I just played Quake 2

[shihonage]

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.

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

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.

I recall holding a mainstream gaming magazine (likely PC Gamer) in my hand, with a screenshot with that caption underneath. Another screenshot had an enemy ducking under a rocket and boasted about improved AI.

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.

I thought Q2s recoil in weapon #4 was pretty cool. Others were average, but Unreal's minigun was a decent weapon among utter shit weapons.

Q2 had only one remotely interesting enemy type (in terms of both combat and visual design) - medic.

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

Quake2's borg enemies with forcefields were pretty cool, and I vaguely recall female midwivey-like things and other shit.

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.

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.

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

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.

Unreal had better enemy behavior, and the rest of the game was designed by Salvador Dali's autistic cousin.

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).

It was an entirely different setting.

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.

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

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).

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

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).

Unreal came after Quake 2.

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.

I thought the nuclear sploshun effects looked quite ok. 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?

I wouldn't give it too much credit for that - textured cube is just a textured cube.

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.

Besides, Q1/Hexen 2 animated skyboxes were much cooler.

Q1 had no "real" skyboxes, that started with Quake2. Q1 had some kind of parallax sky effects. Not sure about Hexen 2.

Hexen 1, Hexen 2, Strife.

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.

Not even that - half a year later Unreal appeared and wiped the floor with Q2. And most of its technology was ready much earlier.

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.

You're either kidding or are retarded have absolutely shit taste when it comes to FPS games, take your pick.

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

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Why do I find Quake II scary? It's simple, there are a lot of obstacles and niches and enemies often disappear from sight or appear from behind some obstacle. Additionally, I have a distinct impression that hitting them is harder than in Doom and Quake I, so there's a higher danger of getting killed by creepy critters. Sound is pretty good too.

I prefer the atmosphere of Quake II over the amosphere of Unreal.

 

[Morgoth]

Unreal was a classic when it came out, especially the huge outdoor levels, music and the Skaarj AI was pretty impressive.

Would you make a 1:1 remake however with modern graphics, the game would turn out to be a total failure.

That's why nobody bothers making an Unreal remake, unlike HL1, which soon will get Black Mesa: Source.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Quake 2 was great. Butthurt atmosphere fags are butthurt just because the setting sucked. Case in point, the same people who diss Quake 2 praise Unreal, a game which was as shitty as it gets, but had nice atmospheric surroundings and music you could emotionally fap to so all of a sudden its a masterpiece. Fucking atmosphere fags don't understand jack about game design.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Unreal was a classic

Doom was shitty but Unreal was a classic. I rest my case.

 

[Morgoth]

Atmosphere > brainless killing

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

What exactly was the atmosphere of Unreal?

 

[Morgoth]

What exactly was the design of Quake 2?

 

[Morgoth]

The only thing I remember from Quake 2 is actually the half man, half-pig player character that always made that "Huagghhh" when you jumped.

Awor thinks that's atmosphere.

 

[Stakhanov]

Quake 2 doesn't have great design and it's not just its setting that's bad. For instance its hub levels with needless backtracking and often invariant corridors as opposed to the finely crafted levels in Doom and Quake, a derp attempt at narrative with more 'meaningful' objectives and marines chattering on coms about how their shit is getting pushed in, mostly boring enemies, mostly uninspired weapons, etc. The only thing I've seen in Q2's defence so far is that it had an excellent engine and better multiplayer, which is not exactly .

Besides Awor, has anyone else played Q2 recently or is nostalgia clouding collective judgment?

 

[TripJack]

I replayed it (and Q1) a few months ago after my Doom engine frenzy. They are alright. I felt the same way about it that I felt about unreal and half life when I played those 3 years ago. They aren't as good as all the retards make them out to be. They were considered amazing at the time sure but that means nothing.

The 3d Realms shooters that were coming out at the same time are far better than quake or half life or unreal will ever be.

 

[Morgoth]

They were considered amazing at the time sure but that means nothing.

That means everything, retard. Because games are being judged at release, not 10 years later. People tend to move on, except the 'Dex apparently.

 

[Syril]

Blood is the fps for real men, quake is for aspie crowd, unreal for faggots and doom for 10 yr old girls.

 

[Berekän]

They were considered amazing at the time sure but that means nothing.

That means everything, retard. Because games are being judged at release, not 10 years later. People tend to move on, except the 'Dex apparently.

A great film, a great book, a great song... those are considered good or bad regardless of age, why is it any different for a videogame?

 

[Morgoth]

They were considered amazing at the time sure but that means nothing.

That means everything, retard. Because games are being judged at release, not 10 years later. People tend to move on, except the 'Dex apparently.

A great film, a great book, a great song... those are considered good or bad regardless of age, why is it any different for a videogame?

Because video games are a piece of technology first, art second.

 

[DraQ]

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.

