about how easy it would be to create a highly complex game by just throwing more manpower at it.
As someone who dedicated 4 (very formative) years to playing Quake / Quakeworld, I agree that the muliplayer game was excellent. Even without the endless extra content from the mod scene, the base vanilla muliplayer experience was just so utterly captivating.
Him being a great designer is debatable. During his tenure at ID, Romero had acclaimed successes which lead him to think of himself as this indispensable god-like figure that everything he touched turned to gold and that his talent is wasted at the current ID at the time and became difficult to work with, which was pissing off John Carmack.
So after he left ID to work on his own company, Ion Storm, most of his post-ID era games were massive flops that over promised and under delivered (ahem, Daikatana) both story and level wise and ruined the company and brought him back to reality that maybe he's not this god-like game designer after all, based on having a lucky streak early in his career.
From my understanding, though, Romero could -- and did -- crank out good, smaller games on demand early in his career, far more than is easily attributable to lucky streak.
The problems, as I see it, only began when he wanted to make bigger games and thought the way to do it was by hiring lots of people and somehow his dream would get well executed by this ill-thought-out organisation.
This is where my playthroughs really grind to a halt. episode 4's levels were primarily designed by Sandy Peterson, who is also responsible for some of Doom 2's more infamous levels. He seems to like very large, difficult to navigate levels with painful traps. It's in total contrast to the tight, iconic levels of episode 1.
The base game has quite a few bugs and arbitrary limitations which could have been fixed at the time. For example:
- While the player movement feels generally amazing even to this day, it doesn't handle ramps that well: the player slowly slides down when on even the slightest of inclines, and jumping while standing on any angled surface has unpredictable consequences.
- The NPCs are really dumb (they basically move randomly until they see an enemy), which is not a huge problem in itself, but they also get stuck on level geometry and each other really easily unless the level is carefully designed so that enemies are never packed too closely together. I was working on a custom level where I wanted a pack of dogs to attack from a sewer pipe, but I had to abandon the idea as the dogs require as much vertical space as the player in order to move, which does not match their visuals.
There are also some game design issues which are maybe more clear in hindsight. For instance, many of the enemies don't choreograph their attacks very well, which combined with instant hitscan attacks makes some fights feel unfair.
But the biggest issue I have with the game is that while basic gameplay is great, in my opinion there isn't just enough variety to keep the game constantly interesting for 4 chapters (and ten thousand custom maps). There are surprisingly few weapon and enemy types, and many of the weapons are just direct upgrades. The issue is compounded by the fact level scripting and interactivity is surprisingly limited in the base game without mods. This results in most standard Quake maps having basically exactly the same gameplay, just in different (and oftentimes beautifully designed) environments. Maybe I'm just spoilt by Half-Life and its sequels and imitators.
But despite all this I think it is excellent for a game from 1996. With more time in the oven it could have been even better, but what we have now is still an enjoyable game, especially with literally decades of open source development and modding.
You have to look at what was available at the time, basicly doom clones and the build engine.
Quake's success in my group was not how it looked, we always played with all the graphics at minimum to extract more FPS, with FOV 120 just to see more of the scene to have the edge. Things made Quake different was playability differences like instant weapon switching, bigger rocket impact area (better rocket jumps), changing direction in the air etc. All the things that make a match fast, dynamic and unpredictable. All unrealistic but more fun.
Anyone interested in DM scene back then may find Lakerman matches (especially on DM4), 9 vs DR series (that held in Sweden and surprised the US players with much more advanced gameplay by Europeans) entertaining.
1. Celephais is the forum Q1 modders meet and showcase projects:
www.celephais.net
2. Quaddicted stores hundreds, if not more Quake 1 mods:
Recommendation of the following oldskool Quake1 map-packs:
- Soul of Evil
- Nehahra Project
- Operation: Urth Majik
- The Altar of Storms
All five star map-packs on Quaddicted are worth a playthrough.
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Back in early 2000s I dreamed about working as a level designer so I was pretty interested in the modding community of Quake, Half-Life and Unreal. It was the golden age of individual modders: The engines are starting to pull off to show good graphics, yet not good enough to persuade modders to go away (modern engines take a LOT more effort to create contents for). The companies encourage modding and provide full tools (with patching) for it.
The communities are still vibrant but many left throughout the years.
Aslong as you are contempt with prepared assets it should be no more effort?
I think the main reason for less mod support is that they can't sell as much low effort DLCs.
