I just played Quake 2

[Roguey]

Quake 2 weapons are also more satisfying to use.

The sound effects lacked punch. They nerfed the rocket launcher, made those rockets slower and wimpy.

 

[Ash]

On the other hand there's more weapons. There's better firing animations. The models and skins are higher detail, and are sexier designs in general. The various ballistics effects are better. There's actually draw/holster animations now...Even Doom had those in simple linear interpolation form goddamn it. And the firing sound effects are just as unsatisfying in Q1 too. Seriously the weaponry in Q2 is better in nearly every way, they're just balanced worse in that ammo placement is far more sensible in Q1, whereas Q2 gives you way too much.

The only thing that comes to mind against Q2's weaponry is the machine gun's RNG firing pattern is some really weird shit, bullets go all over the place making it unsatisfying and not really viable to use at range. That was possibly the point to favor the chaingun at range, but I'm not sure it's necessary when the chaingun is a monster in DPS and the machine gun has a load of recoil on top of the firing pattern, while chaingun has none. So anyway, nailgun/super nailgun > machinegun on those grounds. The nailguns also have a pretty nice firing SFX too actually, as an exception to the rule.

Edit: the explosion effects were better in Q1 too. Used high detail sprites as opposed to the stupid poly explosions in Q2.

 

[Master]

Recently i had some graphic card troubles and had to play some older games. Quake 2 was one of them and damn, its great. The only problem is the enemies could be harder but even that is rectified somewhat with that secret difficulty Ash mentioned. So, its all great. But Draq is being quite an Unreal fanboy here.

I agree that Q2 railgun was primitive. It was also the first railgun in an FPS, or close to it.

Sapphire Wand from Hexen was pretty much a blaster/RG crossover in terms of mechanics and Hexen came much earlier than Q2.
Hexen also had stuff like Bloodscourge, which was an unholy hybrid of railgun and homing rocket launcher.

Then Hexen 2 had Crusader's Lightbringer, which was effectively a thunderbolt+railgun+reflections.

That's about mechanical railun counterparts.
In terms of the idea of EM slugthrower you have Terra Nova, and that atypically awkward piece of shit you unwittingly killed yourself with, then threw away from original System Shock.

I recall holding a mainstream gaming magazine (likely PC Gamer) in my hand, with a screenshot with that caption underneath.

So what was in the screenshot?

Another screenshot had an enemy ducking under a rocket and boasted about improved AI.

The have my respect - it must have been hard to make a shot of a Strogg ducking in sensible circumstances rather than randomly trying to take a dump in the middle of the combat, before remembering that he no longer has an anus due to excessive cyborgization.

I thought Q2s recoil in weapon #4 was pretty cool.

Ok, agreed.

Others were average, but Unreal's minigun was a decent weapon among utter shit weapons.

Lolwut.

You could say that Dooms enemies were boring because a number of them used instahit guns and fireballs and recolored fireballs.
Reduction ad absurdum.

Except I didn't say WHY Q2 enemies were boring. Besides, Doom can be excused for lots of stuff as it was paving the way, was only 2.5D and typically was played without a mouse.

Anyway, tanks, berserkers and rocket bitches after we had Shamblers, Vores and Fiends were pure, unadulterated decline.

Quake2's borg enemies with forcefields were pretty cool,

Conceptually, perhaps (but still not that much - they were cybrog humanoids with chestacles and binoculars for the head, FFS). In combat they were just barely mobile minimum threat bullet sinks.

and I vaguely recall female midwivey-like things and other shit.

Cyber bitches with prosthetic rocket launchers? Well, yeah, shit. Midwives at least had the creepy factor turned up to eleven due to their origins.

And if you don't think that a cyborg who hunkers down while their arm unfolds into a fucking minigun is cool, you are, simply put, not a man.

You mean Barret from DX:HR? No, he wasn't in the least bit cool, even though his minigun was.

Same goes for Q2 gunners.

Way to nitpick on a ton of FPS games over a non-feature.

Note that it was a response to "Cyborgs that (...) try to kill you in a death twitch are mediocre?".

The problem is that it is indeed a non-feature because chances are that if you fall for that again after your first die&spray from Enforcer or Guard, you have an IQ below 60.

IF there were death animations that started exactly the same, but sometimes ended with enemy not managing to shoot back, they would have a point as you wouldn't be able to predict exactly how a dying enemy will react.

the rest of the game was designed by Salvador Dali's autistic cousin.

As such it beats Q2 into a pulp even with both hands tied behind its back - Q2 was evidently designed by a mildly retarded kwanzanian kid that spent his entire life in a warehouse full of crates.

It was an entirely different setting.

Yes, and that's why it shouldn't be named Q2.

ITT DraQ doesn't like the games that largely founded and shaped the FPS genre.

I'm not ragging on Q1 and Doom, because they were obviously excellent games (Q1 was also atmospheric as hell). I'm just noting that a game where cyborg demons attack and you're the heroic spazz mehreen who has to shoot them into chunky salsa can't possibly be seen as particularly creative.

Its true, and same applies to Unreal even more. It was fabulously colorful.

The difference is how both game used the colour.

Seriously, if you can't grasp the difference between

and

,
then I can't help you.
No one can.


Unreal was indeed colourful, but Q2 was just garish.

Also, what's with the puke coloured exterior lighting?
How can anyone seriously complain about piss filter in DX:HR, when Q2 had puke coloured exterior lighting?

I thought the nuclear sploshun effects looked quite ok.

