Good Quake maps

[ironmask]

Is that Quake 1? Impressive if yes.

Pretty sure it's Quake Champions.

No, it's for quake 1. It's made for the source-ports.

 

[pOcHa]

post your impressions if playing it

 

[Naraya]

This is pretty good. Only played the first map but it's a mix of Duke Nukem 3D and... Dark Forces?

 

[luj1]

Impressive, yes, but that's not Quake to me

 

[Naraya]

I finished it and I think it's really worth a playthrough. Quake it's not - it's faster, it's tongue-in-cheek, it has katana and maps are rather open (think small city districts). I like the new weapons and mobs, even though they are mostly just replacements of original ones (eg. Fiend has its counterpart, ogre has its counterpart, rocket launcher has its own etc.).

Overall I'd call it the best "total Quake conversion" to date.

 

[Kabas]

Does anyone here have any idea what can cause this and how to fix it^?

 

[Sjukob]

Can anybody recommends me some difficult combat focused maps? I don't mean maps that just have a lot of monsters, I want something that actually features well-crafted and difficult encounters, it's not necessary for such encounters to have a lot of enemies present.

Whenever I play Quake I tend to get bored rather quickly, because, in comparison to Doom, the combat always feels way too relaxed and not demanding enough for me. I think the closest thing I've experienced to something I want was the final map of Dwell's second episode - Abyss Of The Troglodytes with it's creative use of traps and enemy placement.

 

[Kabas]

Can anybody recommends me some difficult combat focused maps? I don't mean maps that just have a lot of monsters, I want something that actually features well-crafted and difficult encounters, it's not necessary for such encounters to have a lot of enemies present.

Honey offers some pretty memorable encounters.

 

[Dr1f7]

Does anyone here have any idea what can cause this and how to fix it^?

i don't see anything here that needs to be fixed

 

[Kabas]

i don't see anything here that needs to be fixed

This grey rectangle is not supposed to be here blocking the horison.

 

[Azdul]

I've played original campaign, Scourge of Armagon, Dissolution of Eternity, Abyss of Pandemonium (2.0 patched), Arcane Dimensions, Dimensions of the Past.

What's the next logical step when it comes to single player campaign / episode ? Preferably with its own music ...

 

[awsker]

This gorgeous map is from Bonk Jam

 

[Kabas]

I've played original campaign, Scourge of Armagon, Dissolution of Eternity, Abyss of Pandemonium (2.0 patched), Arcane Dimensions, Dimensions of the Past.

What's the next logical step when it comes to single player campaign / episode ? Preferably with its own music ...

There exists some other great extra maps made specifically for Arcane Dimensions like Oxyblack Fortress or Gibtropolis, did you check them?
Alkaline is often called "Arcane Dimensions but sci-fi". Not quite at the same level but still pretty close.
Cimmerian nights is short and very vanilla-like with it's own banger music
Underdark Overbright is amazing in all regards.
Wouldn't call Dwell my favourite but it's highly polished and got some gorgeous looking maps. Yet to muster a desire to finish the second episode.
Episode Enyo is a total conversion of Quake. Pretty good and worth checking out.
Peril is junky AF but also oddly amazing due the the sheer level of author's ambition.

 

[ironmask]

 

[Baron Dupek]

'Fight the Strogg, not the controls'

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Is it less shit than Q2 64? Can't really tell from that trailer, unfortunately.

 

[Sjukob]

108 secrets and 5291 monsters on normal difficulty.

 

[MaxPaint]

Is there any major difference between Ironwail and VkQuake? I tried both and so far the only visible difference was in the Arcane Dimensions' particle system which Ironwail doesn't have. I like Ironwail's mod menu and autosave system more but I also have rx6600 and AMD cards seem to still work bad in opengl.

 

[Sjukob]

108 secrets and 5291 monsters on normal difficulty.

The first thorough playthrough takes about 7 hours to complete, may be less or more than that, depending on your playstyle and how thorough you want to be. The amount of secrets found is astonishing, considering I'm pretty bad at it. But the actual number of "secretive" secrets is pretty small, most of them are just "look around and collect the stuff you see" kind of thing.

As for the map itself, I have nothing but praises to say about it. The scenery is fantastic, as you've probably guessed from the trailer, it's largely flesh themed. You will be going through a massive "living organism" with guts, maws, tentacles, eyes and other nasty gore related stuff.

