came completely out of nowhere. I saw a preview that was fairly low-key and I bought the game because the box looked cool and it had some interesting elements. I actually played the game for an hour and I disliked it. I then went back to it after a week and decided to play it for a few more hours and ended up loving the hell out of it, it became one of my alltime favourite games. 

Hugs and peace allround. I don't think it was massively hyped....but it really did what it promised to. 

half-life1 is an overrated game actually. it was popular for doing more of a real life setting with a story, compared to other games of the time. ignoring duke nukem and sin that were also in modern city settings.

in hindsight the story wasn't actually that great though.

the design certainly wasn't that great, unreal and quake2 looked miles better.

it hasn't aged well because so many other games have gone down the same route of realism instead of fantasy for shooters, so it's all been done and done better since then.

but a game like quake has aged well because almost 20 years later there's still not really another game like it (not that i've played yet, or can remember). which pisses me off. 

Actually, what would you guys consider to be the closest game to Quake post 1996? Unreal is the obvious choice, but apart from that, I can't think of anything.

Definitely not the bright and zany Serious Sam or Painkiller with it's completely random levels and amateur enemies.

Nothing else has combined the hellish monsters, fast gameplay, and mix of fantasy/alien/horror/hell themes. 

Are close to Doom.

Everyone looks at Quake differently though, and it's become, with all the content we've helped make, a different game.

The original was basically get from a to b, killing everything you can without being killed or getting caught in a trap. No fluff.

Games since that era have more fluff than a mattress factory.

I can't think of a game with such a clean concept that is so open and yet suggestive to user content creation. Probably why I'm here, still working on it. 

That describes Wolf3D, Doom, ROTT, and everything else. Quake is much more specific about this.

So you're still gonna kill things in Quake, but not like in Doom II. In Doom II, you mow down things by the dozen. In Quake you'll fight, say, three monsters at the max. Probably you'll fight three guys, but it's going to be like a virtual fighter. There will be more skill involved in the fighting.

(...)

All you had to do was press the button - you move the mouse and press the button - and it's as easy as that. In Quake, you'll have to really kill things. You won't just press the trigger and hit it, you'll have to really beat the living shit out of the thing until it's dead. 

I don't consider Half-Life the least bit overrated. It was the narration and the realistic setting (the guns, the soldiers, and the fact that Black Mesa felt like an actual location) that made the game. Quake 2 & Unreal took very cautious steps toward NPCs and scripted sequences but Half-Life blew them out of the water.

I also would not describe Unreal as Quake-like. Quake was extremely generic with respect to map design (Duke3D of the time was the polar opposite) whileas Unreal went for maps that conveyed tons of awe-inspiring moments. Quake's maps were dull and uninspiring (although the first mission pack went a long way to alleviate this problem), even if they were functional (for all the action) and had a good layout. In Unreal, combat was in the background and only occasionally crept into the game. 

...boils down to one question: Do you play for the game or do you play to live an interactive movie? Recent games are pretty much that: movies. Some good, some not so much.

In that respect, SS and PK are a little more "play" oriented, but they sorely lack the beef of Quake hostility. And their gameplay is 10000 times more repetitive than Q's.

I'm currently replaying Quake 2, boy, THAT was something! 

I don't like deus ex. Interesting ideas, but it ultimately is a very boring shooter to play set in samey grey corridors.

To me the fun factor is the first and penultimate thing in a vidya or a fps.

Painkiller was really great in my opinion, and I disagree about variety, it was pretty great in that regard imho, sorry if I used great too much I'm not a native speaker and also I'm a turd idiot moron piece of shit... sigh... I can't fucking write :((((

I do agree though that painkiller is different from quake. What Serious Sam, Doom, Quake, Painkiller really have in common is that they are fun shooter 

fun shooterS, ignore my non native speaker TURD idiocy (that was more of a typo though) 

I don't think a modern "Quakelike" is necessarily hard to make, if you keep the basic premise in mind. Shades of brown and green, otherwise an absence of colours. Indoor areas of massive blockiness. Drab black-and-white lighting. Relentless combat involving crude weapons. Phlegmatic, single minded monsters that stumble into your gunfire like chainsaw-wielding lemmings, or lob projectiles at you before they switch to cannon-fodder mode and eventually explode in a fountain of "giblets". Oppressive music and sound effects. No story, no protagonist, no real attempt to communicate with the player. No interaction besides shooting and moving. No fancy particles except anemic dust and blood, no vegetation or other lifeforms unless thoroughly dead like those trees from Zerst�rer, and like the heaps of skulls adorning walls and doorways. The world is littered with pentagrams, crosses, demonic faces and unholy altars, but they all appear to be altars to nothing; since the game has no real story or setting (it cannot have those because it's not that kind of game), they cannot serve any particular purpose. The same goes for the handful of names taken from Lovecraft; they never actually matter besides sounding vaguely ominous. Like a half-assed iconoclastic statement without actual substance and without really trying to provide meaning. Thinly veiled mechanics.

It's mostly the absence of things that makes it unique. That makes Quake kind of an outstanding achievement, like a dehydrated nihilistic skeleton of a game, but it's also precisely what makes something like it unattractive to make, unless you're either a nihilist yourself or you hit the exact right balance of being talented and half-assed at the same time.

I think that's why such games aren't really made anymore. 

 

 

Why Are You Here?

Why are you asking? Did I not offer enough glowing praise for Quake? Did I allow myself too much of an opinion?

