Quake Enhanced from Machine Games and Nightdive

Games
125

I probably played through Quake a couple of times when it came out, as I had too much time and not enough £££/games back then, but it never grabbed me in the way Doom did. I was also too young to be allowed internets back then so online multiplayer passed me by entirely. :(

What it did have, and was perhaps its greatest pioneering achievement, was extremely powerful and flexible mod support. That Quake survived on my hard drive past a fortnight or so of time was primarily thanks to the mod compilations that regularly got put out on the cover discs of the gaming mags of the time. Reaperbots were the most important fixture for obvious reasons, but they sometimes precluded other mods unless they had support for them.

I remember spending a lot of time playing multiplayer maps with a mix of Reaperbots and some other mod that added a bunch of new weapons and behaviours that was way, way, ahead of its time (it might’ve been a compilation pack?). I recall it having remote steerable rockets (like the redeemer in Unreal), nail grenades and even a portal gun. Of course the bots didn’t know how to take advantage of those crazy things but it was still a lot of fun turning them to paste with them.

126

Ok, time to talk of Quake 1 problems. The game has two issues: the 1996 technical limitations that limited the gameplay, and the limited enemy variety.

The second issue is clear, it has 13 enemy types, and that’s including the fish, which is more a very limited enemy/decorative thing, so really 12 enemies. Their previous game, Doom 2, had 17-18 (depending if you include the Wolf SS soldier). So less variety in encounters. And it has some overlapping on them, with three melee enemies (knights, dogs and fiends).

The first issue means they had a restricting limited budget on polygons, which meant a much lower enemy density than in Doom. John Carmack’s tech giveth, and JC’s tech taketh. Same as with Doom 3, another game where the tech came first and the gameplay was built around it.
It even affected the environment, as they are usually smaller and consisting more on narrow corridors, to limit visibility to complex areas. Lower enemy amounts meant a bit spongier enemies, too.

This combination of factors (lower enemy count, spongier enemies, narrow corridors) means the gameplay devolves a fair amount of time to some dogs/knights/death knights/fiends attacking and the player pressing S while firing his weapon repeatedly. And I always praised Doom 2 for being so smart as to not abuse melee types enemies (because pressing S while firing is trite), that’s why they only have the pinkies as melee enemies, and they are kinda slow, because truly they are about area denial, in conjunction with other enemies. So here comes Quake 1 and makes that mistake, ugh.
And yes, death knights and fiends are better fought by strafing around, but I’m including the ‘narrow corridors’ design as a factor, too.
Actually, even the highend enemy, our dear Shambler, suffers a bit the same. His lightning attack means he is best dealt in, not exactly the same, but in a defensive way, retreating and firing until finding hard cover, then using that hard cover.

The ogre, which is one of the best FPS enemies ever, helps prop up the general enemy quality of the game a lot.

127

I read that Quake maps had to be < 1.4MB in size, to fit on a floppy. So that’s quite a limitation right there. Also, most folks were on dial-up at that time. Downloading even a 20MB shareware file took a while and it was common for such a large download to get stuck and fail. id ran an ftp server where you could download the files in smaller chunks.

The exciting part of Quake was experiencing true 3D levels in a first-person shooter. DOOM was 2D, Duke Nukem was 2.5D. We take it for granted today of course but back then, experiencing true 3D maps was new and exciting. Building your own maps was fun, too, and there was a proliferation of 3rd party Quake editors, most of them free.

128

Ogre’s are an amazingly great FPS enemy. They move well, their close-range attack is scary good and their long-range attack is dangerous, but not impossible to dodge - and use against them.

To balance the awesomeness of the ogre out, you have these fuckers that may be one of the worst FPS enemies ever created:

image

129

At the risk of people shitting on Descent again in this thread, Descent shareware came out in December 1994, and had true 3D maps. Quake came out in June 1996. But you’re right, seeing true 3D maps in Descent (or whichever game you experienced first) was new and exciting! The main difference for me is that Descent had mouselook by default and Quake didn’t. So actually navigating those 3D maps was a lot easier in Descent.

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Yeah I know. Although I have seen it well used in one of the maps of the new episode, well used means only one of them, in a bigger area where the primary enemies are other monsters, so you have to avoid him while fighting the others.

131

Descent got to 3D first but I was specifically referring to first-person shooters, a more accessible genre. My LAN gaming group played Descent a couple of times, and while we appreciated that it was 3D, most of us lacked joysticks and couldn’t fully enjoy it. So we generally gravitated towards FPS’s (and RTS’s).

