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MrGlide

Let's talk about Quake 1!

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I never knew about this original level order or alternate levels, very interesting stuff!

As for Quake addons I decided to start on MachineGames' episode 5 today, it's alright so far but I'd be hard pressed to call it episode FIVE. I'm going to be checking out Arcane Dimensions afterwards as that's what I'm really interested in.

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16 minutes ago, cyan0s1s said:

I never knew about this original level order or alternate levels, very interesting stuff!

As for Quake addons I decided to start on MachineGames' episode 5 today, it's alright so far but I'd be hard pressed to call it episode FIVE. I'm going to be checking out Arcane Dimensions afterwards as that's what I'm really interested in.

 

You also might want to try out the Nehahra mod for Quake. It's pretty amazing, and definitely a lot harder than the original campaign. 

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25 minutes ago, Ajora said:

Nehahra

Haha, good luck with the new monster AI. Even more luck with the voice acting.

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3 minutes ago, Da Werecat said:

Haha, good luck with the new monster AI. Even more luck with the voice acting.

 

I love the monster AI in Nehahra. Really forces you to be extra careful with your aim. The voice acting is fairly okay for the most part. Dialogue isn't the best, but the story is quite interesting. 

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Going back through old cut content and info on Quake 1. I've done this before, but I've taken a lot of drugs / drank a lot / got married and divorced / lost god - found god - lost god again, been red pilled,  et cetera, so my memory has a lot of weird holes in it. Anyway. I found this interesting, I did not know this particular tidbit, and it's interesting to know that it finally found a place in an id game many years later, albeit in a slightly different form.
http://quake.wikia.com/wiki/Hellgate_Cube

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On 7/17/2017 at 6:44 PM, CARRiON said:

Quake is a near flawless FPS.

I don't agree with this, though I won't argue it's a fast,  brutal, and amazing experience in spite of its many design flaws. They spent what, fourteen months developing a revolutionary engine? And then everyone was burnt out, so they slapped some resources together and washed their hands of it. And it really shows. Most of the weapons are just repeats and the monsters are damage sponges (shades of Heretic). A lot of monster behavior seems unpolished and content-wise not a whole lot stands out.

 

What does stand out is fast, brutal gameplay unlike any shooter I've seen before or since, a distinct steampunk/lovecraft/sci-fi motif, and a badass soundtrack by trent reznor. So I can't complain too much. And when Quoth came out it was all the better, tweaking a lot of stuff and adding new resources.

 

Fuuuuck this thread just made me realize I don't have Quake anymore thanks to a computer crash. Ughhh...

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I would agree that it is definitely not near flawless. After you have the first boss fight, you play through expecting more only to be disappointed. Then you get further disappointed at the final boss that's even a bigger cop-out than the Spider Mastermind. There were some yawn inducing backtracking scattered here and there and the multiplayer was (when I played it) basically Rockets, Lightning and the occasional grenade. I've heard Q1 described as a tech demo for the engine first, game 2nd.

 

Nonetheless, Q1 is definitely a fun game, interesting style and presentation and at times far better than doom. The series surely needs to revisit the roots of the first game rather than do more Q2 story line.

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12 minutes ago, Ru5tK1ng said:

I've heard Q1 described as a tech demo for the engine first, game 2nd.

Probably by the same people who "buried" Doom when more "advanced" FPS games started cropping up.

 

Late 90s were a time when people didn't really understand what the early shooters did right, and only saw them as a stepping stone to something more complex, like story-driven 3D adventures, or games where you can break toilets at the very least. Players who value immersion and/or complexity may still hold this view today.

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I think what I don't like about Quake 1 (it's not like I hate it, I just don't love it) comes down to two things:

 

1) It has every-enemy-is-a-tank syndrome even worse than Heretic. This is frustrating because Q1 actually *has* fodder enemies, but it has this weird thing going where it refuses to mix them with the tougher enemies, so you're either fighting all fodder or all tanks at any given time. This makes some sense from a story standpoint, but it could have been easily handwaved away in light of the dimensional travel theme, and the game really suffers for it.

 

2) I don't really enjoy the weapons. The shotgun and SSG aren't as satisfying or interesting as Doom's; they're essentially like having a really good pistol and a really good single-barrel shotgun, but they're both weaker than they feel like they should be.  The nailgun, super nailgun, and lightning gun feel like they're just progressively better versions of the exact same weapon, and the latter two eat through ammo so fast that you can't use them that often, even though using them gives you the most fun, fast-paced gameplay. The grenade launcher is interesting, and the rocket launcher is a rocket launcher, no complaints there.

