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Comment by Seanambers | Hacker News Reader

The biggest and most damning mistake ID Software ever did was to always start fresh. There was a generation of players who started with Quake and just kept on playing it. Same for Quake 2 and Quake 3. This meant that the FPS player base became very segmentet in a genre which has a pretty heavy learningcurve.

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.

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This is looking at the past with today's eyes. There was no concept of "maintaining" games as you might expect today. Games were finished, put out on disk or CD, and that was usually that. Patches were sometimes introduced to fix bugs or improve compatibility with certain hardware, but that was usually the limit of support. Quake received far more support post-release than any other game at the time. There were many patches, game improvements and fixes. ID released GLQuake to support the new trend of 3D acceleration (the base game was software rendered only). They released QuakeWorld to support the growing player base who wanted to play multiplayer across the internet. And they released several expansion packs to provide a large amount of additional single player content. This is far, far from "abandoning" a player base. I don't know what more they could have done other than make all of their future games in the Quake 1 engine, which would have been commercial suicide given their reputation for being at the front line of PC technology.

I don't remember much segmentation.

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.

Well, what many other games (System Shock, Half-Life etc. etc.) had, and the id games definitely lacked, was simply a coherent story (other than "go in, shoot the monsters/bad guys and try not to get killed"), which (at least for some players) adds a whole layer of depth and motivation...

For what we'd today consider the "hardcore" players, the Dooms and Quakes were all about multiplayer deathmatch. Most of the players I knew didn't care at all about single player. LAN parties were big. In 1994, you couldn't find a campus computer lab not taken over by DOOM deathmatches. Remember SERSETUP and TCPSETUP? Online multiplayer matchmaking was in its early days, but that's already where the "scene" was. You had DWANGO for Doom. Then a guy called Scott Coleman and a few others hacked TCPSETUP to create iDoom, vastly improving network game initiation. This eventually turned into the Kali gaming service. Later, more advanced matchmaking services like Qspy (which later turned into the GameSpy business) made it even easier. I recall running what may possibly have been the first Doom 2 Internet tournament from my dorm room. When QTest came out in 1996, it was multiplayer only. No single player. We all played the shit out of those three preview levels, and I don't think when the full Quake was eventually released I even played the single player game.

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 was competing against Quake 2, which was a year old by the time Half-Life came out.

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:

https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Half-Life_Alpha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h7bTo5xLyQ

I think that's because early Id games were "just" tech demos for new rendering techniques, and it was awesome. Reading John Carmack's and Michael Abrash's posts about their new rendering tricks and optimizations was half of the fun.

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".

ID software had one foot in the shrink wrap box software era and that’s how titles were done then. It’s really the Internet that enables a continuous delivery game paradigm or a large modder community paradigm.

> a genre which has a pretty heavy learningcurve

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?

At the time, Quake used or introduced a ton of new game mechanics that are ubiquitous these days.

It's hardly a binary thing, people put a lot of time into becoming good at games to the point where they can almost compete with pro players. Switching to a new game is a major setback in that regard.

To play well at high level - for Quake (or Doom before it) this meant learning all sorts of details and tricks about how the engine operated and how to deal with it - and those people would be less inclined to change to a new version.

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.

Yes, anyone can learn quake enough to run trough the levels and kill some bots.

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)

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