132

Again, if you were okay with mouselook controls by default you didn’t need a joystick to appreciate Descent. It’s a first person shooter! My brothers had joysticks, but I played it for a week at my cousin’s place, and he only had a mouse, and we had a blast with the mouse controls. It controlled just like any modern first person shooter, keyboard controlling movement, mouse controlling direction you’re facing.

133

That’s the thing about Descent. Apparently some people played it with the mouse and keyboard, but it was definitely a game that felt more like a flight game so the best control scheme at the time was a joystick with a hat switch.

People tend to forget too we didn’t have anything remotely like today’s Dual Sense/Xbox/Nintendo Pro Controllers back then. Gravis Gamepads were still a thing!

134

I’m gonna throw in a third issue: A weak premise. Id’s previous games may have had tissue-thin plots, but they had rock-solid backstories that made it super easy to get immersed in the action.

  • Wolfenstein 3D: You are B.J. Blazkowicz, it’s World War II, and your task is to kill Nazis.
  • Doom: You are a Space Marine, in the not-too-distant future, and your task is to kill the demons that have invaded Phobos.
  • Quake: You’re, uhm… some guy with an axe, and a gun that shoots nine-inch nails. You’re somewhere, sometime, in buildings that don’t look like much of anything. They’re full of futuristic soldiers, but also medieval knights, and ogres with chainsaws? Kill them because they want to kill you I guess.

The premise, much like the textures and sound effects, was just so muddled and vague.

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It’s id. Carmack famously said story in videogames was like the plot in a porno, it really doesn’t matter. And for id games, he may have been right. Quake 2 was a worse game than 1, and it had a plot. DOOM 2020 would have been better without all the silly plot trappings. DOOM 2016 had the perfect amount “Holy shit it’s the doomguy, rip and tear”.

136

I can’t tell whether you’re agreeing or disagreeing. I was specifically addressing premise, not plot.

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Neither, I was responding to the post I somehow imagined you made rather than what you actually typed.

138

As someone who probably wrote some of those reviews, I just want to say this is an excellent point! :)

It’s like the difference between real RTSs and MOBAs. Some people can’t handle real RTSs, so they play MOBAs. Similarly, some people can’t handle six degrees of freedom, so they just opt for four.

This certainly describes me! But now, playing the latest Descent clones, I can’t imagine going back to a joystick. To be honest, I haven’t had my hands on a joystick* in a long long time. I don’t even remember what they feel like!

-Tom

* insert joke here

139

Is there that much of a difference between Doom ‘story’ and Quake ‘story’ ?

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In the future, the player character (an unnamed space marine, known as “the Doom marine” or simply “Doom guy”) has been punitively posted to Mars after assaulting a superior officer, who ordered his unit to fire on civilians. The space marines act as security for the Union Aerospace Corporation’s radioactive waste facilities, which are used by the military to perform secret experiments with teleportation by creating gateways between the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. Three years after Doom guy’s posting to Mars, Deimos disappears entirely and “something fraggin’ evil” starts pouring out of the teleporter gateways, killing or possessing all personnel on Phobos. The Martian marine unit is dispatched to investigate, with Doom guy left to guard the perimeter with only a pistol while the rest of the group proceeds inside the base. Doom guy listens to the sound of combat on the radio for hours until there is nothing but silence. With no way off the moon and wanting to avenge his friends, Doom guy decides to fight his way through the complexes of the moon base.[11]>

In the single-player game, the player takes the role of the unnamed protagonist called Ranger in later games (voiced by Trent Reznor)[12] who was sent into a portal in order to stop an enemy code-named “Quake”. The government had been experimenting with teleportation technology and developed a working prototype called a “Slipgate”; the mysterious Quake compromised the Slipgate by connecting it with its own teleportation system, using it to send death squads to the “Human” dimension in order to test the martial capabilities of humanity.

141

Yup, pretty sure I played Descent (on a Mac no less) with a joystick, a CH Products one, I think, with no twist action for rudder control, so you had to use the keyboard to roll.

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Descent. Hmm. Back in the day, that would mean a CH Pro Joystick, the 4-button one with the hat switch. I think I used the hat switch for up and down, but I can’t remember. I had the CH throttle, too, so I might have drove my spaceship just like a flight-sim.

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As I recall Descent doesn’t have inertia, it’s just a FPS with 6 DoF, so mouse+keyboard would seem to be far superior. I never got into the game though, so my opinion doesn’t carry a ton of weight.

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::sigh::

Much love.