I didn't have a problem with the spirit/death/reviving thing. I still tried just as hard to avoid dying (apart from in the boss battle but I usually either cheat or quit those anyway), and when I did die I ended up doing some jiggery pokery with shooting spirits instead of some jiggery pokery with F9...

Sounds like I am more able to get into the spirit (sic) of being immersed in a game than you guys... 

Is there ANY shooter at all that has a decent story?
HL1/2 does not. It has good and convincing world. With developed "legend" that is not being told actually.
"Freeman comes and beats the shit out of combines" is not much of a story.

Ok Deus, SysShock and Thief had good storylines. Those are less shooters tho. 

Convincing immersive world (as Kinn said).
And good diverse gameplay (no detailing this time sorry)
Thats what HL2 did. And CoD. And Prey (to some extent)
It feels to me Quake1 did that too pretty well, but Im biased. 

You do die. It is an indication of 'not doing well at game' and it is present. But then there is a punishment - and instead of making you replay some amount from the last savepoint it forces you to go thru the 'spirit' routine for a bit.
Im sorry you cant accept this concept and ruin the game for yourself with 'no need to replay - no need to try hard' attitude. Its more a problem with your preconceptions.
Also you had an obvious choice of using quickload yourself whenever you die, just to make game a bit harder (like I did). But I understand that some people would be unwilling to 'discipline themselves'. I�m on the other hand have more problem with games that don�t have quicksave and use much more sever punishment for losing � forcing you to replay the game from the last checkpoint or the very start of the map. And no other choice, (except maybe cheat, if that�s available). It can get very tedious, and time consuming. Yes, I didn�t like Mario.
To conclude: I believe there should be challenge and should be punishment for losing. But its hard to agree on the degree of both. As was apparent from the many discussions on QMAP some ppl cant stand dying at all.

And back to Prey - I believe the 'resurrection' should be made available on the easy/norm skill level only. Not on the harder one.

I would love to hear some other opinions from people interested in gamedesign. 

I have no idea why Q4 didnt sell well and got many bad reviews. Its not another D3 definitely. And its not a bad game. Solid shooter with its ups and downs.
Maybe many customers shrugged it off as 'another doom3', maybe MP was a letdown, maybe the marketing is to blame... maybe its the lack of bloom!
Pre-release shots of Q4 didnt look spectacular really...

Failure of q4 is a mystery to me, almost as big as the shite looks and the great success of the Halo series.

Was Unreal2 even a bigger flop than q4? 

ta speedy, I forgot I till havent finished that yet :) 

will be a MMORPG. Crap! :(
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1057232/000117091806001092/presentation.htm 

Interplay has no money. Needs 75mln? They gotta be kidding

Zero chance of release. 

1.) WTF does "Securities and Exchange commission" whatever the fuck that is have to do with Interplay/games?

2.) $75M budget for a game? That's ridiculous.

3.) Is this Fallout 3 by Bethesday or Interplays rebirth and their own Fallout too? 

FallOutOnLine 

...that are incredibly cool in Gothic 3.

Day/night cycle and random weather cycle (rain and fog).

Wandering around with a tamed Rhinocerous. Looks great and actually very useful fighting tougher stuff. 

Failure of q4 is a mystery to me, almost as big as the shite looks and the great success of the Halo series.

Marketing and advertising. q4 shipped when id wanted it to, and not when activision wanted it to, and activision was footing the bill for promoting the game. if a game doesn't make pre-decided dates, a publisher decides not to waste money on aisle-end space and standees and ads and stuff if there won't be a game to sell on those shelves in time.

that, plus PC gamer's resounding initial 70, plus a consumer base already somewhat beleaguered by doom3, completely nuked enthusiasm for the game. 

PCGamer need to be fucking taken out and shot for that. That was totally unreasonable. I for one will never trust a word they print again.

For the record I think Quake 4 is a great game and it's a shame that shit had to turn out like it did. 

well, i haven't read pcgamer in ages, but i'd say 70% sounds about right for q4. it was never anything astouding, which is what they usually reserve stuff higher than 80 for (iirc).

it was a slightly above average game, but still had many flaws. (sadly, a lot of those flaws were flaws in the d3 engine itself). 

it was a slightly above average game, but still had many flaws. (sadly, a lot of those flaws were flaws in the d3 engine itself).


what aspects of the doom3 renderer were responsible for making this a "flawed" game? (not trolling, just asking :} 

To me, Quake 2 felt more like an adventure, whereas Quake 4 felt more like a cheesy script.

Something about Quake 2's theme made it feel more like a strange, alien place (even though it was clearly not a purely alien environment). Maybe part of it was due to the lack of wires, control panels, and pipes streaming across every scene which made Q4 seem more like a logical Borg facility than a de-humanizing society that recycled body parts.

