It's true that players "don't look up" but this is also due to games not requiring it.

If you make the player look up constantly, if you teach it as a basic skill early in the game, then they will look up.

Just don't expect them to look up for your ONE puzzle halfway through a 15 hour game, if the rest of the game never requires looking up. 

I just read through an entertaining, depressing and sometimes annoying essay which is very relevant I think (at least to negke's comment): http://www.learntocounter.com/the-history-of-why-im-tired-of-your-modern-shooters-part-one/

Takes an hour or two but imo it is worth it. It is 2-3 years old. Very grumpy but raises many good points and is a nice historic overview at least.

----

The old Zelda games (I only played the NES and GB ones, couldn't get into the others at all) have many mechanics that would work in Quake like FPS. I wrote about some monster designs somewhere once. 

I've been seriously thinking about how I'd go about making a modern Quake-like for the past year or so, and as you guys touch upon; Metroid Prime and Dark Souls are absolutely games to look for inspiration from.

One thing I think that would be a really good thing to borrow for consoles, is the Metroid lock-on mechanism. When you lock on to an enemy, you enter circlestrafe mode, where jumping allows you to do a quick dodge move. Coupling that with some spatial awareness to try to prevent unintended falls off edges, I think that would go a long way towards a more Quake-style combat feel.
For PC mouse and keyboard would of course be the preferred way.

The meat and bones of a modern Quake would be the monsters and the world though, so that's where most of the effort would have to be focused in my opinion. :)
I can't even count the number of different weird-ass monsters in Dark Souls, so it is always so disappointing when I see a game that only features Men With Hitscan Weapons. 

3) Revisiting or backtracking areas through unlockable routes and/or new means of transportation. (eg, learning to crouch, jumping further, using a grapple hook, etc...)

Yeah, that's also a good one. In Quake, this basically amounts to "u must have teh gold key", but Metroid Prime goes absolutely balls-deep with it. In fact, it's kinda the driving force of MP's entire world structure. 

in his if games are our movies, what are our films article? 

about it.

The metroid series sometimes makes the lock-and-key mechanic too obvious and gamey, and that's not always desirable.
I know I kinda failed on that myself with honey.

In MP2 I especially remember the multi-lock-on doors which made no sense besides being a progression blocker.
I never really enjoyed MP2 & 3... :-| 

but money talks as much as your modern day average 15-29 year old male with internet access and a smartphone. 

Quake's monsters were just bullet sponges, with one or two exceptions, and one thing I would change in Nu-Quake, would be to add a healthy dose of monsters with non-trivial defeat strategies. Zelda and (again!) the Metroid Prime series have plenty of good examples of this sort of monster. 

Heh, yeah I gave up playing Metroid Prime 2 very early in the game, but I can't for the life of me remember why (I think I got stuck during a section of incredibly obtuse gameplay, which bottomed out my give-a-shit-ometer for a while, and I never did get motivated enough to play it again.)

I think I played maybe half of Metroid Prime 3 before real-life monopolised my time, and I remember liking it a lot more than MP2 but still not as much as MP1. 

Oddly, games like DeusX:HR or Dishonored have more quake-like level/game design with multi-routes, secrets etc, than 'pure' shooters.

Cant complain about games overall btw. Things are much better now compared to ~5 years ago. Plenty of good games for different tastes/needs these days and many more games with freedom and "consistent response", instead of linear rides with arbitrary scripted bs and "tap x to win". Even AAA action games.
Don't even have the time to play everything that I'd like to. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx40CRwwkS8

From last October, but they are doing some cool things with WebGL. They are making a 3d model editor for it ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=qx40CRwwkS8#t=1563s ) 

I was just going to suggest that it might be cool to have a Quake editor that works on any WebGL browser (well, probably just Chrome...) 

http://radiantjs.com/ 

that's a pretty nice start.

Some weird pauses when moving around with the camera, but it seems like they can load an navigate maps nicely.

Would love to see a TB port of course ;) 

Using 1bit stainmaps and modulating the edges using detail textures (or something among those lines) to get perma-blood and the like in maps. 

DP has stain maps. 

I like the idea of stain maps, but I really kinda wish it looked a bit more pixelly and bold than aiming for realistic. I really am a purist for these things I think. 

I'm thinking about this with DP's blood particles in mind. Stainmap res is typically too low to look convincing for hard edged stuff (such as blood decals). Could look better when combining with detail textures to get 4* the res (or more for high res stuff). If you take it as grayscale and combine with detail texture before doing alpha-test you could get more irregular looking hard edged stuff. Could look more like decals when done right... Just think it would be cool to be able to paint a map with blood, lol.

(and please don't turn the particle thing into a style argument, you can make it look like Duke3D style 8-bit with custom textures + effectinfo.txt and nearest neighbour filtering, etc etc) 

It's not a problem if people play cubism, fitzquake or dark places. Each to their own, I'm just saying it'd be nice if some of these fancy new features were added in a more classic flavour.
For the record I think Dark Places is cool, kinda wish the Rygel set included the knave textures and the id_base_ultimate too. 

I'm just saying it'd be nice if some of these fancy new features were added in a more classic flavour.

I can totally agree with that. 

It's a small-medium sized base map.

I have posted it as news but I didn't know how long it would take to get moderated (or even if it would pass!! (joke)) , and I'm hellish impatient.

Screenshots:

http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/quarantine.jpg

http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/screen_shots/quarantine2.jpg

Download:

http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/single_player/maps/quarantine.zip 

http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60921 

In a web design studio.

When I started mapping again in '07 I had just stopped working in factories and started working admin for my fathers business. Taken me a long time to get into the IT industry. I've done CLaIT, OCR Bookkeeping, Adobe ACA Dreamweaver and Flash and 2/3rds of a foundation degree in computer science.

Jees. Guess there might just be some hope!

Been nice chatting with all you guys in that time BTW. Not to say I'm leaving Quake/Func any time soon. I'm not planning on it. 

Ricky!