had a neat little device with the translator and the messages you got near dead bodies.

Sometimes they got too long and repetitive, but done right they added a fair bit without getting in the way of gameplay. 

Ok, but I didn't find the Quake2 enemies scary at all. The Gladiator was pretty vicious, but being basically the q2 Shambler he should have been. The rest were pretty low fear factor because of what you mention - wear em down until they keel over.

I know id tried to make a tactical element to the gameplay - gunners hiding behind those black and yellow barriers in the toxic refinery springs to mind - but they failed dismally when compared to, say, HL1. The soldiers would duck behind cover to throw grenades, run from threats, fire in bursts etc. They didn't need a high health (although they had, as well as stupid bulletproof parts of the model) because they were tactically enjoyable to kill. I think the biggest error Valve made there was needing a full 30 clip to drop a soldier, and the Xen grunts were just stupid in the amount of damage they could take.

Because id didn't have this kind of clever (node) Ai they instead just kept the same as Q1 but gave them more health. Made the whole thing a bit more drawn out.

If I'm hitting a Q2 boss tank (the big one) with a futuristic rocket launcher I'd expect it to die reasonably quickly, but with one false move it'd splatter me all over the walls. The model has two nubs on top of its tracks that look suspiciously like Warhammer 40,000 Rhino grenade launchers. I wonder if there was a chance missed there.

Scampie, that's pretty much what I was trying to get at before. 

I like the combat in Halo. Good balance of AI/Gameplay. The player could move at a reasonable speed, enemies died at appropriate times, they weren't too tough or soft, they weren't too stupid.

Shame, it wasn't as dark as other shooters. A wee bit immature for me... 

http://www.quaddicted.com/wishes.html

The map opens with a simple message.

"You sense danger everywhere."

It's non-linear, in a way that you feel like you're exploring, not lost, as you wander. There's ordinary buttons that do ordinary things, but the subtle mystery of what those buttons could be doing in this level you haven't seen the entirety of yet is enhanced by the centerprints that someone railed against so hard.

"A bridge has extended ..."

That did more to draw me forward and encourage me to explore and discover than any hackneyed dying quake dude with some hackneyed dying message for me that was meant to 'explain' my purpose.

The fun of Quake is the lack of explanation. The fun is in filling in the gaps with your imagination, like metl described. It's eerie and mysterious, because things don't all make sense.

Mexx7-9 had a 'story' that didn't try to override anything that made Quake what it is. Levels were still unexplained buttons and near-senseless architecture, but you were given an overall goal by the level end texts that gave you an umbrella of meaning. The level where you storm the Bishop's tower started with a tower rising above you, and was generally vertical in progression, but it didn't try to make any more sense than that. The rocket launchers weren't explained, the chainsaws weren't explained - that was just the eerie mythos.

There's plenty left to do with Quake, and making it more like Quake2 is decidedly not on the list.

Discrete choices aren't necessary when the absence of linearity has a purpose, which contributes to the design of the map instead of just being choice for the sake of choice. How about a map where Cthon moves? The whole map spans a lake of lava, with islands and pools and antechambers, and he wades through the lava following you, occasionally diving under and resurfacing to keep you from escaping. The entire level is a drawn out series of battles with him, as you scrounge enough cells for your lightning gun to do him in for good.

None of the encounters would be planned, and the map wouldn't be linear - there's just a lot of ground to cover, a lot of lava for him to manifest from, and a lot of monsters and mini-levels between you and each little battery cache. Something like the last level of Contract Revoked, without buttons. 

Ricky:
The player could move at a reasonable speed

haha, crysis, halo what�s next ;) one of the reasons I deleted this abomination halfway through was the ridiculous low player speed, combined with the insufferable mickey-mouse sounds of some enemies.

Ijed:
Ok, but I didn't find the Quake2 enemies scary at all.

uh, where did I say i found them scary ? I just stated that the GZ missionpack was a worthy improvement over vanilla Q2.

I think the biggest error Valve made there was needing a full 30 clip to drop a soldier

indeed, an indication of bad design, all they did was adjust some numeric values because they couldn�t get their gameplay right or whatever. 

How about a map where Cthon moves?

Sssshhh! You're giving it all away...


�_� 

I didn't really like the amount of ammo you need to drop a soldier or combine in the HL games. It's not too bad on normal, and at least grenades and shotgun blasts to the face generally take them out, but it wasn't particularly satisfying to shoot a guy wearing no headgear in the face 10 or so times before he would die.

One thing I hate about the Half-Life difficulty setting is that if you increase it the enemies get stronger, so this is even more of a problem. 

It's not like Half-Life(2) are the only games that suffer from that though, is it?
Stalker is shit for this. Assault rifle wielding 'zombies' that shoot with pinpoint accuracy, even on the lower skill settings, but take 3 shotgun shells at point blank range without flinching?
I mean most devs can't even spell playtesting. 

Quake is more realistic than Half-Life, after all. A shambler takes several double barrel shots to kill because a grizzly bear charging your ass takes several shots to kill, as Meriwether Lewis found out on that fateful trip.