But when I think about it I think you are right regarding "corridor like" fpses, like Half-Life or Quake, where you need to make the buildings.
[1] https://trenchbroom.github.io/
You can use the shareware versions to create maps too. See also the doom mapping community.
[1] Part1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SibdQvgsGJo
[2] Part2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlnDvsa-Ork
We've been working on an open source fork of Quake Team Fortress for a few years now: https://www.fortressone.org
If you like remastered Quake (particularly multi-player), you'll probably enjoy it. Organised games happen most days.
I like that this re-release sparked extra interest, but I think QSS is by far the better engine.
If you're interested in Myst style games but want to play a modern spiritual successor, check out The Witness. It's an astoundingly well designed game, though some of the last puzzles will take some persistence.
For RPG, there are a few "ages". Check out Ultima 1/2/3/4, Wizardry and Bard's Tale which I consider still fun to play despite the oldskool graphics. If you can't stomach the style or graphics, check out SSI Golden Box products. If you still can't go through any of the above, I'd suggest you try out Fallout, Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter nights (Both Neverwinter nights and Baldur's Gate have an enhanced edition that you can purchase).
ID Software never went the Valve route with a Steam like application with engine updates and so on, in the end they always abandoned the player base that was built up. Modders kept the quake games alive but they couldn't fix the game engines.
Back in the day Quake series was the big games, not Counterstrike. ID Softwares lack of investment opened up the door for Valve.
It was theirs to loose and they lost it.
Also, what's "winning" in the context of game development anyway once you have a breakthrough title. Doom and Quake made enough money to make the company owners rich. There's not much point in being "richer".
I almost never play games and even I can manage to figure out how to play Quake! Not sure what you mean about a learning curve?
But the mods are the more important reasons - and even now we see that in Minecraft which has very increments upgrades; many modpacks are still on the version of Minecraft that came out when they were released.
Good luck trying to do same vs online players, at this point everyone in Q1 community has been playing it for 10+ years, some of them even more. It would take you 6+ months of hard grind to start winning against low tier players (given that you have talent for AFPS games)
The people who played Quake moved to Quake 2 and Quake 3 and Half-Life, for the most part. It's just that of the three Quakes, Quake has the most long-lived single-player experience.
Half-Life was competing against Quake 2, which was a year old by the time Half-Life came out. I think the general consensus is that Half-Life is just a much better game than Quake 2. Quake 2 had a much better competitive multiplayer experience than Half-Life (my opinion), but Half-Life was much more fun for casual play. The players that moved from Quake to Quake 2 moved to Half-Life.
Steam wasn't a major factor early in Half-Life's release cycle. Half-Life was released in 1998, and Steam didn't come out until 2003. Before then, you'd update Quake, Quake 2, and Half-Life the same way... you'd see a news article on Planet Quake or Planet Half-Life about a new patch and download it, or you'd connect to a server and you'd get an error message. Quake did get updates for a fairly long time, considering... QuakeWorld 2.33 came out in December 1998, when Half-Life was already out. Quake 2 got updates for a while as well, but the online experience of Quake 3 was far superior, and Quake 2's single-player campaign just wasn't great, so not many people cared about Quake 2 updates late in the game's lifecycle.
> Back in the day Quake series was the big games, not Counterstrike. ID Softwares lack of investment opened up the door for Valve.
> It was theirs to loose and they lost it.
Half-Life was just a better game, overall, than Quake 2. It wasn't a lack of investment.
There are various theories revolving around the major "personalities" at ID Software, but I think it's enough to just say that Quake 2 was not as good as Half-Life.
Multiplayer (Dooms/Quakes) and mods (mostly just Quakes, due to the difficulty of modding Doom), were the two huge drivers of those games' scenes.
Half-Life is even more impressive when you compare its state around the time of Quake2's launch to the final game that shipped a year later:
Bunny hopping and circle jumping were real cool. Mastering those moves made for such a fun gaming experience.
Does anyone have a good link on how to run Quake on Macbook M1? I've tried Steam, Wine and some other resources, but couldn't make it work. :/
- QuakeSpasm-Spiked, modified QuakeSpasm with framerate-independent physics and other improvements: https://triptohell.info/moodles/qss/
- FTE QW, will let you play singleplayer, multiplayer, and I think even Quake II (and III?): https://fte.triptohell.info/
- QuakeSpasm (sibling comment has a link)
If all else fails, I know some QW guys are playing on M1 using ezquake. That's really a multiplayer engine and I wouldn't recommend it for SP but it could do if you're desperate.