But it's not just about the flesh alone, the map offers breaks from it's primary theme with occasional voids, castles and tech bases. The environments are not only rich with details but are also distinct from one another, so even though the map is huge and non-linear you are unlikely to get bored or feel like there's too much of the same.

The exploration doesn't miss the mark either. As you've probably guessed from the screenshot above, there's a big number of secrets hidden in various places around the map. And as I said, finding most of them doesn't require much effort from you, such secrets usually award you with a bit of ammo or megahealth at most. But there are also more "advanced" secrets, so to speak, where you either have to complete tricky encounters or do various movement related puzzles, like rocket jumping, sliding on ledges, bunny hopping etc to reach them. For example, in this section you collect a pentagram of protection and have to trigger a bunch of shamblers to zap you and give you enough momentum to cross the gap between the platforms. I've never had to do any sort of advanced movement in Quake before, so of course I'm bad at it, I had to generously spam save/load feature to beat these challenges.

But it's not just about looking for items or power ups. Some of the more demanding and creative encounters also require you to wander off the paved road to find them, which is also further encouraged by the captivating scenery and intriguing story. The immortal lock is that exact occurrence when you stumble upon something truly unique and creative, and want to explore and experience more of it, just for the sake of exploring and experiencing it, because it's so good. Moreover, the author managed to strike a good balance between easier and harder to find places, and between sightseeing, puzzles, switch/key hunting and combat, so you don't end up feeling like one of the parts of the whole creates imbalance and drags the rest of them and whole overall experience down with itself.

The combat is among the best ones I've ever experienced in Quake, featuring a good amount of creative, memorable and challenging encounters, here are some examples:
There's a section that mimics archvile carousel from sunlust, only that there are shamblers instead of archviles.

There are three cool slaughter sections that take place on the big arenas with springboards and respawning power ups and ammo, one of them is a secret and features low gravity instead of springboards.

There's a hazard course, where you have to run away from a giant wall of flesh, while various monsters and traps try to slow you down, but I didn't take the screenshot of that part.
There's a section where you have to try a stay on top of the platforms that periodically submerge into acid, while a big group of monsters attacks you, and that was just a couple of the examples.

But of course, it's not just the punchline after the punchline, the major part of the combat still consists of fairly regular encounters that don't feature any extra gimmicks, otherwise the fatigue over playing would've been building pretty quickly. Still, even the more generic and simplistic fights usually have some of creativity sprinkled on them, like teleports allowing you to telefrag tougher enemies, damaging floors, traps, difficult terrain etc.
The author warns that hard and nightmare difficulties are very hard and are not meant to be beaten by the majority of the players, I've played on normal difficulty so, I can't comment on that. I think the good way to judge the increased difficulty is to look at some specific fights, like the slaughter ones, which are among the most demanding of them all. I believe on some of them the amount of power ups gets limited on the higher difficulties, while on the lower ones there are either more of them or they are outright unlimited. Nightmare might be really tough, even outside of such encounters, the mod utilizes Quoth and some of the new monsters can be really devastating with the double attack rate, like those flying gargoyles, that hit with you with lightning, just like the shamblers.
I'm mostly a Doom player and my biggest gripe with the Quake is combat, which to me generally feels too simplistic and not demanding enough. Usually, I find Quake maps too toothless and too relaxed to be enjoyable and memorable, in this regard the immortal lock is a pleasant exception. It towers above the rest with it's creative and challenging fights and I'm very glad that it didn't fall into "pretty but shallow" category, like it often happens with the big and visually impressive maps.

Lastly, there's one additional element to this map that I mentioned earlier that will probably help to keep you hooked throughout your playthrough, and that element is called story. On your way through the mountain of flesh you'll find various notes scattered around, that speak about what is happening and why it is happening. In addition to those notes "the living organism" your traverse, speaks to you, but in text only. While the notes are mostly concerned with presenting you a story, the tide of flesh mostly spews out flavor text, although sometimes they switch their roles. The texts are pretty tastefully written, they are, however, rather ambiguous, never trying to present to you a clear vision, still there are some concrete details that you can figure out as you progress.

I'm going to just flat out explain the story to you, so if you want to figure it out on your own, then you better skip this portion of the post.
There's an entity known as "the magician" that travels between the worlds and absorbs them, but it doesn't just kill everyone, instead it places a part of itself in the world that serves as a trap for the souls, where they are drained of their memories and personalities and then are constantly reformed and killed in various ways in an endless loop to power up the magician, hence why the map looks like a giant pile of flesh. Once the absorption of the world begins it is completely impossible to stop, the magician has seemingly acquired Godlike powers in some way. The notes speak of something called "the inversion chamber" and how it was the thing that made magician so powerful, but it's not made clear what it is. The magician is looking for something or trying to achieve something, but again, it's not made clear what exactly, at least I wasn't able to figure it out from the notes.

