Happy 18th Birthday Quake!

[Destroid]

I wonder why they never repeated the experiment of hiring someone to produce original works like they did in Q1, most of the rest of the series music is some random music guy making ripoffs of popular metal songs.

 

[DraQ]

The track goes more in line with the rest of the soundtrack after the initial minute. Still, that part sounds great and fitting for when it is played, mainly for when the game is started and when you complete an episode. It has a nice gritty and foreboding sound to it for these few occasions.

I never said I disliked the first track (quite the opposite), just that it isn't in the same tone as the rest of the OST.

 

[dnf]

I remember all sorts of things I hate, probably more clearly than their opposites.

I think the idea that 'action' needs 'exciting' music to accompany it is a pernicious one that I wish we'd collectively move on from. It's usually uninspired, substituting volume and tempo for an ear for aesthetics of any sort (either technical or compositional)--it is a way of trying to dictate emotions to the player ("this is an action sequence! feel the tension!") rather than evoking them (via challenging gameplay).

I played Q2 with the Reznor soundtrack in my cd drive, which I think enhanced the mood--particurlarly in the prison levels. I always mute 'combat music' if I'm given the option in settings, or I delete the battle playlists or individual files if that doesn't work. I prefer my killing to be more contemplative, but that's probably a function of hypertension and a fondness for sedatives.

The soundtracks for Diablo I & II were good at emphasizing atmosphere even in the middle of constant combat, and at no detriment to those games (whatever their other failings), although I think games in general could stand to do with less, but better, music overall.

I think you need to check your testosterone levels, just saying. Overthinking low brow action games is a sympton of low T levels. OTOH we barely get an OST like Q2 at all in action games(i only remember of Destruction Derby 2, NFS III, but those are racing games), while there is an overabundance of atmospheric music in games.

 

[Destroid]

I'd say there is an overabundance of generic orchestral music rather.

 

[Cadmus]

I'd say there is an overabundance of generic orchestral music rather.

Yeah. I can't remember any RPG where the battle music didn't annoy the fuck out of me. It's always the same generic, booming, dissonant, ugly orchestra.

As for Quake, I had a pirated copy of 1 and think the music wasn't included. I love Q3 music though, I remember most of the tracks and always play the game with the music on full so I can barely hear the footsteps! EEAH CHACHACHAAA!

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

Q1>Q3>Q2 - that's how I see it.

The version of Doom made on Playstation had some really nice ambient tracks too. I feel that if Reznor would made it, it would be something like this.

 

[Astral Rag]

Interesting RPS article:

Free-To-Frag: QuakeWorld’s Once-Planned Business Model
By Alice O'Connor on July 4th, 2014 at 5:00 pm.

Spoiler

When John Carmack started tinkering with Quake’s multiplayer code in 1996, his plans for the QuakeWorld client went deeper than TCP and UDP. Its new netcode made playing an FPS online over dialup not total garbage, sparking the multiplayer FPS explosion, but Carmack had also once intended for QW to be what we’d now consider free-to-play. Though the plans changed and this never happened, I can be endlessly fascinated by scraps of video game history like the time John Carmack thought about selling the right to have a name.

Quake had started building a multiplayer community even before release, with Qtest, and QuakeWorld was to encourage that competition and bragging something fierce. “All frags on the entire Internet will be logged,” Carmack schemed in a .plan file update (an awkward precursor to weblogs, using the hilariously-named ‘Finger protocol’) in 1996:

“You should be able to say, ‘I am one of the ten best QuakeWorld players in existence’, and have the record to back it up. There are all sorts of other cool stats that we could mine out of the data: greatest frags/minute, longest uninterrupted Quake game, cruellest to newbies, etc, etc.”

Quake became a game with big personalities (“Who names their child KillCreek?” I wondered, reading PC Gamer) and plenty of trash-talking. It also connected people to form communities and friendships and all those soft things. That’s why Carmack’s monetisation idea fascinates me:

“My halfway thought out proposal for a biz plan is that we let anyone play the game as an anonymous newbie to see if they like it, but to get their name registered and get on the ranking list, they need to pay $10 or so. Newbies would be automatically kicked from servers if a paying customer wants to get on. Sound reasonable?”

id did shareware. They made large chunks of their games free to prove the full thing was worth buying. Carmack’s idea would give away the pure game side but limit access to what made multiplayer any fun at all: people. Connecting and competing with people across the world, exploring that weird frontier, and expressing ourselves as whoever we wanted to be was so exciting then, and vital to multiplayer. It’d be a mite more difficult without a name.

