There are other mods / paks like DOPA, Arcane Dimensions, Copper, and Alkaline. Just to name some of the pretty damn good ones. Somehow, Quake ended up in a sweet spot. There's a rhythm to the way you fight, and a lot of tools in stock Quake to make varied situations in a single-player level. The level design doesn't ape reality like games from the early 2000s started to do.
There are tons of things Quake did wrong, but enough things that it does right.
I don't want to head too deep into the "wrong for their time" versus "wrong in hindsight" calculations, because it turns into a game of "pretend it's 1996"
Things Quake did "wrong" mostly boil down to game design and level design problems. Most base levels and episode 4 suffer from various problems... poor layout, inconsistently sized spaces, samey areas, unnecessary teleporters, too many corridors, overuse of traps, under-lit areas, etc. Chthon is boring. Shub-Niggurath is obtuse. Vore missiles track too perfectly. Spawn (the blobs that explode) are just no fun. Ammo balance could be a lot better (e.g. Ogres give you grenades). Weapon balance could stand some tweaks (e.g. between the two nailguns).
I think a lot of these problems could have been fixed if Quake had been less rushed--but may not have been fixed. The development team had a bunch of ideas for Quake that were questionable. Quake 2 was worse in many ways, except when it came to multiplayer and the mod scene. The Quake 2 engine fixed so many of the technical problems with the Quake engine, but the game is saddled with an awful story, and some of the slight slant towards more "realism" in Q2 level design did it a major disservice.
Various Quake 1 mods address balance issues, and the single-player maps you can find these days are simply phenomenal. Some of them would not have been possible in 1996 (like Tears of the False God in Arcane Dimensions) but then there are level packs like DOPA which just seem like, well, better levels, and there are mods like Copper which directly address various game design issues.
So I think it's interesting to ask "What did Quake do right, so that in spite of its flaws, people still like it?" I think that it's an enjoyable game as a game, not just as a retro game you play for nostalgia.
>Things Quake did "wrong" mostly boil down to game design and level design problems.
This was a reflection of the issues and internal squabbles ID Software had at the time, especially between John Carmack, the (in)famous programmer, and John Romero, the (in)famous game designer.
The story goes that John Carmack tore down walls at ID offices to keep an eye on everyone since John Romero was just coming at work to slack off and play games all day instead of working on Quake, and the other employees were burned out and irate by John Carmack's iron-fist leadership and working style.
That's pretty much the epitome of toxic work environments. I'm surprised that Quake came out as good as it did, all things considered.
>The Quake 2 engine fixed so many of the technical problems with the Quake engine, but the game is saddled with an awful story
After John Romero left and they lost their top game designer, ID Software's released games were basically tech demos to showcase John Carmack's cutting edge 3D engine tech wrapped up in some improv story so they could be sold as games.
This is an unfair generalisation. In addition to being a great game designer, Romero was an extremely skilled programmer. He just didn't measure up to Carmack in terms of pure graphics--technical solutions. But since when is that a fair comparison for anyone?
I think the primary reason the original Quake idea never bore out (not at id, and not at the studio Romero started after id) was that Romero had some misconceptions about how easy it would be to create a highly complex game by just throwing more manpower at it.
>This is an unfair generalisation. In addition to being a great game designer
Him being a great designer is debatable. During his tenure at ID, Romero had acclaimed successes which lead him to think of himself as this indispensable god-like figure that everything he touched turned to gold and that his talent is wasted at the current ID at the time and became difficult to work with, which was pissing off John Carmack.
So after he left ID to work on his own company, Ion Storm, most of his post-ID era games were massive flops that over promised and under delivered (ahem, Daikatana) both story and level wise and ruined the company and brought him back to reality that maybe he's not this god-like game designer after all, based on having a lucky streak early in his career.
Sure, it's impossible to distinguish between "great at X" and "having a lucky streak at X" for anyone.
From my understanding, though, Romero could -- and did -- crank out good, smaller games on demand early in his career, far more than is easily attributable to lucky streak.
The problems, as I see it, only began when he wanted to make bigger games and thought the way to do it was by hiring lots of people and somehow his dream would get well executed by this ill-thought-out organisation.
Quake was a huge cultural hit and basically kickstarted the multiplayer shooter genre which has ever since been probably the most popular genre for decades. I’m not sure what these takes about it being a failure are
The previous comments were focused on the single player game.
As someone who dedicated 4 (very formative) years to playing Quake / Quakeworld, I agree that the muliplayer game was excellent. Even without the endless extra content from the mod scene, the base vanilla muliplayer experience was just so utterly captivating.