It might be hard to grasp for severely biased people, but I am not at odds with Quake's dreary, desiccated art style. I even said it was an achievement. I accept that such an art style is a valid thing to do. I respect it. You probably read it as a fundamental criticism of Quake, but that's not what it is. Read it again please.

Anyway, I'm here because I have an interest in Quake modding (I use a Quake-based engine myself) and I'm interested in games. But if my posting once in a blue moon is too much, well, you guys just tell me.

If that's what it is, then it's really kinda sad. 

It sounded more like you didn't like the game at all.

It is stripped down, in all aspects, to leave just what's necessary to make one of the highest metacritic rated games of all time.

And I'm sure you can appreciate how difficult it is to not put more features into a game than are necessary. 

I don't like deus ex. Interesting ideas, but it ultimately is a very boring shooter to play set in samey grey corridors.

Hm, I don't really think of it as a 'shooter'. If you play it in the same way you would play HL or Quake, then yes, it's very boring. What I like about it is how the game invites the player to try to exploit as much of the environment as possible, even though it's way too gray and samey :P

I don't think I played another game besides Deus Ex that closely follows a storyline and at the same time feels like infinitely replayable. To me there usually seems to be a dichotomy between story driven design and replaybility as can be found in arcade games. 

it's first person rpg. Sure, you can get guns *and* shoot people, but that's not really what the game is about. 

"Hm, I don't really think of it as a 'shooter'. If you play it in the same way you would play HL or Quake, then yes, it's very boring. What I like about it is how the game invites the player to try to exploit as much of the environment as possible, even though it's way too gray and samey :P"

I don't like the game at all no matter how you want to define it. Shooter, rpg, stealth game, to me it's pure boredom. It appeals to people who like sandboxness per se, you know the type of guy who gets excited by discovering you can use pepper spray on tripwire mines (even if it is completely useless as there are a billion ways of bypassing any challenge, all equally valid and boring as fuck).

The plot is very dumb and not very good. It's impressive the way the game keeps track of what you did, but that's not enough. Boring plot, boring gameplay, boring levels, boring everything 

...apart from the fact they are complete goatshit and it is still one of the very best games ever made. Unless you're a retard. 

...how empty praise is never a problem, but criticism? Uh oh. Fuck it, there's plenty of universally acclaimed stuff that bores me to tears, let people have their own opinions.

----

On a sidenote... Has anyone ever noticed how in Deus Ex, the first couple of levels all have monochrome lighting? I verified this in the editor. Only after you start getting in a bit further colored lighting starts becoming typical. That certainly contributes to the 'grey box' look it has. I wonder if the development of the game ran parallel with the development of the engine? It only came out a year after Unreal afaik. 

I don't think being so sensitive to criticism to deus ex is reasonable. To be honest, I loved the game when I was 13. As an adult, I thought it was just a mediocre game at best, with neat stuff like the game keeping track of small plot minutiae or using various approach to situation you can bypass the standard way anyway.

I liked bloodlines (similar to deus ex) more, if you liked deus ex you should probably check it out... it still has flaws but probably worth to check out 

""To be honest, I loved the game when I was 13. As an adult""

As an adult the game was at least 5 years outdated. Not sure what was happening in the gaming world in the intervening 5+ years, but it is was probably enough to make DX seem less exciting... 

Count me as another underwhelmed Deus Ex player. Admittedly I had to play it on super-low-graphics settings at the time, which made everything look like a brown-grey mush, but the fact that every. single. puzzle. had to be solved in one of exactly three ways (shoot, sneak, tech), which affected the highly-linear story not a jot was hateful. Also the circle-strafing bad guys. Totally ruined the immersion.

But then I remember thinking HL was a bag of wank at the time, too, because although it tried very hard to present what appeared to be an open, realistic world, it was so rigidly linear and yet sometimes the route forward was so obscure (I'm thinking of the passage through the rocks into the first minefield) that you spent ages backtracking fruitlessly.

HL2 was much better but I didn't bother to complete the boss fight at the end of Ep2 on the basis that mines that stick to things *but don't explode unless you shoot them* was an entirely infuriatingly, pointlessly convoluted way of killing the boss things, especially when you've just walked past an ammo dump FULL OF ROCKETS. 

I don't remember doing a lot of backtracking or getting lost in HL, but everyone has different experiences I guess... 

...is now the Every Single Game thread.

gb - It isn't that you insufficiently praised Quake, it is that you wrote 200 words seemingly describing what characterizes Quake, using mischaracterizations and negative terms. Maybe it is just a language difficulty, and you meant those things in a positive respect? Even if so, it doesn't match what other people experience when they play Quake, and what they miss when they play other games and find them lacking next to Quake. This isn't a cult of personality or an elite cadre of fanboys, we do accept the existence of differing opinions, but we expect that what is being opined on has some basis in the reality of the subject.

To put it in another perspective, one could suggest that a Doom3like is a slow moving first person shooter with an obvious plot arc and on-screen mouse UIs for game buttons, where monster spawns are tied to armor pickups and player choice is never a factor. Some of this may be true, but even the parts that are true are not an indicator of what makes the Doom3 experience, and a project which followed such wouldn't necessarily be a Doom3like. To suggest to Doom3 fans that these things encapsulate the experience and express it is both offensive, and ignorance. The same goes for Quake.

Func_Msgboard has more to do with Quake mapping rather than the Quake platform, the people here make maps for Quake because they like _Quake_, not idtech1.