Which is something that bothered me. The most disturbing elements of Q4 were either only touched upon briefly, or were just recycled in exactly the same way throughout. Example: the medics' futile efforts to de-stroggify their comrades, or the Strogg systems with the same integrated human torsos copied everywhere. I felt like the real horrors of the war were never really touched upon; even in your own stroggification it was very formulaic: of course your teammates still love you as the ever-capable Corporal Kane and shower you with pats on the back, but you're simultaneously bullied by unfamiliar marines onboard the mothership who want to give you the 24th centuary equivalent of a lynching.

Not that Q2 had obviously grotesque imagery, but it didn't try; it was just an action-adventure game. But that also meant it stuck to its ideals pretty easily.

Clearly I was disappointed with the themes of Quake 4. I saw it more like Doom 3 without hell, and humanoid cyborgs substituted for demonic cyborgs.

I don't feel so strongly about the gameplay. It didn't excite me, but it wasn't exactly disappointing to me either. The sections where you drove a vehicle seemed like a weak link, but things were generally balanced pretty well even if there weren't really any gameplay innovations. 

well, one of the key points would be the most obvious one; lighting.

d3's lighting is terrible for outdoor areas, which q4 had quite a lot of. lack of a way to properly fake GI/Ambient Occlusion at the minimum made the game look almost like a step back graphically. (soft shadows would have been prefered, of course, but a faking of ambient occlusion would have rocked) 

hi shambler i just wanted youm to know my feeelings. I started this thread long ago as a wayn of diversivifying ths little quake ampping community into playing and discussing other games, butn it seems you are a coomunist and hate fun and only care about you you you and it makes me angry alright so please stop it and close that other thread and make this the Other Games thread again alright ok bye 

Scampie's been hitting the gin? 

Anyway. Re: Quake 4. Sorry I was really drunk last night and so my posts had a "grr angry defensive grr" tinge to them, but I still believe what I wrote. Namely, PCGamer's 70% is a bad score, the sort of score that basically says to the public "this game is really mediocre, don't bother with it". I think PCGamer had basically jumped onto the id/doom3 backlash bandwagon at the time they wrote that review, like a bunch of bratty schoolchildren, and so they went over the top in panning the game.

Necros: yes there are limitations in Doom3's lighting model, but I think when you look at the capabilities of the lighting system as a whole, the pros quite convincingly outweigh the cons.

Also, maybe I'm not really seeing the problem, but Quake 4 had some massive outdoor vehicle sections, and I thought the lighting worked fine for what it was.

I agree with RPG that for some reason, the Stroggos architects seemed to have taken a shine to the UAC base's "double horizontal patch railings around everything, pipes covering every wall and ceiling" design ethic, and it didn't seem particularly alien, and to be honest in many of the levels you could have just done a texture replace and got something that would fit perfectly into Doom3. Hell, some textures in Q4 were actually unchanged from Doom3 anyway.

Then again, I like that style and Q4 just gave me more of it :} 

I rated it. 

didn't rate games on a scale of 72 to 93 it wouldn't have come across like Quake4 was utterly unplayable. But, then again, humans don't endeavor to become critics and editorialists to be nice to people.

I've always liked the concept of reviews that don't try to summarize what they said into some kind of numeric rating. It implies absolutes where there are none. A review should just go over the premise of the game, if and why it's fun, what works, what doesn't, who it's for, and then just leave it at that. The reader will come away with a strong sense of whether or not he wants it himself (which is what a review is FOR) rather than skimming it to find out how the reviewer and his editor (who we're supposed to trust as knowing everything there is to know about games, including more than the actual developers) graded the game. Did it pass? Can the studio maintain its GPA? Will dad ground them?

Lucasarts' Ron Gilbert originally planned his website (www.grumpygamer.com) as a review site that would review other reviews. I thought that was ingenious. (It's too bad he decided instead to enter the site into the 'blogs that never update' market.) 

A review should just go over the premise of the game, if and why it's fun, what works, what doesn't, who it's for, and then just leave it at that. The reader will come away with a strong sense of whether or not he wants it himself (which is what a review is FOR)

*Nods.* 

PC gamer's resounding initial 70

There was a stats research that showed no correlation between reviews score and game sales 

You'd be right, Q4 on average reviewed somewhat well (mid-eighties), and didn't sell that way at all. But I'm sure that study wasn't weighted toward the earliest reviews, which public opinion usually is - just the eventual average. We monitored the buzz around the game anxiously, and after that one review, in what we read and heard there was a tangible sense of "What? ONLY 70? oh well time to immediately make my decision to buy FEAR instead."

also, I think we all generally know that there's typically not much of a correlation between stats research and reality either.