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.