As for the protagonist and how he ended up in this mess, a group of people from Finland decided to open a slipgate to some place and stumbled upon the world that was in the process of being absorbed, and I think you can guess what happened afterwards. This is the reason for techbases being present in the map, there's a way for you to go back to your homeworld from the immortal prison, but it's not a happy return...
The map features two endings, you either submit to the prison and become another mindless zombie forever locked in a loop of being flayed alive in various ways or find and collect all four runes, repair the slipgate, travel back to Earth and nuke all of it, before it too becomes absorbed. The runes are not in any way hidden, they are placed in the optional segments of the map, so you don't have to trouble your head thinking of where to find them, you just have to decide for yourself whether you want to play and see more or less of the map.
After you detonate a nuke, some time passes and the protagonist reforms himself in another, familiar world, but something feels wrong about it, but it's not explained what exactly. Considering that the map begins with a bright white flash and also ends with it, and the starting map is called "falling into a dream" I thought that it was implied that the second ending was part of the loop too, and that the protagonist couldn't get out of it. But the author said that he plans to make a direct sequel to map that will continue on from the second ending. Considering that the immortal lock took over 1,5 years to make, it means that realistically you can expect the sequel to come out in no less than 3-5 years from now on.

There's a note that references Quake maps created by the author, which made me think that the entire story is an allegory for playing the game repeatedly, hence the trap for the souls, and the magician is the author of the maps, but that's just my guess. I haven't played any of those besides the immortal lock, but considering how good it is, it's probably worth it to at least check the other ones out.
"An indigo sun shackled beneath the sands" - Starslave
"A tide of flesh that forever hungers" - The immortal lock
"An eclipse that drinks the skies of battle" - Annihilation conduit
"A deathly lord that feeds upon color" - I No Longer Fear The Ranger Guarding My Heel

After saying the praises, it's only the fair that I should also mention the downsides:
1) The author decided to add images of human mouths to some sections of the map, as a part of the overall aesthetic. Only in one location, the gate where you use the first silver key, it more or less adequately fits, in all other places it looks outright bad and out of the place, the photos just don't mesh well with the low poly models and low resolution textures of Quake. It also applies to the eyes, which dot the walls of the place, but not the same extent as the mouths, far from it. The worst offender is the big wall of flesh that you have to run away from, which I mentioned earlier. It looks plain ugly, as if no effort or thought was put into it. It's as if it was created by a schoolboy with the complete absence of taste, who went on a puberty rampage in an attempt to impress everyone and came up with something that he thought was looking cool and edgy, but didn't have the skills to pull off what he has conceived. Strangely enough, the map features a good number of monstrous maws that, as you can see from the the screenshots above, look well and fit the map perfectly. I have no idea how the author didn't feel the sharp contrast between the two and just stuck with the photos of the mouths. Thankfully, there are only 3 or 4 them in the entire map, and the wall of flesh is really just an obscure anomaly in an otherwise excellent map.

