The reason for why Quake isn't as good as Doom...

[hardcore_gamer]

...is pacing.

Don't get me wrong, I think Quake is a fun game that deserves to be played by most hardcore_fps players at least once.

However, for some reason I have never been able to enjoy the original Quake anywhere near as much as the Doom games. It was something that I could never put my finger on for some reason for the longest time, but now I think I know why.

Simply put, Quake is just too slow.

You go around, traveling a maze like level just as in Doom. But unlike Doom where each level is made interesting by hordes of monsters and unexpected ambushes that often throw as many as a dozen or even dozens of monsters at you, your typical Quake confrontation consists of about 2 or 3 enemies at a time. And not even powerful enemies, but even just lower level ones. And as a result, a lot of Quake's levels and fights just feel dreadfully boring.

There are some good fights to be had here and there, but many of the levels in the original vanilla Quake honestly bore me to tears.

The levels where I find myself enjoying myself the most are the ones that ramp up the action and throw lots of enemies at you instead of just 1 or 2 at a time.

What is your view on this? Is Quake's biggest problem it's slow pace compared to Doom?

[40oz]

If you want to see someone post a quake done quick video, why don't you just ask for it?

[hardcore_gamer]

40oz said:

If you want to see someone post a quake done quick video, why don't you just ask for it?

Beating the game in a short period of time doesn't make the actual game or the combat itself fast paced. There are speed-runs for Doom 3, and that game is nowhere near as fast paced as the original Doom.

[kristus]

It's been a long time since I felt Doom was fast paced.

[Phml]

I kinda agree with your reasoning, but I'm not sure I'd reach the same conclusion. IMO, Quake's biggest issue is combat being largely inconsequential. Weapons feel weak and aren't too interesting to use, monsters are few and not terribly threatening... It's more of a movement game than a shooting one. You fight the environment more than anything else, the first boss is the poster child of that.

While you could argue Doom is also like that, especially compared to modern shooters, Doom has more of an even split, whereas Quake is mostly parkour-in-abstract-environments. You can play Doom super slowly, without straferunning or arch-vile jumping and still have a blast, but Quake without its tricks and jumps is a snoozefest - and the amount of skill required to use those tricks and jumps efficiently is out of reach for many of us, which leads to more frustration than fun.

It's no surprise Quake SP tanked so fast, whereas its MP is still alive. Fighting against human players circumvents the shoddy bestiary, and DM layouts are designed to make movement fluid.

[TimeOfDeath]

kristus said:

It's been a long time since I felt Doom was fast paced.

You're doing it wrong. :)

[negke]

You do have 'always run' enabled, do you?

[kristus]

TimeOfDeath said:

You're doing it wrong. :)

No. I started playing Quake Live instead.

[Maes]

1996 good reasons.

[Technician]

Maes said:

1996 good reasons.

That was hardly one-thousand, nine-hundred, and ninety-six good reasons, Maes.

[Nomad]

I'm surprised he hasn't stated that the reason Quake is inferior to Doom is because there's no forced and painful chocolate shotgun.

Also Ogre butts aren't sexy enough.

[Enjay]

...and it's fugly. Too much brown. Models indistinct blocky messes that don't look as good as the sprites from the games one generation prior to it.

I agree with the weapons point. The shotguns in particular were horribly understated, unsatisfying things to use versus their Doom counterparts.

I liked the music.

[Maes]

Nomad said:

I'm surprised he hasn't stated that the reason Quake is inferior to Doom is because there's no forced and painful chocolate shotgun.

That's definitively an issue, but the sexy moans and groans of the Quakeguy more than make up for it. They even surpass Doomguy's forcibly muffled pain groans (that sound like toilet straining) when you stand on a nukage floor with the chainsaw on! But that's pretty much the only aspect of the game that I liked.

[PRIMEVAL]

I quite enjoy Quake. Love its atmosphere and more laid back gameplay. Still fast, but not too fast and crazy.

[levir]

I think I tried modding a map for quake ONCE a long long time ago, could be my own personal beef with quake. I'm going to try to attempt this again soon though, just for the hell of it.

[Bucket]

What's with all this Quake talk? Did I miss an anniversary or something? More importantly: will this facilitate the return of Quake Night?

[Fletcher`]

As someone who grew up with both Doom and Quake, I find that I still enjoy quake immensely and would LOVE to do more modding for it. I just need to learn how and have better tools (that new map editor is an awesome start.)

[levir]

ill have to try that new quake software out. I downloaded it I just put it on my external and forgot about it. there was an error I'll have to look up.

[dew]

quake DM is pretty fucking fast. doom DM can be even faster, by a lot. the rest of the fps games are usually much slower. and this thread is silly.

[Quast]

kristus said:

It's been a long time since I felt Doom was fast paced.

I'm going to kinda agree with this sediment. I can't say I've ever really felt that way though unless I'm playing a wad that more or less forces it. Plutonia is the only official wad that pushes that envelope and there are precious few pwads that really follow that road.