Well that's more of a limitation of what PCs could do at the time. Large levels full of monsters like Doom had in 2D, could not be handled in 3D even by the high end PCs at the time so that's why the design direction was so different and did not age well.
Masters of Doom mentions how some of the early design was based around a D&D campaign Carmack made and they all played. The modern game Amid Evil really struck me as what Quake could have been without its design compromises due to technical limitations and "rush" (more like, they couldn't believe it was taking so long, it turned things toxic, they needed to get it out and be done). AE really nails the swords&sorcery-style fantasy elements whereas Quake only really hints at them (though the more contemporary Hexen series did them a lot better too).
I remember reading about Quake before it was released, and I recall that it was going for a much slower pace. Melee combat and 1v1 fights were the focus, and environments felt very dark and moody.
Not sure if that was a piece of fan-fiction or whatever, this was ~30 years ago so my memory is very fuzzy. It was also passed around in the BBS days so who knows the veracity of what I read. I imagine this document has been lost to time.
I was a little disappointed at the final release that I didn't get the above but it was nevertheless extremely cool.
Yeah, Quake was supposed to be their RPG in development, The Fight for Justice. "You start off as Quake, the strongest, most dangerous person on the continent." Your character in The Fight for Justice was supposed to start off with a Thor-like hammer and a ring of protection. They tried to carry forth the combat with the hammer into the final Quake game, making it a more melee-focused thing albeit with the ability to shoot thunderbolts or other magic and cause shockwaves by striking the ground with the hammer, etc. They found it didn't work, and they all just wanted to play with more Doom-like guns anyway. The hammer may have become the Axe and Lightning Gun weapons in the final game.
What I don't get is that Goldeneye came out the following year was way more impressive in everyway but it's quake and quake 2 that's remembered as ground breaking. I had an N64 and was convinced by hype to get a 3dfx card for my pc. To be honest it was a bit of a let down.
Goldeneye may have been a very good game, but visually, what the Quake 2 engine was capable of on PC, was far ahead of what the games running on the N64 hardware could ever dream of as it was limited to only 4k texture cache vs PC GPUs back then had 4MB or more of VRAM for textures. This is why N64 textures were blurry.
Maybe you weren't blown away because the games you tried were not great or your PC had bottlenecks, since if you do a side by side of PC games of the era that were also ported to the N64, they look obviously worse on the N64.
Goldeneye engine was written bespoke for the N64 hardware and the devs were absolute wizards to make it look as good as it did on that limited hardware, but if you look without the rose tinted glasses, you can see the rough edges of the N64 HW limitations.
You make some fair points. Thing is I've been back to Goldeneye a lot, on original hardware, emulators and even the leaked Xbox 360 version. Gameplay wise it feels quite far a head of quake 1 and 2. I read that the half life team saw Goldeneye and went and made significant changes because of it. The fact that quake 2 and Goldeneye came out in the same year is strange, Goldeneye plays like it's a generation a head of, it's environments are way more interactive, it's level design is also something that still stands up (this might be something to do with designing the levels as real places and fitting the game around it).
Bizarrely I don't think perfect dark was as good. Even worse, I kept waiting for an FPS that took Goldeneyes lessons onboard. Only thing that was timesplitters 1 and 2 (though that's because free radical were ex Goldeneye staff).
If someone could recommend an FPS that plays as well as Goldeneye I'd really want to play it :)
Goldeneye is remembered as groundbreaking everywhere I go, it seems. A lot of it comes down to split-screen multiplayer and its ability to run on a $200 console. It sold at least 10x as many units as Quake 2. People you meet by chance, in person, are more likely to remember Goldeneye.
People you meet on HN or at FAANG companies had $2000 PCs back in 1998, hooked up to a LAN. You get a distorted perspective if you work in the tech world.
I vividly remember my first experience with Quake. I had to turn the settings all the way down as far as they would go, and the game barely ran. We have a 486 DX33. It took me hours to download the 8mb shareware version, and the game stuttered badly. I remember the sound effects would echo badly as the computer could not render the game at full speed. I could hardly make any of the platforming sections, since the frame rate was so low, and there was a palpable delay between hitting the buttons, and getting a reaction. A year or two later, we got an upgraded PC which ran at ~100 MHz, and of course this handled Quake just fine. It was only then that I played it online. I remember distinctly: 800 ping was "pretty good," while over 1000 ping" was on the boundary of playable. We had dial-up only, and were very rural, so our connection quality was not simply slow, but also spotty and high-latency.
