I’ve always been familiar with Quake, but only as a multiplayer game. I’ve played a lot of arena shooters (I’m more of an Unreal Tournament fan), but for whatever reason I never got around to playing the real Quake. I didn’t really expect much considering how badly DOOM has aged, especially in terms of level design and general game feel, but I was really impressed.
Quake holds up on all fronts. The gunplay feels good, the movement feels great, the enemy variety is pretty good, and the level design is a night and day difference from DOOM and DOOM 2. It’s hard to imagine that they came out only two years apart.
Despite being copied a million times, I feel like Quake holds its own against modern shooters. I would recommend it to anyone who likes movement shooters, and I probably should’ve played this ages ago.
P.S: I HATE SHAMBLERS I HATE SHAMBLERS I HATE SHAMBLERS
I didn’t really expect much considering how badly DOOM has aged, especially in terms of level design and general game feel, but I was really impressed.
I unironically think Doom aged better than Quake, especially in the audiovisual department.
Doom had worse technology, but the sound and art direction is in a other league.
I think stuff like the limited color pallette may have been due to technical limitations where they would need to fit solid gradients of every color into a 256 color pallet to do the convincing dynamic lighting and the like.
Doom has a nice style to it but the level design is just masochistic. Most of the levels are just spamming powerful enemies and having you run in circles to whittle them down, that is if the level isn’t intentionally claustrophobic and obtuse. I love GZDoom and all, but the official campaign isn’t fun imo.
Most of the levels are just spamming powerful enemies and having you run in circles to whittle them down, that is if the level isn’t intentionally claustrophobic and obtuse.
I feel like you’re describing some fan made slaughter map, not any of the Doom episodes lol. The only thing I somewhat dislike about the level design is the labyrinthine nature of it, but you get used to it after a while thanks to the automap. If anything I wish the official Doom episodes had more enemies and used the strong ones more often, especially in the first game you mostly just fight imps for duration of it even on ultra-violence.
No, the level design in original Doom is weak compared to Quake. It’s not as bad as he describes it, but it’s seriously held back by the tech.
Sure, the original Doom engine couldn’t handle multiple floors and complex geometry so the levels were fairly horizontal and labyrinthine, but I think that in a way that made it so the developers had to be even more creative and many of the levels in turn are just downright memorable to say the least. What I can say though is that I can easily remember most of the Doom 1 and 2 levels, meanwhile Quake for me is nearly a complete blank.
To each their own, I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think you’re on to something. There’s something more “grokkable” about Doom’s 2.5 maps (some more than others, admittedly), both as a player and maker. And I think it shows in the incredible number of Doom maps people have made over the years.
I think the limitations of the Doom engine work both against and in favor of the game, the enforced limitations kind of “distills” the levels to it’s bare minimum, pure creative level design, forcing the developers to work around those “barriers” as I’ve said, you can see this with older map packs like Alien Vendetta where the map makers were pushing the limits of what the engine could achieve. With the risk of sounding utterly pretentious, there’s a sort of artistry to making good Doom levels and this is somewhat lost nowadays with limit breaking source ports like GZDoom.
I’m with you - a really beautiful vanilla map, that pushes the visplanes, is much more impressive than a limit removing equivalent. I’m not saying that the latter maps lack artistry, but vanilla requires that you look at your map from every angle in almost excruciating detail. The result – to me – just feels that much more intentional/authorial.
OK now I’m definitely sounding pretentious :p
Quake 2 also holds up really well. The remaster added a guide compass to point you to the next objective that is a godsend.
I recently replayed Q2 and I found it… decent. Alright but not amazing in basically all respects. Just like I remembered it. I hate the fact that enemies have collision until their dying animation is finished, that was a constant annoyance. Quake 1 got it right, so I haven’t got a clue why they screwed it up in the sequel.
The Quake remasters are well done and I’ve been enjoying them on the Deck. I wanted to play something I already knew to get used to the gyro aiming and the remasters came out shortly after I bought it. Perfect timing.
The games have aged surprisingly well. I don’t think you give Doom 1/2 enough credit but I’ll be the first to admit I liked Heretic more. Hexen on the other hand has aged poorly but when modded it is fun.
Heretic, damn. I hate to put Doom behind any of them, but Heretic is engaging as hell.
I liked them all, but Rise of the Triad was my favorite in some ways. I remember it being a lot of fun.
RotT has really fun weapons and a banging soundtrack, I can see how that would be the defining FPS of the time for some people. I think my favourite FPS of the 90’s was Blood, they nailed the atmosphere in that game.
I think the one area that Quake really falls flat on modern playthroughs, is the level aethetics. The assets all look fine, in my opinion, but the levels visually, all just feel so bland and same-y. So much of it is just brown-grey tunnels. The closest thing to a landmark within a level tends to be a stained glass window. It really highlights just how much of an improvement Half Life was. While I enjoy Quake on a moment-to-moment basis, I find it gets a tad tedious purely because everything looks too similar, and it doesn’t feel like you’re making much progress.
The star of the original quake was always the multiplayer.
Tcpip multiplayer meant you could have full servers of people playing CTF. And the gameplay was epic. It was fast paced, and a massive improvement on anything else available at the time.
Nothing was better than a quad damage appearing right in front of you while you were holding a rocket launcher.
My friend playing Brutal Doom recently made me wonder if there is a similar mod for Quake. Just to jazz things up a little more cuz I’ve done vanilla Quake since 1996 (I think the only mod I’ve ever actually played for Quake specifically was Team Fortress).
you know about the og hidden Nightmare Mode in the hidden door underwater in the level select?
That’s the only way I play.
The original Quake is one of my favourite games of all time and absolutely holds up! … Until episode 4, at least. Episode 4 is rubbish.
I should really play this game again some time.
Still have a lot of fond memories playing this with my brother when I was little, we played the campaign together if I remember correctly? That was a thing you could do, right? (I guess those memories are fond but not very clear :)