I’ve been idly imagining an alternate timeline where free-to-play grew out of weird ideas like this. Popular F2P models focus on the game side, selling boosters, items, and so on. Carmack’s idea would have monetised human interaction. Which sounds a bit monstrous when I say it like that. (And stats, sure, all those stats, and the not-getting-kicked-from-servers, but I’m not particularly interested in those.)

In a way, Dota 2‘s take on free-to-play feels close to this. Valve let everyone play then charge for instant unlocks of cosmetic items. These don’t affect the core game, so buying (or not buying) never feels unfair or cheaty, but they do let us express ourselves through our wizard’s outfits. As hero looks can range from blind mystic to Cyndi Lauper, it feels unusually personal.

Video games are very different now. Pre-Steam, pre-Counter-Strike, pre-PayPal, Carmack wrote:

“If it looks feasible, I would like to see internet focused gaming become a justifiable biz direction for us. Its definitely cool, but it is uncertain if people can actually make money at it.”

At the time, id didn’t believe they could. These plans were dropped. QuakeWorld didn’t turn out like this. In the end, it was simply (hah!) an updated Quake client for people who’d bought it. QW did launch with basic player rankings, but stopped them after a few months. The first multiplayer-focused id game was Quake 3, three years later in 1999. In 2010, Q3 became the free-to-play Quake Live. Its business model isn’t nearly as interesting to coo and poke at.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/07/04/quake-quakeworld-john-carmack-free-to-play/

 

[DraQ]

Interesting RPS article:

Free-To-Frag: QuakeWorld’s Once-Planned Business Model
By Alice O'Connor on July 4th, 2014 at 5:00 pm.

Spoiler

When John Carmack started tinkering with Quake’s multiplayer code in 1996, his plans for the QuakeWorld client went deeper than TCP and UDP. Its new netcode made playing an FPS online over dialup not total garbage, sparking the multiplayer FPS explosion, but Carmack had also once intended for QW to be what we’d now consider free-to-play. Though the plans changed and this never happened, I can be endlessly fascinated by scraps of video game history like the time John Carmack thought about selling the right to have a name.

Quake had started building a multiplayer community even before release, with Qtest, and QuakeWorld was to encourage that competition and bragging something fierce. “All frags on the entire Internet will be logged,” Carmack schemed in a .plan file update (an awkward precursor to weblogs, using the hilariously-named ‘Finger protocol’) in 1996:

“You should be able to say, ‘I am one of the ten best QuakeWorld players in existence’, and have the record to back it up. There are all sorts of other cool stats that we could mine out of the data: greatest frags/minute, longest uninterrupted Quake game, cruellest to newbies, etc, etc.”

Quake became a game with big personalities (“Who names their child KillCreek?” I wondered, reading PC Gamer) and plenty of trash-talking. It also connected people to form communities and friendships and all those soft things. That’s why Carmack’s monetisation idea fascinates me:

“My halfway thought out proposal for a biz plan is that we let anyone play the game as an anonymous newbie to see if they like it, but to get their name registered and get on the ranking list, they need to pay $10 or so. Newbies would be automatically kicked from servers if a paying customer wants to get on. Sound reasonable?”

id did shareware. They made large chunks of their games free to prove the full thing was worth buying. Carmack’s idea would give away the pure game side but limit access to what made multiplayer any fun at all: people. Connecting and competing with people across the world, exploring that weird frontier, and expressing ourselves as whoever we wanted to be was so exciting then, and vital to multiplayer. It’d be a mite more difficult without a name.

I’ve been idly imagining an alternate timeline where free-to-play grew out of weird ideas like this. Popular F2P models focus on the game side, selling boosters, items, and so on. Carmack’s idea would have monetised human interaction. Which sounds a bit monstrous when I say it like that. (And stats, sure, all those stats, and the not-getting-kicked-from-servers, but I’m not particularly interested in those.)