I remember that Quake was not designed to run on a 486 at all. The vertex transformation code that did a perspective divide was optimized around the Pentium microarchitecture and wasn't as efficient on other microarchitectures, sometimes much less efficient. Quake is cited as one of the reasons why Cyrix disappeared.
This is where my playthroughs really grind to a halt. episode 4's levels were primarily designed by Sandy Peterson, who is also responsible for some of Doom 2's more infamous levels. He seems to like very large, difficult to navigate levels with painful traps. It's in total contrast to the tight, iconic levels of episode 1.
I did not play Quake 1 at the time (mainly because I was not quite born yet), but I've played bits of in the past decade and this year I've played and modded it a ton, thanks in part to the remaster. I think it's all of those ways to some extent.
The base game has quite a few bugs and arbitrary limitations which could have been fixed at the time. For example:
- While the player movement feels generally amazing even to this day, it doesn't handle ramps that well: the player slowly slides down when on even the slightest of inclines, and jumping while standing on any angled surface has unpredictable consequences.
- The NPCs are really dumb (they basically move randomly until they see an enemy), which is not a huge problem in itself, but they also get stuck on level geometry and each other really easily unless the level is carefully designed so that enemies are never packed too closely together. I was working on a custom level where I wanted a pack of dogs to attack from a sewer pipe, but I had to abandon the idea as the dogs require as much vertical space as the player in order to move, which does not match their visuals.
There are also some game design issues which are maybe more clear in hindsight. For instance, many of the enemies don't choreograph their attacks very well, which combined with instant hitscan attacks makes some fights feel unfair.
But the biggest issue I have with the game is that while basic gameplay is great, in my opinion there isn't just enough variety to keep the game constantly interesting for 4 chapters (and ten thousand custom maps). There are surprisingly few weapon and enemy types, and many of the weapons are just direct upgrades. The issue is compounded by the fact level scripting and interactivity is surprisingly limited in the base game without mods. This results in most standard Quake maps having basically exactly the same gameplay, just in different (and oftentimes beautifully designed) environments. Maybe I'm just spoilt by Half-Life and its sequels and imitators.
But despite all this I think it is excellent for a game from 1996. With more time in the oven it could have been even better, but what we have now is still an enjoyable game, especially with literally decades of open source development and modding.
Yeah, the "find the yellow key" style gameplay was par for the course at the time, but does feel one dimensional. Half Life changed that, but also System Shock (Classic) was a lessor known game of that era that was hugely different on this point. If you like games of this era I'd suggest checking it out. It uses a different control scheme vs most FPS's, one that ultimately the industry did not chose to follow, and that bothers some people, but I think it fits the gameplay and the rest of the game is so compelling it's pretty forgivable even if you dislike it.
Yes but it caused a revolution in gaming which other studios were able to work off of and refine, eg Half Life. But at the time, there was truly nothing like it, with its full 3D, which is harder to develop for but clearly was the future of gaming.
You have to look at what was available at the time, basicly doom clones and the build engine.
Me and my friends played hundreds or maybe thousands of hours of Quake 1 back in the day, I don't think anyone played the single player more than once so level design there and all are irrelevant. But deathmatch levels were things of beauty IMO, purpose-built ones like DM2,3,4,6 and even accidental ones like E1M2.
Quake's success in my group was not how it looked, we always played with all the graphics at minimum to extract more FPS, with FOV 120 just to see more of the scene to have the edge. Things made Quake different was playability differences like instant weapon switching, bigger rocket impact area (better rocket jumps), changing direction in the air etc. All the things that make a match fast, dynamic and unpredictable. All unrealistic but more fun.
Anyone interested in DM scene back then may find Lakerman matches (especially on DM4), 9 vs DR series (that held in Sweden and surprised the US players with much more advanced gameplay by Europeans) entertaining.
Arcane Dimensions is fantastic. There’s no campaign, but a bunch of different individual levels made by different mappers. An individual level in Arcane Dimensions has about as much content as an entire episode of the original Quake. Level design is very sophisticated, with lots of reuse of areas. Can be easy to get lost if you’re not paying attention.
There are other mods / paks like DOPA, Arcane Dimensions, Copper, and Alkaline. Just to name some of the pretty damn good ones. Somehow, Quake ended up in a sweet spot. There's a rhythm to the way you fight, and a lot of tools in stock Quake to make varied situations in a single-player level. The level design doesn't ape reality like games from the early 2000s started to do.
There are tons of things Quake did wrong, but enough things that it does right.