Well, not really. Polys don't work with fuzzy stuff like smoke or fire and Q2 explosions were really sluggish for some reason. To the point they didn't really look like something exploding.

As for use of polys in smoke and explosions, the line kind of blurs with modern technology. They're never just flat/alpha'd bitmaps anymore, there's always more sophisticated shit going on. Have you seen the smoke in Frostbite-based games?

They usually rely mostly on particle effects which are effectively just moar, somewhat independent sprites in place of one.

And no, I haven't seen Frostbite.

It wasn't just a textured cube. It created a "bendy" illusion of perspective past the map boundaries, and it wasn't just used for the sky but for "distant city" backdrops, as I recall.

It was just a textured cube. I don't know the exact details - possibly it was just always drawn as seen from fixed point in its middle over certain geometry, but you can make 6 square shots covering full spherical FoV (90 degrees each) and if you map them onto a cube the illusion will be perfect when viewed from it's centre. It doesn't mater if the textures are shots of sky, city, big gun or goatse.

Q1 had no "real" skyboxes, that started with Quake2. Q1 had some kind of parallax sky effects.

Yes, and they were really cool compared to a textured cube.

Not sure about Hexen 2.

The same as Q1.

Hell, Unreal did a really interesting thing with skyboxes - it used a small enclosed space within a level to model the sky, which was then designated a sky zone and mapped onto any suitable geometry as seen from the zone info actor making it. You could do everything with the skyzone you could with the normal part of the level - 3D geometry, brushes, meshes, animated stuff, lighting, triggers, even manipulating the zone info actor itself to alter the view.

I'd argue it was closer to beginnings of Half-Life scripting, where it was no longer about just placing random trap triggers and moving walls. It was actually trying to introduce coherency into the narrative. Hence, the prison cells, the meat factory and other things I've entirely forgotten by now.

Except the prisoners were just another type of "monster", not really scripted, the rest of stuff relied on simple triggers triggering simple environmental shit.

Hexen 1, Hexen 2 and build engine games all feature seriously shit compared to that, despite being much earlier. So do somewhat newer Unreal and HL. Then you have Strife.

Unreal came after Quake 2.

I can say that my renderer can pull off a gazillion normal-mapped polygons, and then I add a game to that, with AI and input cycles and collision detection, and suddenly my technology isn't running so well anymore.

Making it 80% of the way when you're jumping over a chasm, isn't really making it. Nobody cares when technology was running in some test environment, if the end product, i.e. real-world proof, wasn't out using said technology.

Yes, but Unreal had a lot of it's cool stuff already implemented in 1995 (that's before Quake 1), including texture filtering and fake specular (all in software), while in 1997 and possibly even late 1996, it had effectively all it's important features ready, and most of the content finished to the point it probably could have beaten Q2 if the devs hurried a bit more.

Also Unreal looks much better in software than Q2 in hardware, while still being able to run on P133 with 16MB of RAM and shitty 2 meg card.

Yes it ran shittily on my P133 (no wonder when P166 was listed as bare minimum), but so did Q2, and guess which one looked impressive?

ITT someone who craps on Doom and loves Unreal, lectures me about taste in FPS.

I definitely don't crap on Doom, if only because it would be hypocritical - I still play it from time to time. Noticing that "teleport experiment mishap draws in cyborg demons from hell, also Deimos was sucked into hell and you have to shoot Satan in the brain in the end (because of the bunny, presumably), collapsing the hell itself because you're just that badass" is the epitome of derp isn't "crapping on Doom", it's just stating a glaringly obvious fact: Doom is fucking derp.

It's still great, but you can't really get any derpier than this and trying will only rupture your derp sphincter and turn you into andhaira.

I don't even crap on Q2, because it was a pretty fun game in the end, it's just that it was thoroughly uninspired, unimpressive and rather forgettable experience.
Still better than RTNP for Unreal, I suppose, because it was one hell of a dreary, incoherent and mostly unatmospheric trudge (albeit with some genius shining through) crudely sewn together from leftovers by necromancers from Legend, but original Unreal can behead Q2 merely by blowing load into Q2's face.

In that screen there is no piss filter. Its just good lighting, with the water naturally reflecting the red sky. Everything seems bathed in not some random colour like DXHR but the dominant light source, the red sun. Also the gun is rusted as Q2 seems to have some kind of theme of everything being rusted and used up... Compare this to Unreal that, even though i like it, is too all over the place. In the first area for example, the water is bright blue even though the surrounding rocks are dark brown and the sky above is green. Its just whatever.
While in Q2 they were careful to light it properly.
The same with the levels and missions.
They are all logical and make sense.
While in Unreal i will just mention that ending sequence that while cool, was just ludicrous.
Also that Q2 intro. Damn! While Unreal has you looking at the ceiling for 5 seconds.
The Q2 explosions are great and maybe the best... Dont know what lag are you talking about. But if you mean that they linger for a bit, well they should. Its possible thats why they slow them down in movies, it looks better. Q1 explosions suck as they dissapear in half a second like wimpy firecrackers. Duke Nukem also has great explosions and they stay for a while too.

 

[shihonage]

Unreal was a game engine sales pitch in a clown suit.

 

[Astral Rag]

The best thing about Quake 2 is Kingpin.

 

[Wunderbar]

The best thing about Quake 2 is Kingpin.

Soldier of Fortune and Anachronox.

 

[schru]

I would rather say Sin.

 

[udm]

The best thing about Quake 2 is Kingpin.

Soldier of Fortune and Anachronox.

I would rather say Sin.

YES!