IIRC railgun became a cult weapon thanks to Quake II.
It also had all the subtlety of a garbage truck in Q2 when it comes to concept and mechanics - "a hitscan weapon that shoots so hard that it can pierce multiple fucks, it also leaves particle trail".
I guess it explains its popularity - among knuckle-draggers.
If you want to see similar concept but realized gracefully see HL1's gauss gun - lower damage and higher rate of fire, but similar mechanics (plus oblique angle ricochets) in primary fire, charging up for variable damage (so slow RoF, very high damage if you charge it up) with additional ability to pierce walls and cause deadly spalling in altfire. It's effectively railgun on steroids, with several juicy layers of interesting mechanics added on top.
The only cool weapon in Q2 (in terms of mechanics - conceptually Unreal's Minigun is still the best gatling ever) was Chaingun and that's only because it was simply "more dakka" gone horribly right and pursued to its logical conclusion.
Cyborgs that jump from niches while making creepy-creepy grunts and screaming distorted war cries and try to kill you in a death twitch are mediocre? Fuckers are so creepy that I often gib them after killing (One thing that would be cool if there was a chance for them to self repair and start attacking the player again).
Wow. Just wow.
You find Q2's laughable canned prosthetic people creepy AND well designed opponents?
'K.
Q2 had only one remotely interesting enemy type (in terms of both combat and visual design) - medic.
As for death throes, the problem with Q2 death anims (and with about every repetitive scripted thing ever) is that you probably had them memorized by the time you left the first level (not unit, level) and your reaction to them was hardly anything but "oh, how cute, he will now try to shoot me in his death throes, *yawn*, *evade*" for the entire rest of the game with the first frame or two sufficing to make a distinction.
Contrast this with Unreal (an absolute masterpiece but not without flaws, mostly suffering from low weapon lethality, low enemy projectile speed and quiet gun sounds) where Skaarj were prone to feigning death or getting knocked unconscious (by explosions and shocks), which used the exact same animations as some genuine death sequences, so while you could eventually learn to spot some telltale signs of feigned death, it wasn't nearly as obvious, and could well be impossible from distance.
Also, FPSes, especially FPSes of old might not have concerned themselves with plot or setting too much, but Q2 raped Q1 way harder than Bethesda did rape FO with FO3 (also harder than it was accomplished with FOBOS).
Anyway, I consider post Q1 id creatively bankrupt, and even before that, they didn't seem particularly creative folks - Doom had some nice sprites and level design (Doom 2 also had Archvile), but was pretty derpy overall, Quake was more interesting due to mere fluke, when id realized that hacking shit with an axe doesn't cut it and they need their guns back - pretty cool atmosphere ensued, but completely by accident.
Hell, id couldn't even be bothered to progress beyond Doom's arsenal most of the time
back when it wasn't creatively bankrupt.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It was the first game to have colored lighting, and the way it looked blew the pants off everyone on E3 and the like.
Early obliviontards.
Q2 colored lighting was puke inducing as it made it clear that none of the mappers had any clue as to how to use it to improve their creations so they just pasted randomly coloured lights everywhere (with their favourite being jaundice coloured light saturating the outdoor areas).
I could possibly list some much earlier games depending on exact definition of coloured lighting (or possibly not even that if unreal engine's implementation of coloured lighting predates that of Q2 - unreal engine had general advantage of being capable of all its impressive stuff in bare software - colored lighting, procedurally animated textures, texture filtering, volumetric lighting, etc. - they even had some sort of fake specular implemented back in 1995, which was dropped for some reason, software texture filtering was already there at that point).
The magazines gushed, "See that boss? This weapon he's holding is an independent lightsource".
I actually don't recall anything like this in Q2.
Quake 1 used bitmaps for some effects, Quake 2 was 100% polygonal, even for explosions.
And it also looked like shit. Notice how most modern games DON'T use polys for shit like smoke and explosions or use them sparingly. It's for a reason - a really good reason.
Also, Quake (1&2) used very early particle technology which couldn't even use bitmaps to represent particles.
Quake 2 was probably the first game to have those pseudo-3D skyboxes.
I wouldn't give it too much credit for that - textured cube is just a textured cube.
Besides, Q1/Hexen 2 animated skyboxes were much cooler.
Quake 2 had the rudimentary of the kind of scripting present in Half-Life. There were prisons, meat conveyors, ceiling breaks and Borg-like robots with forcefields jump on you... and it had the same kind of back-and-forth map travel as Half-Life did.
Hexen 1, Hexen 2, Strife.
Quake 2 was the first game to let you see the weapons carried by other people in multiplayer.
Hexen 2 has it beaten, although some "similar" weapons shared models there.
Yes the tech was impressive for the time
Not even that - half a year later Unreal appeared and wiped the floor with Q2. And most of its technology was ready much earlier.
However "bad" you think Quake 2 was, Unreal was far, far worse.
You're either kidding or
are retarded have absolutely shit taste when it comes to FPS games, take your pick.