The wall of flesh, watch at your own risk

2) The map is not long enough. It's not meant to be a praise, neither I mean to say that it is so good that I can play it without incurring fatigue, but rather that, at least to me, it feels like about 1/3 of the map was cut out either due to development fatigue or technical limitations. Initially, you get the impression that the map is absolutely gigantic and will take you many hours to explore, then you wander around a bit and realise that it's not that big and you were just overreacting. Then you get to the second half of the map and: "Oh my God, I was so wrong, this map really is enormously huge!" and then you come to the same realisation you've had in the first half of it, and then it ends rather abruptly. It constantly feels like the map tries to build up to something bigger, but sadly that "something bigger" never appears, it's especially pronounced in regard to the story, there's plenty of lore dumping going on in the beginning, but then it gets scarcer and scarcer, and in the final 30% of map or so you are left with almost nothing at all, it just gets hanged up in the air. It's as if a big piece of both story and environment went missing, I guess that void can only be filled by the sequel, if it ever gets released.
3) The amount of monsters and their overall stats mean you basically have play with only two weapons: rocket launcher and plasma gun. The map throws a generous amount of high health monsters at you, but also not the less generous amount of rockets and energy cells. Thanks to that and the general geometry, you will find yourself using either rocket launcher or plasma gun almost exclusively, because only they can really get the job done. As for the other weapons... You will forget about the shotguns very quickly, they are way too weak to take on the stuff that will be thrown at you. What are you going to do when you have to take down something like 50 knights and 5 shamblers at once? Pull out your double barrel? There isn't even a custom more powerful version of a shotgun, like the three barrel from dwell or arcade dimensions, to at least attempt to close the gap between the shotguns and the other weapons. The nailguns can deal good damage, but chew through ammo way too quickly and can only damage one target at the time. Again, fighting off the horde you will probably run out of nails in the first 1/3 of a fight, this is not a problem in the maps with lower monster counts, but is a considerable issue in something like the immortal lock, so the nailguns are used more as emergency type weapons. Meanwhile both rocket launcher and plasma rifle deal a lot of splash damage, are good at any range and are generally easy to use. Additionally, there's a new power up, that's very common, that makes you immune to your own splash damage and fall damage, which allows you to just spam explosives recklessly, even if you have quad. Sometimes you might prefer to use grenades instead of rockets, especially in the later parts, where the amount of monsters get truly overwhelming and grenade's launcher higher rate of fire really helps with culling down the crowds.
4) Too many monsters during the final slaughter section, obviously it causes massive lag and makes the game unplayable. Even my Intel i7 10700k couldn't handle those numbers, I had to enable god mode until the monster count was reduced to the point where FPS could reach double digits again. May be there's something that can be done to improve the performance, but I haven't looked at it yet.

In the end, this is probably the best experience with Quake I've ever had and may be the best experience I'll ever have with Quake. It's not just about the exceptional quality of the map, I've had thoughts about a similar story on my mind for a while now and was also in a mood to play something with some sad and depressing mood sprinkled onto it, it as if I was looking for something and found it, or it found me. I highly, highly recommend this map to anybody and advise you to at the very least try it, even if you don't like Quake for some reason, it's one of the best things you can experience in FPS games in general. I'm only concerned that from this point on I'll be inevitably comparing every other map that I could play to the immortal lock and would likely be underwhelmed and disappointed in the process.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Is there any major difference between Ironwail and VkQuake? I tried both and so far the only visible difference was in the Arcane Dimensions' particle system which Ironwail doesn't have. I like Ironwail's mod menu and autosave system more but I also have rx6600 and AMD cards seem to still work bad in opengl.

I've recently switched to vkQuake from Ironwail and don't regret it. Both are good source ports but vkQuake is actually smoother and faster + supports weather, particle effects and other eye candy with AD-based mods.

Played Seismic Ventures recently and it's good old school Quake design. However, the beginning of the last map had me rage-quitting. How da fuck are we suppose to fight waves of shamblers with only the Quad damage available for the first wave? I can play most custom maps on Hard with few issues but this was cancer of the fun factor. My Quake custom map collection (if you add up the individual maps in the jams et al) is probably 1000+ now. Some of these things are works of art. Use QMLauncher to keep them organized or else suffer the consequences of being a Quake custom map digital hoarder.

 

[Bad Sector]

Now, it might be me being an old fart who hates change, but IMO if a mod can't run in one of the OpenGL source ports due to performance, it might be a hint towards said mod being a little un-Quake-ish.

 

[ind33d]

This gorgeous map is from Bonk Jam

seeing this just makes me angry they're making medieval Doom instead of bringing back Quake

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Played an incrementally difficult 3-map episode called Carved in Flesh but it humbled me. Virtually no exploration and it was a non-stop slaughter map, with me being the one slaughtered (or, as one mapper once wittily titled his map: I Have No Ammo and I Must Scream). Well, at least it had nice non-original textures and monsters. Don't think I saw an original Quake beastie in the entire 1 and a half maps I lasted. Too much of that can be cloying. I think I'm getting too old for this shit.

 

[Tehdagah]

I never liked singleplayer Quake but recently I played the PS4 version and quite enjoyed it. Then I realized something: the mouse/keyboard control scheme breaks the game. It's good for PvP, but the singleplayer works better with a controller.

 

[Kabas]

This gorgeous map is from Bonk Jam

Just completed this jam.
The purple sky one was definitely the most standout map from the pack. Overall quality of maps is uneven.
Hammer gimmick is fun but those two jumping puzzle maps were annoying(very pretty looking too though). Appreciate all these neat little touches devs put into various skins you can get for your hammer.