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Comment by tejohnso | Hacker News Reader

Quake III Arena was pretty entertaining. Doesn't seem like it came from a company that had been ruined for years.

I definitely noticed something around the Doom 3 release many years after Quake III Arena. The new game just didn't seem to have the same industry pushing, genre changing energy. Or maybe I was just older and had moved on, and didn't care as much.

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In the original thread Carmack was replying to, Sandy Petersen said Q3 was the only other great game they produced after that: https://xcancel.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/206959226489744192...

Honestly I think Doom is where it came together the best, Quake was technically better (of course) but it was not a better game.

Rocket. Jump.

The original Team Fortress on quake.net is where I grew to appreciate the beauty.

Same here. I enjoyed Q3A, but I spent so many hours playing TF/MegaTF.

The true successor of ID software is Half-life 1 with its goldsrc engine... but that simply was made by another studio.

HL1 took both the engine and the genre further + continued the modding culture that brough Counter strike and other mods

(Note I know very well that Half life is not an ID software game, it only took the engine that was auper heavily modified / updated- but it my opinion this is the successor)

goldsrc is based off the q1 engine.

It was based off the q1 engine but heavily modified and took stuff from q2 as well, notably coloured lighting and radiosity lightmaps.

Don't forget that the entire Call of Duty series also sits on Quake's shoulders.

Maybe they're related by blood, but the apple fell very far from the tree. the ID guys were quite vocal in their dislike of the slow pace & puzzle solving. This was when ID was all about technical advancements and repeatedly making the same game, faster & shinier. They also focused on multiplayer with Quake III arena and Unreal Tournament dictating where the market moved.

I always felt Serious Sam was the real spiritual successor of the original Doom lineage.

Quake was better for multiplayer though. Personally I enjoyed Quake 2 the most. Quake arena was designed for multiplayer but you had to practice with the cheating bots so it was kinda boring.

Quake 2 multiplayer is such a blast. The cat-and-mouse chase fights in that game is what defines the genre of "arena shooter" for me, there's still nothing else really like it.

The campaign has a place in my heart too, even if it's not perfect. A lot of DOOM's level design was predicated on claustrophobic interiors, and when you go "outside" in many levels it feels like a glorified courtyard. From the very first level, Quake 2 pushes hard to create an illusion of environmental complexity that plays very distinct from Quake 1 or DOOM.

Personally I think Unreal Tournament perfected the genre when it comes to multiplayer. Q1 was a lot of spamming of grenades and so on. Q2 was better. Still a lot of chaos. UT99 was also chaos but you could combine it with perfect moves and high precision shots. Great games all of them. I used to be an elite UT99 player but as the pace kept increasing along with my age my reaction time was simple not good enough anymore. Even if tactics compensated a lot those games are not like sneaking around in CS. I mostly played CTF. Good old times.

Quake III art style and level design is disgusting, depressing and boring. But it is the better game.

Go here right now and play a few games against bots and people of Quake III and UT99: https://dos.zone/mp/?lobby=*

There is no denying that movement and gameplay is much more enjoyable in Quake compared to UT. Even with the lack in variety on all fronts.

Idk, I think UT has some really neat design elements, like the shock rifle that are really unique. It rewards predicting the enemy a lot and a lot of mechanical skill etc. Plus there's the cool factor of guns like the Redeemer :D

QIII while solid feels missing lots of flair, it feels more generic shooter. Good, solid, but a little generic.

I think what makes Q3A seem generic nowadays is that it set the standard.

Q2 was always my favourite, that's where I started my multi-player journey. I only played against bots in the first Quake, and only played against my cousins at their place in Doom (they had multiple computers linked up back in the day).

IIRC, my problem with Quake multiplayer was that one node acted as the server, so when I connected to a friend’s computer via modem, my lag was a serious disadvantage (neither my friend nor I ever won as clients). Doom, on the other hand, simply froze both computers whenever there was a communication issue.

Although, to be fair, we played Doom over an RS-232 cable - hauling a PC across the city every weekend was a testament to our love for the game :)

I agree. I loved DOOM: it was so over the top. Tons of monsters to kill, loads of great weapons, enough ammo around that you didn’t have to worry about it too much, and it was all so colourful and gore.

Quake felt much more subdued to me. Not enough to shoot, the weapons weren’t as fun, ammo was tighter, and although in many ways it was incredibly atmospheric it was also just so brown and grey.

To me Quake always lacked the OTT fun factor of DOOM. Technically, it’s vastly superior - and an incredible achievement - but just not as good a game.

I think it’s telling that I’ll still play DOOM every so often, but I haven’t touched Quake since the 1990s.

Yeah, they could do a lot more in it with true 3D maps, but the design was all brown. The bosses were boring - the first one is kinda cool, the others not (IIRC episodes 2 and 3 were just kind of standard enemies); all three of Doom's were scary, especially the Cyberdemon when you can hear it roaring and the noise of it walking around.