A grunt and a dog go down with a single slug or two, and an enforcer who is more heavily armored takes a few more rounds than that to kill.

Then the fiend, being pretty much a leathery, perhaps eyeless, wolverine also takes many shots like the Shambler. This is due to a constant, likely arcane, adrenaline frenzy. 

I doubt it. 

Painkiller, Serious Sam, etc. Doesn't mean they're better by virtue of being fast paced.

P.S. A lot of interesting replies so far. And quite a few that have strayed away from Gameplay through to Story and Modifications ;) 

doom?? 

There was a nice map, from some speedmap package I think. Player inside a "bird-cage" (a _large_ one) was lowered to some kind of labirinth with fast moving blocks. Map was small, but it took me nice couple of minutes to figure out how to get out and then some more minutes to find the exit. I liked the idea and the scary part "is this the right way?" or "wtf? dead end? *gib*". 

Umm... it's worth to mention I think, one of my favorite maps in the past: The Well of Lost Souls. Good gameplay, few traps, great fight at the end and the start on some graveyard with "Abandon all hope".

And I like the buttons idea. It could be scary if you think about some machine, just standing there for 50 or 100 years, and it _just_ works when you start it. Like one said that there's a knight, standing behind a door. He's not from our world, he stands there for thousand years, covered with the dust, not even blinked once through all this time. But when you open this door, he's immediately ready to kill you. 

Always annoyed by the axe - you're a game stereotype futuristic soldier hitting another with a fireaxe in a two-handed swing.

The only trouble you'd have after the first hit would be dislodging the thing from between his vertabrae - you wouldn't have to smack away at him two or three times.

Maybe the grunts are full of adrenaline or whatever, but it should't give them iron skin. 

it's been a while since i played HL1 so can't recall, but were the skill levels basically like HL2 where a higher skill just meant your weapons had less effect on the enemies & theirs had more on you?

i remember reading this before playing HL2 and went straight for easy skill. i fail to see how either dying more often or increased enemy HP add to the fun factor at all? had the differences been in quantity of monsters (like quake) or enemy AI then i'd want to try it on multiple skills, but as it stands i have no desire to replay it on anything other than easy

i can't say i remember having issues with enemy HP in HL1 so i'm guessing it was the same 

ijed

The Quake dudes axe doesn't look particularly sharp. 

i fail to see how either dying more often or increased enemy HP add to the fun factor at all?

of course it doesn�t, but it�s an easy way out, just changing some numbers. That way there�s no need to re-design something like writing different AI code for different skill settings.

It also makes the levels (and the whole game) seem to last longer, because players need longer to get through; that�s often needed because games get shorter and shorter, and most eye-candy engines of today can�t render levels with more than 3 rooms and 10 enemies.

The absense of these cheap tricks is what makes games like Quake stand the test of time. 

But it's still a lump of metal, or polygons.

At least it could be used to batter the enemies to death a bit better.

I agree with Romero in that the weapon balance of Q1 is crap, compared, say, to Doom.

There's almost no reason to use the SNG when you have a DBS - maybe when the map design breaks down and you're sniping an Ogre from range. Same for NG / SNG, but with even less utility.

The Doom Shotgun had a meatier punch and the DBS was a devastating weapon, offset by its very slow firing rate.

I'm not saying the Quake weapons should be Doomified, but they could be much better balanced to provoke tactical decisions. Which = fun. 

sielwolf: aint that the truth ;/

ijed: i'm working on rebalancing the weapons a tad for my episode.. the shotgun now has a tighter aim & does a little more damage. for the SNG i was considering making it scatter the nails a little, so the player has to choose between power & accuracy. the axe also does 2x the damage now & gibs zombies (thank you zer!)

i also thought about replacing the lightning gun with a low-end cell weapon, something like the gun the enforcer uses maybe 

That sounds good - pretty much what I have in mind for my own episode.

I haven't changed the weapons much as yet, apart from the axe (now Ogre chainsaw, gibs zombies). I've also tried to make a version of the Enforcer Blaster, but not to replace the LG, just to sit inbetween the SNG and GL as an extra weapon. 

Do you want to go onto the playtesters list?

I'll have a one map beta in the next couple of weeks. 

and the rest of the game stays pretty much unchanged you might want to change the visuals or sound of them to make the player aware that it's not business as usual 

bear makes an extremely important point. It was very hard to get some people to get this in a certain other game as there were multiple versions of the same weapon with the same graphic and name (except the other was capitalized) - and they had different behavior. 

it'd be cool if you could like cut the monster's hamstrings with the axe and have them move slower or something. or maybe it could just make them bleed for 25 damage every 2 seconds. give a chance to make them go into pain and also a decent amount of damage.

or like, in quoth, if the warhammer dazed monsters and made them move slower or increased the damage they recieved.

basically, anything to give an excuse to use melee weapons in the game.

doom chainsaw was kind of like that. it kept monsters in pain frames almost constantly, but was a little unpredictable because of the way it pulled you around and wasn't really an option with more than 2 monsters.