...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. 

My bro' relies heavily on the PC Gamer goofballs for his purchasing advice, and that "What? ONLY 70? oh well time to immediately make my decision to buy FEAR instead." is exactly what happened in his case. He'll be getting a copy of Quake4 for Christmas from me though.

Also, I have no doubt from reading their other scores if an indy developer came out with the same quality product but with no tie to the established Id franchises, the score would have been much higher.

There are expectations built in for a 'ground breaking', a 'life changing event', if you will, when Doom/Quake
release occurs because of the impact of the original games of the series.
Something that is just a fun game is not enough to quench the thirst of hyperbole driven reviewers. 

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)

Lun wins this month's Hug Of Koth. And a beer icon.

There are expectations built in for a 'ground breaking', a 'life changing event', if you will, when Doom/Quake
release occurs

Actually, I've felt this is true of pretty much all FPSs 

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.

it's of course, not just that. i wouldn't say a game was only about average just based on lighting :P

i was very disappointed in the first vehicle section of the game, and the followup part where you're in the mech wasn't much better.

the first vehicle section, you're litterally on rails, and can't even move. this was an incredible blunder, and i'm astounded someone, somewhere, greenlighted that section. even the intro to the russian chapter in call of duty or medal of honour (i forget, but it was one of those war fps games) was better. sure you couldn't move, but you could at least duck.
so here i am, standing tall in the back of a truck, getting shot, and seeing all my friends ducking, like smart soldiers, and i can't even do that.

the mech part was only slightly better. i could control my actions, yes, but in a very sluggish manner. i'm going through what seems like a gauntlet of only mildly interesting brushwork (and poor lighting, which i already covered, which only serves to accentuate the poor lighting).

finally, i gotta put this last jab in here: where is the liquids?! jeez, i don't even need fancy ass fresnel shaders like the source engine. i'd have been satisfied with some proper swimming physics and a semi-transparent static texture that looked vaguely like slime or water. why the hell d3 originally never even had it is completly beyond me. i guess this is more from a mapping perspective really. but i hold to my belief that at least 1 map in q4 which had some nice sewer-y or flooded areas, would have totally pwned. 

(and poor lighting, which i already covered, which only serves to accentuate the poor lighting)

should read:

(and poor lighting, which i already covered, which only serves to accentuate the poor geometry) 

Of the things about Quake 4 I could complain about, the brushwork is pretty low down on the list.

Seriously, I literally finished the game today (my second playthrough), and it did a pretty good job of reminding me that an awful lot of the environment art is really really fucking good. 

I agree that some water areas would have improved the variety in the game, (and looked hella purdy), but I'm pretty sure id would not have settled for anything less than proper fresnel shader shenanigans, and from what I've heard the resulting performance hit required to get these looking good ultimately prohibited their inclusion.

The vehicle sections were a bit pants gameplay-wise but I've already said that. They did grow on me the second time round though. 

nah, not at all. there are a couple of player-made water shaders out there that look very nice, and don't seem to have any performance hit at all or a very slight one such that i don't notice it on my mediocre system. 

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.

No. No they do not. When you look at the amount of scattered light in any natural photo, and consider the myriad of ways the engine would make it prohibitively expensive to simulate that with even a tiny handful of always-dynamic batch-splitting overdraw-mongering lights that only attenuate from a single point, you'll know what I mean. Yeah, it's cool seeing the light pick out all the little bits of a texture from the right direction, but that's actually pretty non-essential to making a scene sell itself.


the water decision had nothing to do with the shader. the development of water physics and time spent on water character animations and all the other new assets you'd need wasn't considered worth the nearly minimal amount of time the player would spend in the water in the first place. but I miss it too. 

I think lighting alone is no biggie for games success, and q4 has just crappy outdoors, with good indoors.
I dare you to look at all the PS2 ports with poor vertex light model. I would even say the games with good light are in the minority...
Actually good games are in the minority

Anyway, cant argue it was silly to not allow easy lightmap usage in d3 tech and you need to use ambient_ light that looks crap and still eats resources.

This brings me back to discussion would Q4 been any better if it was made on (omg) SOURCE or smth like cod2 engine(Q3 +DX, shaders and bump ?) 

Lun, thanks for clearing up the water issue.

I'm still not convinced D3 engine's outdoor lighting ability is that terrible though. I'm currently working on a massive outdoor section in my map and a bit of ambient light to complement the sky and the regular lights is working out quite nicely.