The Lovecraftian vibe could have been cool but it doesn't really come through in the game in the way the satanic / hell thing did in Doom.

> I think it’s telling that I’ll still play DOOM every so often, but I haven’t touched Quake since the 1990s.

That is just your preference. For me it's the opposite, I have never finished DOOM, but Quake is one of my favourite games ever and I have replayed it countless times.

Not to mention that Quake has a fantastic community that keeps pumping out dozens of incredible maps every year, it would not be like that if people didn't love it.

> That is just your preference.

Did you think I hadn’t realised?

I think it's about the first thing that got you hooked. My Macintosh LC II with a 486sx daughtercard couldn't play Doom well. By the time I sorted my PC situation out, there was Quake.

For me the thing about Quake was the clans, CTF, LAN parties, QuakeC mods, Quake World. It was the first of its kind, perhaps not technically, but in capturing that zeitgeist. Yeah, there were DukeNukem, Heretic, Raven, UT, but we built our camaraderies around Quake, getting all tacticool with "10-4, RTB, RGR" and hanging out on the clan's IRC :)

Yup. I was disappointed that Quake was a graphics downgrade from Doom and went back to playing Doom wads.

There was a spirited debate about Quake III Arena versus Unreal Tournament. Both were praised, but UT had more creativity in game modes (Assault, Domination) and weapons, better bot AI, and more polished sound/art assets. Reading the Gamespot reviews (below) is fun.

Each had standout maps that made you want to own both, such as Q3A's Longest Yard and UT's Facing Worlds. I ended up playing more hours of UT because I had slow internet and its bots were better.

Point being: Q3A was great, but in 1999 it became clear that id Software had lost their head start over other FPS developers. They were still elite, but in the early-mid 90s they were alone at the top.

https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/quake-iii-arena-review/1900...

https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/unreal-tournament-review/19...

Both The Longest Yard and Facing Worlds can now be played instantly on the web:

https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/ (instant, even works on phones)

https://dos.zone/mp/?lobby=ut (scroll down and click Create on CTF-FACE)

They even have multiplayer support.

I hope someone ports UT2K4 someday so I can play ONS-Torlan.

Jumping right into The Longest Yard was amazing. What a site.

They both work great. The MUSIC in Facing Worlds is amazing! I wasn't old enough to fully appreciate good electronic music back then :)

I was deep into the worlds of Quake 3 and UT99 back then. I made maps for Weapons Factory Arena, a popular spin on Team Fortress but much faster and frenetic (more like Overwatch). I also created all the weapons and some maps for the port of Weapons Factory to Unreal Tournament, which did well but was no where near as popular as the original. UT was by far the easier game to mod but there was something about the physics in Quake 3 that just lent itself better to that type of mod.

As for id drama, there was plenty after Quake 3. I remember a .plan update from John where he talked about people leaving and people getting fired...I think one of them was John Steed (rest in peace), one of the player modelers who was very active in the modeling community and well liked. Felt like a disaster at the time. I just think there was a lot of conflicting personalities at the company and it was doomed to fail (no pun intended).

Shadow volumes were the big feature in that one, but this is a rendering, non-gameplay advancement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume

Shadow volumes turned out to be a dead end technology though because they can only do unrealistically hard shadows.

I have very fond memories of playing the quake 3 arena demo in our high school computer labs in the late 2000s. I would install it every time i sat down at a computer and sometimes half the class would be in the lobby. It was dated by the time I found it but it was still incredible fun. I particularly loved the level with the platforms out in space.

Our photo teacher got fed up with the whole class playing one day so he froze everyone’s inputs with the monitoring software and went around killing everyone before simultaneously shutting off all the computers.

I really miss simpler games without progression systems and loadouts and gimmicks. l would imagine the gameplay probably still holds up today, it was very fast paced.

Being someone who was glued to this stuff at that time, I thought Doom 3 had that energy, but they were also clearly taking their time to get it right. And that time spent ended up giving Valve the chance to slip in with Half-Life 2 and steal some of their thunder. Otherwise I felt like they were setting out to do some amazing new things with the tech and game design and they (mostly) accomplished that.

Quake III Arena was super fun!

I think the point is that Quake (1) came out within months of Activision launching Mech Warrior 2, Blizzard doing Warcraft, and even a couple years before Valve did Half Life. And Quake / Doom were so much bigger.

They had terrific success but if you were handicapping US video game companies in 1995 it would be like EA, iD (and maybe Sierra Online!). Point is they were way ahead at that point.

> Quake III Arena was pretty entertaining. Doesn't seem like it came from a company that had been ruined for years.

It's not that the company was ruined, but that it had lost some of its creative direction after Romero left (while retaining technical excellence).

Same feeling.

Quake and Quake III Arena was were the magic happened.

Yet, Quake III Arena had no single player. It was a fun MP game, I spent years playing. It's not really the same as Quake and Quake 2.