 

The modding community has made the game better primarily by creating new monsters and weapons, and secondarily by being willing to mix the base enemies with the medieval/eldritch ones to some extent. Also, they make maps so gorgeous that the gameplay doesn't matter. But still, I love most of Doom's monsters and weapons so much better by comparison.

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While I essentially agree with everything you've pointed out:

 

10 minutes ago, Not Jabba said:

Also, they make maps so gorgeous that the gameplay doesn't matter.

This made me dig my fingernails into my desk. The idea of good looking maps being able to compensate for "meh" gameplay is something that has always eluded me, and it probably always will.

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11 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

This made me dig my fingernails into my desk. The idea of good looking maps being able to compensate for "meh" gameplay is something that has always eluded me, and it probably always will.

"Doesn't matter" is a bit of a stretch; it was just a simplified way of saying that atmosphere and architecture can be the strongest points of a level and the most compelling reason for playing it. Anyway, sorry about your fingernails or the desk, whichever got the worse end of the deal.

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37 minutes ago, Not Jabba said:

The modding community has made the game better primarily by creating new monsters and weapons

I've played a metric shit ton of Quake releases, and this is a surprise for me.

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10 minutes ago, Not Jabba said:

Anyway, sorry about your fingernails or the desk, whichever got the worse end of the deal.

Not to worry, my fingernails are in top condition, and my desk is made of wood, so I left a few clawmarks in an unimportant spot. ;-)

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11 minutes ago, Da Werecat said:

I've played a metric shit ton of Quake releases, and this is a surprise for me.

 

I mentioned earlier that Quoth is amazing. If you haven't played it, you should. Subterranean Library is a Quoth powered map that I highly recommend. Red777 is another classic map for Quoth.

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It would've been pretty hard to play a metric shit ton of Quake releases without stumbling upon Quoth. The point is: for every Quoth release (or AD, or Drake, or whatever), there's a huge amount of things that only use what the base game already had. It can stand on its own pretty well.

 

The comparison with Heretic is something I don't understand at all, because in Quake there are several factors that make it feel much more dynamic. For example: yes, the shotguns are weak, but they're also fast. Second - the monsters are actually dangerous, and some of them are pretty fast to boot, so there's no time to snooze.

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I played quake 1 Single player alot last year, and just downloaded it again tonight. Going to go through it again, was great fun and is a classic.

 

I would love to see a GZDoom total conversion of Quake within the engine for Doom 2 (but with enemies/weapons/health/armour powers etc as sprites). Use the most advanced features of GZDoom Builder and make a total conversion as 1:1 as possible with the original game, with the original map layouts as proposed above from that site. It would be a cool community project, none the less (focusing on the single player levels, and then easing onto the two (3 technically, with  MachineGames)  Expansion Packs. What do y'all think?

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1 hour ago, ImpieEyez95 said:

What do y'all think?

That effort is better spent on making fresh content rather than homages and recreations, and that an extensive accurate recreation probably wouldn't have enough benefits over the original game to make up for the effort put into making the recreation, compared with just playing the original game.

Edited by scifista42

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5 hours ago, Da Werecat said:

 

The comparison with Heretic is something I don't understand at all, because in Quake there are several factors that make it feel much more dynamic. For example: yes, the shotguns are weak, but they're also fast. Second - the monsters are actually dangerous, and some of them are pretty fast to boot, so there's no time to snooze.

Me too, Not even a shambler takes long to kill if you have anything above the ssg, Yet they can kill you easily if you aren't on your guard. Meanwhile heretic's monsters can't kill corvus for shit unless the mapper doesn't place ammo nor health. 

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1 hour ago, ImpieEyez95 said:

I would love to see a GZDoom total conversion of Quake ..... What do y'all think?

Things that are easy to do in Quake can be very time consuming to recreate in GZDoom. ZDoom basically has it's roots in supporting Hexen on top of Doom, and there's lots of things you can do to simulate 3D brush-work, but you're still confined to a 2D sector approach which can quickly get complex as soon as you have overlapping floor and ceiling features.

 

That said, I am creating 'Quake flavored' maps for Doom at the moment, and I've certainly built a number of homages of single Quake rooms. (Which were a good learning exercise.) But I'm quite conscious that I'm primarily building Doom maps first and foremost.

 

A better approach might be to put some Doom gunplay into Quake. The move from sprites to ploygons meant that there had to be less monsters in Quake, so they had to be tougher to make up for that. But with modern cpus you could potentionally throw a lot more monsters at the player.