Seriously, if doom ep 1 sets the standard, then doom is meant to be quite moody and atmospheric.

Quake as a whole is very similar to that in that it's meant to have a certain gloomy aesthetic the player is meant to absorb.

Personally I quite like it that way.

[schwerpunk]

Yup. Agreed: I play Quake a lot more quickly than I do Doom. Especially if we're just considering the respective campaigns.

Quake has the best secrets of any id game I've encountered.

Also, I just love Quake, even if I came to it relatively late in life (long after I'd played Quake 2, 3).

[188DarkRevived]

For me the reason is definitely because of the graphics more than anything else. I don't care if the monsters were made out of true-3D polygons or out of flat 2D pixels, but I just don't want to see chunky angular blocks running around the maps.
What the hell was the logic of using polygons instead of pixels if in the end they still created the illusion of oversized magnified pixels?
If they didn't have the technology to make curved and detailed models back in 1996 then they should've just waited until 1998 when they did acquire that kind of technology and should've released a quality product at that time instead of releasing garbage at a time too soon when they were obviously unprepared to serve quality.
Plain and simple.

[Technician]

188DarkRevived said:

I don't care if the monsters were made out of true-3D polygons or out of flat 2D pixels, but I just don't want to see chunky angular blocks running around the maps.

Because people would be bitching if they are looking at cardboard cutouts in a true 3D environment. Also, why the fuck did they ever leave vector graphics for sprites? I mean, c'mon.

Seriously, the monsters are my favorite element of the game. They're just so alien looking, right out of a Lovecraft novel.

[Mr. T]

Enjay said:

...and it's fugly. Too much brown. Models indistinct blocky messes that don't look as good as the sprites from the games one generation prior to it.

I used to think this too, but replaying Quake recently let me appreciate it's unique art style a lot more. The castles, jerky animation... it's spooky as fuck.

[Avoozl]

One thing's for certain is that I enjoyed Quake's music much more than Doom's, though I still like a select few tracks from both Doom's much more.

[DoomUK]

hardcore_gamer said:

You go around, traveling a maze like level just as in Doom. But unlike Doom where each level is made interesting by hordes of monsters and unexpected ambushes that often throw as many as a dozen or even dozens of monsters at you, your typical Quake confrontation consists of about 2 or 3 enemies at a time.

This statement can't be disputed.

It never diminished Quake's awesomeness, though. Generally speaking Quake presents a different kind of challenge than Doom, but I love it just as much.

[Maes]

188DarkRevived said:

rant over polygons vs sprites

Id couldn't just serve yet another rehash of the Doom engine (they did it with Final Doom and it didn't go down too well, nor yet another overblown 2.5D engine and neither create a mixed bag of fully 3D environments and 2D sprites. Besides, the competition had upped the ante quite a lot and thus afforded them no discounts on this front. Sprites had the disadvantage that they:

• Look like crap when combined with really 3D environments and/or with unconstained freelook, so they would have to essentially dumb environments down to a more familiary but less innovative 2.5D feel, and it was too late to beat DN3 at its own game. DN3 was pretty much the Swan's Song for 2.5 engines (except maybe the first Blood), but after 1996 the paradigm had shifted.
  
• They took WAY TOO MUCH MEMORY, which could be put to better use by storing more complex 3D meshes, level data, and game code. Especially in the mid 90s, where RAM was at a premium on both PCs and game consoles, this was a decisive factor that caused the switch to 3D games, and marked the end of 2D games. A single sprite, especially with multiple rotations and animation frames, took up much more memory than a textured model mesh with potentially infinite set of rotations and even infinite animation postures (Half Life perfected that with their skeleton-based animation).
  

The above being said....did early polygon-based games look like crap, even with HW acceleration e.g. on the PSX? Sure they did, but there was no turning back. Quake was released just before the peak of a transitional period between two eras where a lot of things changed, and fast (I like to call it "the Dark Ages of PCs and gaming"). Most stuff back in those days was about future potential (e.g. even Windows 95!), rather than getting stuff right the first time, and Quake was no exception.

[DoomUK]

Maes said:

I like to call it "the Dark Ages of PCs and gaming"

I have too many fond memories of mid-90's gaming to describe it with this kind of rhetoric.

Objectively you're right, though. It was a time of necessary backward steps. I maintain that Quake is a good game, but it hasn't aged as well as Doom in the visuals department. Same applies to all the other "1st generation" 3D games that I spent my adolescence playing and the 2D/2.5D games before them. In fact, there's plenty of widely-praised games from that era that I never played, and I can't bring myself to enjoy them in 2013 because I find them distractingly ugly. Yet I can give games from the early 90's and earlier a go that I never played at the time and not have any issue with them.

[Mr. T]

Q1 has aged quite well if you view it thru a lens of "artistic weirdness" as opposed to "low tech, so everything is fucked up".

I know that's kind of revisionist, but IMHO Q2 has aged way more than Q1.

[Avoozl]

I don't think Q2 has aged more. :/