Single player = beating the "campaign" in Nightmare difficulty with Gauntlet only :) (but I don't remember how far I got)

> Quake III Arena had no single player.

It... sort of did, but it was extremely shallow. It was a preset sequence of matches against increasingly difficult bots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrmJgXT8WSY

Exactly. And I didn't see anyone here talking about QuakeWorld, which changed the gaming experience in an unmatched way.

Doom 3 was pretty huge of a step forward in many ways and had no competition for being SOTA except for Far Cry (1). I remember that summer as it was when I had my first job and I saved up to buy a GPU.

Not just graphics but character acting and animation, interactive world elements, deliberately dramatic scenarios in the levels (Half Life pioneered this, but Doom3 had a lot of really good ones).

It was years ahead of what was on consoles at the time.

I feel like the Source engine for Half-Life 2 had some industry shaking physics due to their Havok implementation, which released in the same year. Doom 3 had cool gritty horror looks, but HL2 blew it out of the water SOTA wise, in my opinion.

I think you might be misremembering Doom 3 a bit. Both it and Half Life 2 came out in the same year, and, well... just compare:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTJ1weGimZQ

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_3vMUOayyc

Doom 3's fully real time lighting and bump mapping was technically impressive, and the live interacting UI was very trick, but the character acting and animation was definitely not SOTA. That was Half Life 2. And if we consider impact on the gaming landscape, Doom 3 was if anything a dud. Elements from that game were not taken along, including not even in subsequent Doom games. Meanwhile Half Life 2's approach to storytelling & world building, animations, physics system - those practically defined the next generation.

I built my first PC and bought both around that time. 2004-2005. I remember Doom 3 running FAR better than HL2. It's been a while but I believe I had a 2.3GHz CPU with 512 MB ram. 256mb video card.

Doom 3 and Half Life 2 were both quite demanding titles at the time, neither ran well on hardware of the era if you cranked up the settings & resolution. Doom 3 was definitely more compromised because of it, though, with too little lighting because of the "only real time lights" constraint (which the BFG edition changed, and also adopted the famous "Duct Tape" mod).

Doom 3 was SOTA in terms of realtime lighting and shadows, but that's basically it. In terms of visuals, Half-Life 2 with its baked lighting in directional lightmaps (essentially calculating three lightmaps for each surface for lighting coming from different directions, then using those with normal maps during rendering) with radiosity indirect lighting did a much better job with how good environments looked (and it scaled much better than Doom 3 which in lower settings looked worse than Quake 3). Doom 3's character rendering was also subpar compared to Half-Life 2 - let alone character animations mentioned elsewhere (Source/HL2's facial expressions were SOTA for several years after the game was released). Doom 3's physics were also not as complex as HL2's and the game didn't use them much (the expansion did better use of the physics engine and IMO the Grabber feels superior and more seamless in its use compared to the Gravity Gun but the expansion came later and while the Grabber is nice, the rest of the expansion suffered from focusing too much on gimmicks).

In general while Doom 3 has the better (and probably more forward thinking) rendering tech, HL2 also had some very good tech for its time and did a much better use of the tech they had available than Doom 3 did.

That said, personally i enjoy playing Doom 3 much more than HL2 but that is largely because Doom 3 plays more like a traditional shooter with very little scripting / storytelling to get in your way (and the little there is you can ignore it without losing anything) - you just shoot demons, find keycards/PDAs to open doors and that's it for the most part. I often just put it in low volume and play some podcast in the background :-P.

As for Far Cry, the game looked too plastic IMO, i remember playing the game and the characters' muscles had specular reflections :-P.

The quality of gunplay (sounds, feedback, enemy reactions) is a surprisingly big, yet underrated part of an FPS. Far Cry looked great but was hard to enjoy as the gunplay was crap. A big reason why Quake 2 was so popular was that the super-shotgun, rocket launcher, railgun and BFG felt amazing in their own unique way.

The problem with Doom 3's gameplay is it was too fucking dark and constantly having demons jump scare you or spawn behind you got stale quickly. At some point I need to give the BFG edition a try which at least addresses the "too fucking dark" aspect, but that's also now a 2012 game instead of a 2004 game.

HL2 just on physics wins over Doom 3 any day. It's far superior in every aspect.

I have attempted to play Doom 3 on three separate occasions in my life, and each time I gave up before ever having a chance to fire a weapon.

Similar. I played Doom, Doom II, Quake and Quake II a lot. But by the time Doom 3 came out, the gameplay just didn't interest me. I guess I got further than you, I shot a few enemies. But meh.

Same - loved those other games but Doom 3 felt miserly in comparison to the previous games where you had space to move and options to target. D3 felt like it was just random jump scares more than much else.

I didn't love Q2, but really enjoyed Q3A.

Quake 2 as a game was ok, but I've always just really loved the visual esthetics of the software renderer. It had this gritty, rough feel that I really enjoyed.

Never liked the modern renderer versions, none of them look good to me, too flat, too polished.

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