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Indeed, Arcane Dimensions does throw a lot more monsters at the player. At least hundreds in eg ad_swampy

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11 hours ago, Da Werecat said:

The comparison with Heretic is something I don't understand at all, because in Quake there are several factors that make it feel much more dynamic.

The rocket launcher is pretty much Quake's ultimate weapon, once you got it you can dominate with it, 3 rockets for the average toughie (Fiend, Death Knight) and 4 rockets for a Vore. Ogres are common and constantly supply ammo so you always get back what you use when killing one with rockets.

Make great use of a Quad Damage too, don't grab it until you're ready, and once you got a path of meat to plow through use in conjunction with double barreled shotgun, perforator or thunderbolt and lay waste to everything in sight in seconds.

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I don't recall many bullet sponge enemies in Quake. Most seem to go down in 3-4 double-barrel shotgun blasts? The RL and GL are very powerful, and the game likes to hand you Quad Damages quite a bit. Super Nail Gun destroys Shamblers quickly, too.

 

Did we play the same Quake?

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10 hours ago, CARRiON said:

I don't recall many bullet sponge enemies in Quake.

I'm replaying on nightmare, I'm on ep 4 as we speak, oh dear god they're everywhere. It makes me want to make a little 3 panel comic about it.

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11 hours ago, CARRiON said:

I don't recall many bullet sponge enemies in Quake. Most seem to go down in 3-4 double-barrel shotgun blasts? The RL and GL are very powerful, and the game likes to hand you Quad Damages quite a bit. Super Nail Gun destroys Shamblers quickly, too.

 

Did we play the same Quake?

The ogres and death knights (the most common enemies in the game) both take upwards of 4 double shotgun blasts to kill.

 

Doom: Mostly low HP enemies, a few medium HP enemies, and very few high HP enemies 

Q1SP: Mostly medium HP enemies, a few low HP enemies, and very few high HP enemies.

 

As someone said earlier in this thread, Quake managed to make do with lower monster counts.

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Isn't the shotgun the shittiest weapon in Quake 1 though? Don't recall using it unless it is impossible to use RL\Grenades and having no ammo for lightning\Nailguns.

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Uh, no, there's still the axe. I still use the single barreled shotgun against certain long distance targets to conserve ammo. Often against ogre's, knights, and spawns. So unlike Doom's pistol, the shotgun still has some value.

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54 minutes ago, nxGangGirl said:

Uh, no, there's still the axe. I still use the single barreled shotgun against certain long distance targets to conserve ammo. Often against ogre's, knights, and spawns. So unlike Doom's pistol, the shotgun still has some value.

This. Although it doesn't seem to conserve ammo: I've found the Ogre takes 10 single shotgun rounds to take down, but four super shotgun blasts, so while I'm preferring the hang back and shotgun snipe method on a lot of enemies (they seem to get hung up on the environment quite a bit; as an older individual I notice this as a flaw I didn't really perceive as an awestruck child, but isn't making me dislike the game at all and is a tremendous help in my first ever Nightmare run) it isn't saving me any ammo, except that I'm not using up my nails by doing so.

 

Enemies hanging up on the environment seems to be a common thing in the vanilla map though. Fiends are ridiculously easy to cheese, either by leading them to a doorway, set of stairs or tricking them into jumping into a pit and then shotgun sniping them. Scrags have a hard time understanding the concept of ducking under doorways. All the enemies track in the same way as Doom, so utilizing corners and quick SSG blasts is relatively easy. Only enemy that gives me a pain in my ass is the damn Shambler. In "The Road to Chthon" when you pick up the gold key, if you don't run the hell away you're dead in a matter of seconds. In E2M6 on the final elevator, two shamblers on NM is pretty cheap and again, with almost zero cover you're guaranteed dead* (shortly before in the same level, you fight one Shambler with the same amount of cover and it isn't a problem at all). Add that to the low chance of a pain state and constant attack and unless you have the Lightning Gun or Super Nailgun they're a huge pain in my ass. Maybe I should be ducking and weaving with the SSG? I dunno, I figure I just need to get good TBH. Especially since I know the plethora of user maps are going to be utilizing enemies much, much better. (AD is a lot of fun so far.)

Not looking forward to the Vore encounters I know are coming up shortly. Gonna be lots of save/load.

 

*Yes, I reloaded an old save and utilized the Pentagram of Protection for this encounter; I may be an idiot, I do understand item management. :P Funny thing is, when I did the second Shambler telefragged the first one and I didn't need to worry as much. Pmsl

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