In a way, Dota 2‘s take on free-to-play feels close to this. Valve let everyone play then charge for instant unlocks of cosmetic items. These don’t affect the core game, so buying (or not buying) never feels unfair or cheaty, but they do let us express ourselves through our wizard’s outfits. As hero looks can range from blind mystic to Cyndi Lauper, it feels unusually personal.

Video games are very different now. Pre-Steam, pre-Counter-Strike, pre-PayPal, Carmack wrote:

“If it looks feasible, I would like to see internet focused gaming become a justifiable biz direction for us. Its definitely cool, but it is uncertain if people can actually make money at it.”

At the time, id didn’t believe they could. These plans were dropped. QuakeWorld didn’t turn out like this. In the end, it was simply (hah!) an updated Quake client for people who’d bought it. QW did launch with basic player rankings, but stopped them after a few months. The first multiplayer-focused id game was Quake 3, three years later in 1999. In 2010, Q3 became the free-to-play Quake Live. Its business model isn’t nearly as interesting to coo and poke at.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/07/04/quake-quakeworld-john-carmack-free-to-play/

It's not proper F2P if 99.9$ can't buy you a BFG9000 with plasmagun's ROF (ammo refill 0.1$ per cell).

 

[Astral Rag]

http://antonior-software.blogspot.be/p/if-quake-2-was-2d.html

 

[Astral Rag]

Everything you need to know about QuakeCon 2014

Spoiler

 

[DraQ]

Everything you need to know about QuakeCon 2014

Spoiler

Don't known if it's more hilarious because of Carmack or Bethesda.

 

[Siel]

 

[Euronymous]

http://new.livestream.com/quakecon/events/3192775

 

[Silva]

I had played System Shock and Half-Life before it, so I never saw anything special in Quake.

 

[Gragt]

I never said I disliked the first track (quite the opposite), just that it isn't in the same tone as the rest of the OST.

I know. That's how I took it.

 

[Astral Rag]

 

[Astral Rag]

 

[octavius]

Ha he, "most important PC game ever".
Surely even ID's own game Doom was much more important.

 

[Gozma]

I remember being like, "What is this shit, it's just Doom again? Is that Nine Inch Nails?" because I'd read the old "Quake is a Conan the Barbarian magic hammer game" bullshit they never did.

 

[Great Deceiver]

The original gameplay concept for Quake was very different (this was one of the reasons why Romero was butthurt and left id shortly after release), but they ended up having to basically do a Doom-like because the engine/tech took so long to program - not surprisingly, since it was fucking revolutionary, not the least for bringing TCP/IP into multiplayer gaming, the rest is history.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Ha he, "most important PC game ever".
Surely even ID's own game Doom was much more important.

From a gameplay/design standpoint perhaps, but the technological repercussions for Quake can't be overstated - it was the first popular, truly polygonal FPS, and the game that singlehandedly brought the TCP/IP stack to gaming - previous to Quake, everything else up to then was shitty IPX. Quake was absolutely massive in that regard.

 

[taxalot]

Yep. It's hard to deny that Doom is a vastly superior game to Quake, but both games brought technical and sociological (modding scene, competitive) revolutions that cannot be ignored. As a matter of fact, Quake probably changed gaming much more than Doom while being a not as good game.

 

[Destroid]

Is doom as strong as quake in multiplayer?

 

[Astral Rag]

Is doom as strong as quake in multiplayer?

No.

Playing Doom with my friends was like black magic and I still adore Doom but Quake's multiplayer is in a different league.

2.5D games are never accurate and smooth enough to "compete" with 3D games like Quake. Try playing (Chocolate) Doom or a Build game online and then play some Quake...

Doom and the (good) Build games are also a lot of fun though.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I think the idea that 'action' needs 'exciting' music to accompany it is a pernicious one that I wish we'd collectively move on from.

Ho, but we have. And not only in action games. This is why it is the other way around that i find pernicious. Games haven't had exciting music for how long now? Its more than i can remember. Multiplayer is partly to blame here, but i think atmosphere fags are also the problem.