Anime Is there any mod that makes Quake 2 not suck?

[schru]

Well, i guess it's good relatively speaking. The game is inferior to Quake 1 that's a given.

I'll say though, one has to keep in mind that the hub system changed certain aspects of the design of the single levels, just as it did with Hexen (a superior game, to be sure, but one that still has some limitations if you look at the design of the maps when taken by themselves). Also, with Quake 2 they tried to introduce a bit of realism. The maps still feel pretty boxy because of the engine but one can already see the change of direction that was happening in shooters which eventually culminated in Half Life. It's still not there but you can see they tried to make the locations feel like locations instead of abstract places build entirely with gameplay in mind.

Lastly, one thing i liked was the pacing. Or at least back then when i played it i found the levels getting slightly more imposing as the game went on. When i was a kid i definitely felt a well thought out increase in the difficulty curve. With the skill set i have now alas that went out of the window as the whole game is in the "kinda easy" category, but ho well.

It's the sort of hub system that might have been more extensive and non-linear early on, but ended up getting integrated into the flow of a mostly linear game. It still provides a bit of satisfying branching and exploration. I'm not saying that the more realistic level design isn't interesting either—it does give this nice feeling of making your way through a large complex with various unique and specialized sections. Despite the uniformly yellow lighting, the form of the levels is pretty interesting, this kind of heavy sci-fi industrial thing, complemented very nicely by the music.

The flow or pacing is definitely the saving grace of the game. Despite its weaknesses—and if one doesn't expect too much of it—all its elements come together to make it somehow enjoyable. I started to appreciate it only more recently, though. I didn't play it at its release and when I tried it for the first time years after it came out it just seemed mundane and unimpressive compared to the first game. However, when I played it again more recently, adjusting my expectations given the state of shooters, it was simply enjoyable enough and pleasantly quaint.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Modern decline makes it so that the "shit" of yesterday is now the good for what it is of today lul

 

[Dayyālu]

Modern decline makes it so that the "shit" of yesterday is now the good for what it is of today lul

Amusingly enough, the Great Enemy, Daikatana, if patched and modded (solving the problems of saves, allies and crashes) is a fairly more interesting experience compared to Quake II. It's bad at times (the beginning is an almost perfect exercise in how to fuck up a starting area) but it improves and it even gets a certain charm. The shlock charm of 90ies Romero that thinks that time traveling cyberpunk samurai are the coolest thing ever and that having a shitton of weapons and settings is better than testing them properly.

Quake II , bar the soundtrack, is devastatingly bland by comparison. I'm not saying that Daikatana is mechanically better than Quake II, but it's for sure a more interesting experience. I don't remember a single level in Quake II bar the very beginning, the secret levels, the marine slaughter level and the final boss, and I don't remember them because they were mechanically interesting, they simply were the only bit of novelty in the sea of gray.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I guess the fact i played Q2 as a kid makes me remember it as being better than what it was.

I also played Daikatana when it came out but i absolutely hated it. The only "fondness" or nostalgia i have for that game is goofing around the multiplayer demo (i think it was a demo, might have been a leak i forgot) that was released much earlier than the actual game for a few hours.

 

[Dayyālu]

I also played Daikatana when it came out but i absolutely hated it.

Daikatana as we got it in glorious 2000 was a complete mess. As it is, the game is an exercise in frustration due to it collapsing under the weight of Romero's ambitions, like...

+ Gotta have companions, but 2000-era tech gives you terrible companions that have shit AI and that make some levels flat-out unplayable
+ Gotta have "RPG" elements both in weapons (the titular Daikatana) and for your guy, but they are essentially broken
+ Limited saves with in a high lethality enviroment with terrible companion AI
+ No weapon is "baseline", meaning ALL WEAPONS are some kind of weird shit
+ The first levels (the demo levels you played) a.k.a "GREEN FROG HELL" are probably the worst that the game has to offer.

Then I discovered a bunch of madmen worked on patching Daikatana. And it becomes interesting. I mean, you see the failures. You see the problems. But it's a fascinating failure, and not merely a bad or mediocre game. Romero worked on it and tried to make it work, but the tech and the skills just weren't there (also hubris). Compared to the utter blandness of Quake II, in a weird perverted way Daikatana is the most interesting game. Some pieces of it are even outright fun, and the I have a soft spot for the shlock. It's certainly better than Blood II or SHOGO: MAD, and I remember back then some reviewers giving it 6/10 "there's almost a game under the failed ambition".

 

[Lyric Suite]

I'm not buying that argument. I don't think it was the "ambition" part that was the problem, but Romero's inability to get shit done.

Don't forget that we are talking about the same studio that gave us Anachronox and Deus Ex. How ambitious were those?

Also, i liked Shogo lmao. Blood 2 the only thing i remember is that airplane level, possibly because it was the only memorable part of the game.

 

[Wunderbar]

Wtf, Shogo was horrible. Worse than Daikatana and Blood 2 combined.