 

[DraQ]

Blood is the fps for real men, (...) unreal for faggots.

If I love both Unreal and Blood, does that mean I'm a Spartan?

 

[Berekän]

They were considered amazing at the time sure but that means nothing.

That means everything, retard. Because games are being judged at release, not 10 years later. People tend to move on, except the 'Dex apparently.

A great film, a great book, a great song... those are considered good or bad regardless of age, why is it any different for a videogame?

Because video games are a piece of technology first, art second.

One could argue the same about movies.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

The only thing I remember from Quake 2 is actually the half man, half-pig player character that always made that "Huagghhh" when you jumped.

Awor thinks that's atmosphere.

Not really. To me the most important things for atmosphere in Quake 2 are:
1. The level design - lots of cramped, cluttered rooms/corridors with lot of stuff that breaks up the line of sight. All of it is in 3D, so there is often a level above where there are additional enemies. Very unpleasant undergrounds with water. Ability to reach some rooms from afar.
2. The enemies - they are hard to hit and kill, make creepy sounds and tend to appear from unexpected directions - they create a constant threat of death in a very unpleasant place.
3. Sound - everything sounds are weirdly distorted, there are creepy breathing sounds, sounds of someone somewhere reloading a weapon, etc.
I have a version without music. I tried to play with other music but it kinda kills the immersion for me.

 

[Morgoth]

They were considered amazing at the time sure but that means nothing.

That means everything, retard. Because games are being judged at release, not 10 years later. People tend to move on, except the 'Dex apparently.

A great film, a great book, a great song... those are considered good or bad regardless of age, why is it any different for a videogame?

Because video games are a piece of technology first, art second.

One could argue the same about movies.

Not really. In movies, the tech serves the art, not like in games where it's the other way around.

Also, in real time graphics there's more change and pressure than in CGI graphics.

 

[Morgoth]

1. The level design - lots of cramped, cluttered rooms/corridors with lot of stuff that breaks up the line of sight. All of it is in 3D, so there is often a level above where there are additional enemies. Very unpleasant undergrounds with water. Ability to reach some rooms from afar.

I suppose you also belong to the crowd then who hates FEAR 1's level design. I personally loved the dark and empty offices, it really grew on me. FEAR 2 was the result of listening to the whiners, i.e. introducing more "diversity" in level design and aestehtics and thus destroying the spooky nature of FEAR.
As for Quake 2, the layout I guess was okay, but the level art was crude and just atrocious.

2. The enemies - they are hard to hit and kill, make creepy sounds and tend to appear from unexpected directions - they create a constant threat of death in a very unpleasant place.

They're hard to hit maybe because you suck lol.

3. Sound - everything sounds are weirdly distorted, there are creepy breathing sounds, sounds of someone somewhere reloading a weapon, etc.

Sound design? Please let me refer again to FEAR 1 and Condemned 1.

 

[TripJack]

That means everything, retard. Because games are being judged at release, not 10 years later. People tend to move on, except the 'Dex apparently.

bullshit

a sane person likes or dislikes a video game based on how interesting and fun it is to play, at release or 10 years later makes no difference at all

 

[Morgoth]

That means everything, retard. Because games are being judged at release, not 10 years later. People tend to move on, except the 'Dex apparently.

bullshit

a sane person likes or dislikes a video game based on how interesting and fun it is to play, at release or 10 years later makes no difference at all

Bullshit.

It does make a huge difference.

Just like when I loved playing C&C Red Alert and Starcraft and System Shock and Thief 1 and BG series etc at release (+3 to 5 years after), playing them 10 years later and still feeling the same amazement and love like back then is impossible, at least for me.

But whatever floats your boat, oldtard.

 

[Berekän]

They were considered amazing at the time sure but that means nothing.

That means everything, retard. Because games are being judged at release, not 10 years later. People tend to move on, except the 'Dex apparently.

A great film, a great book, a great song... those are considered good or bad regardless of age, why is it any different for a videogame?

Because video games are a piece of technology first, art second.

One could argue the same about movies.

Not really. In movies, the tech serves the art, not like in games where it's the other way around.

Also, in real time graphics there's more change and pressure than in CGI graphics.

No. Cinema and Computers share a common beginning. The Lumière brothers didn't have any narrative claims when they invented the film, same as computers weren't invented for the purpose of gaming. It wasn't until Méliès got in the way that the Cinema started to have some kind of narrative. Computers were made at first for making calculations, until they evolved and someone saw the potential in them for "gaming".

When anyone plays a game, he's not pressing keys at random to see how the "technology" reacts. He's engaging in the game with the ultimate goal of having fun, to enjoy the game.

 

[hiver]

Fear was spooky?

What... did Fatal manage to scare you? Bwahahaha.... so lulzy, he was so fatal...
The whole fucking thing was a copy of Max Payne 2. With added lulz.