 

[Dayyālu]

I'm not buying that argument. I don't think it was the "ambition" part that was the problem, but Romero's inability to get shit done.

Romero worked on it and tried to make it work, but the tech and the skills just weren't there (also hubris).

There's no need for you to buy it because we share the same opinion. Romero planned but didn't deliver, and could not deliver. As they say, it's a wonderful failure.

Don't forget that we are talking about the same studio that gave us Anachronox and Deus Ex. How ambitious were those?

Different people, different targets, different results. Ion Storm Austin (different studio entirely) for Deus Ex, and Anachronox was Tom Hall's pet project (if I remember right).

Wtf, Shogo was horrible. Worse than Daikatana and Blood 2 combined.

Mecha levels are adequate. Everything else... uh.... uh.... it's a thing.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Hey, Shogo was... creative lmao.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Wtf, Shogo was horrible. Worse than Daikatana and Blood 2 combined.

1998 is one of the strongest years for fpp shooters and Shogo is TOP3 easily.

 

[Lyric Suite]

There's no need for you to buy it because we share the same opinion. Romero planned but didn't deliver, and could not deliver. As they say, it's a wonderful failure.

What i meant is that the issue isn't that Romero's dreams were too big, but that they were too big compared to his own abilities to make them a reality. Someone else may have been able to pull it off, so the problem wasn't that the ideas were too crazy but that Romero was particularly inept with execution, something we saw over the years as other projects of his failed. Which is a shame because Sigil showed that he is still a solid designer. He should have found another Carmack, somebody to provide him with a more robust working environment but over the years he only seems to have surrounded himself with people as crazy (and lazy) as him.

In a way he got what was coming to him as he obviously has an ego problem but at the same time i still can't bring myself to dislike the guy. He is a classic example of a nerd who got rich and famous so he LARPed as a rock star but deep down he is still one of us lmao.

 

[schru]

Quake II is still decent and enjoyable, though. If anything, it's an interesting atmosphere piece with a smooth flow weapons that feel pretty good, having that quality of craftsmanship characteristic of Id. Daikatana's creativity looks more like a stack of random ideas. It doesn't look good, it plays awful, and the level design ranges from cumbersome to amateurish.

 

[Dayyālu]

Daikatana is more interesting than Quake 2 in the same way an insane person is more interesting than a normal person. It's not the better game. Even as a fascinating failure, most of the game is actually excessively easy and boring, more-so than Quake 2 was. Also, that fan-patch does nothing lol.

Quake II is just tedious, boring and uninspired. Yes, I'd prefer the insane person than the NPC every day. Tastes, I guess. We'd have to agree to disagree.

I think Blood 2 might be a bit better. It actually looks decent, at least. But that game actually is overly difficult, so playing it is just tedious. Shogo was instead really retarded and easy, though, since you can completely stun all of the enemies just by shooting them at all, and the critical hits give you free health, so you don't actually have to worry about anything, ever.

Blood 2 is terrible as a game and even more as a Blood sequel. It fails on every goddamn level, particularly considering Blood's charm and personality. I don't remember it being particularly worse than SHOGO's on foot sections, both were janky early LithTech games.

None of this really matters. Sin is better than all of these shitty games.

Amen to that

Sin has a shitton of ideas, the majority of 'em work, and it's fun to play. A mistery why it completely failed to gain recognition even in the retro shooter crowd.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Back then, Half Life stole its thunder.

After that, i think part of the problem is that up until recently it was really a bitch to make it run on modern systems. I think even with the GoG version you still have to do some tinkering.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Sin has a shitton of ideas, the majority of 'em work, and it's fun to play. A mistery why it completely failed to gain recognition even in the retro shooter crowd.

Another mistery is why its sequel had such a meh reception.

 

[Lutte]

Sin has a shitton of ideas, the majority of 'em work, and it's fun to play. A mistery why it completely failed to gain recognition even in the retro shooter crowd.

Did you play it on release? that thing was heavy as fuck and had some of the most nightmare-ish loading times of the era. I'd wager most people saw it as just yet another generic fps after a few minutes while not being able to bear the loads and went for uninstall.exe.

Seriously, the load times were deal breaker level stuff. They were so, so, so bad. They are the sort of technical aspect that can destroy a game if it's not an extraordinary flawed gem worth eating the shit to get to the gold.

It's not an aspect that matters in 2020 but it did have a responsibility in making this game pretty much an obscure average fps thing and talking of the retro shooter crowds, if you are the sort to replay decades old games in 2020, would you replay the best of the best or would you also go for the just "it's alright" type? I certainly don't care to go back to SiN, I'd rather play another Doom wad.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Sin has a shitton of ideas, the majority of 'em work, and it's fun to play. A mistery why it completely failed to gain recognition even in the retro shooter crowd.

Another mistery is why its sequel had such a meh reception.

Because it was a second rate total conversion of Half Life 2 that bore little resemblance to the original game.

[EDIT]

For some reason i thought you guys were talking about Sin 2. I need my coffee shiiiet be right back.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I remember the loading time issue but i didn't find them so bothersome as to make the game unplayable. Then again, after the absolute anal rape of my system Unreal caused, i was probably used to that kinda of stuff and i think at the time i just assumed it was my system that was too shit for the game. That is until they patched them later on lmao.

But yeah, a broken launch can definitely hurt the success of a game. As always, i assume the publisher was to blame for rushing the game out there before it was ready.

 

[schru]

Because it was a second rate total conversion of Half Life 2 that bore little resemblance to the original game.

[EDIT]

For some reason i thought you guys were talking about Sin 2. I need my coffee shiiiet be right back.

oddech_wymarlych_swiatow is talking about Sin Episodes: Emergence, which I assume you mean by Sin 2. But yeah, it took some of the weakest aspects of Half-Life 2, having an extremely restrictive path through the levels and set pieces that probably took much effort to script, but which weren't very interesting to fight through.

 

[Dayyālu]

The only thing I remember about Emergence was tiddies, that it felt like a demo - short, few enemies, test-like - and that it took Valve's bait for "episodic gaming" seriously.

But mostly tiddies. Ahh, simpler times.

 

[Lutte]

But yeah, a broken launch can definitely hurt the success of a game. As always, i assume the publisher was to blame for rushing the game out there before it was ready.

lolno
the publishers are an easy target to shield muh poor game developer but we don't live in a world in which money grows on trees. All those salaries spent into making something have to pay for themselves or else money run dries.
It's part of the job of being a game developer of being able to assess what you can reasonably build with your current means in a timeframe in which you won't starve to death.

You have the reverse going on where unlimited funds can just means rolling with it and still never producing anything actually usable for more than a tech demo a decade later - see Star Citizen. Don't assume games that release broken would have been better without publisher interference, it might have been worse and with more scope creep and reach an unreleasable state without a budget.
In the case of Freelancer you could even say that the publisher saved the game.

 

[Dayyālu]

Limitations can be a good thing, but Activision raping all its developers and fucking up everything for everyone isn't that. Sin is anything but a generic shooter, and you'd know that if you had actually bothered to play more than the loading screen (and didn't have me on your ignore list).

I mean, you just need to fire Sin's tutorial to see that a shitton of good work was put into it.

 

[UserNamer]

Quake 2 is the only classic I've never returned to. Doom and quake are a staple. There are reasons to revisit blood. Even half life had some recent so mods that were cool, like echoes or something. Forgot the title. But I never returned to quake 2 (I remember loving it though when it was released, and I think the weapon were funn)

Here's why in my opinion
- it's the easiest of the classics I remember even then it was very unchallenging. The birth of sp god popamole?
-one environment only. Think doom even with the abstract graphics you had a variety of recognizable settings like the Phobos space station, cities, hell which was distinctive looking in doom 1, gothic looking shit, and this variety of settings was increased in user wads. Same for quake which had a pretty unique artstyle. For monsters, for both games, it's the same you had distinctive looking monsters with varieties between them, a healthy mix of cyborgs demons and lovecraftian bizarre creatures (I'm quake even the humble zombie was somewhat unique and distinctive, if only for the way they moved attacked and sounded)
- in quake 2 everything is a generic tech base and everything is a cyborg. The monothemathic nature of it it's such a turn off when you compare it with quake or doom or other classics

So I enjoyed quake 2 as a kid but never felt a desire to revisit this setting at all

 

[soulburner]

I revisited Quake 2 several times and I like it a lot, although it's nowhere near Quake 1. I remember the demo blew my mind, even though I had to play in a very low res because my PC could barely run Quake 1 at the time. I could not understand the disconnection between Q1 and Q2 but I really liked it. I recently started replaying it and...I still like it. It is easy, the enemies are predictable, but the level design is interesting enough to keep me interested through the whole thing. Might be a little too much of "generic base", but it does change a bit later on and the Palace levels were pretty hard for me back in 1997. I like how there was a story to follow - the radio communications were pretty great. I never played with music on, but I listened to the Sonic Mayhem soundtrack on its own and it fucking brilliant.

Sin... I never played it for too long and I have to find time to give the re-release a try. I do remember playing the demo and... the loading times were so extreme it's impossible to imagine today. Also, being low on RAM, it not only took ages to load but was constantly swapping on disk and had stuttering audio. After I upgraded my PC all I could think about was how amazing Half-Life is and Sin never got the attention it may have deserved.

PS - ooooh, how I hate the blaster weapon in Q2. From day one to this very moment

 

[Ol' Willy]

I don't get what the fuck you are talking about, Quake 2 is awesome. Quake 2 is literally Industrial Metal FPS. Play it with some Fear Factory or KMFDM for proper soundtrack. And gameplay is tits