Quake 4

[markec]

TL;DR: It's a better game than retro revivalist boomer shooters or the Ashes mod for Doom, and certainly most of the competition at the time. It was just made in a bad period, some of that influence can be found in the game with the CoD wannabe stuff or vehicle sections. Nobody remembers the bad games of the time though so people with no memory of the time will rate it shit since they compare it to Quake 1.

Its a bad game, being better then other bad games does not make it good.

 

[Lemming42]

Played Doom 3 BFG edition a while ago and liked it quite a bit, there's nothing really wrong with the game at all. I didn't like it back when it came out but I think that's mostly because it bore the name "Doom" on the box, playing it back these days and treating it as its own thing, it's totally solid. It's the clear winner between itself and Quake 4 IMO.

 

[NecroLord]

Played Doom 3 BFG edition a while ago and liked it quite a bit, there's nothing really wrong with the game at all. I didn't like it back when it came out but I think that's mostly because it bore the name "Doom" on the box, playing it back these days and treating it as its own thing, it's totally solid. It's the clear winner between itself and Quake 4 IMO.

Original Doom 3 is way better than the BFG edition.

 

[NecroLord]

I think that maybe Quake 4 should've followed the same design principle of Quake 2.
You are a lone badass marine who just mows down hordes of Strogg.
Secret Areas and enemy count for each level. Maybe some keycard hunting. Stuff like this.
No tiresome turret and vehicle sections or fighting alongside a squad.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I don’t know how Raven managed to make a game where you play as a badass half-alien cyborg using big fucking guns to blow up and dismember other alien cyborgs so utterly forgettable and boring, but they sure rose to that challenge.

Quake IV is the kind of bad that’s not even fun to make fun of; it’s as bland as a packet of water crackers. Glad it flopped.

 

[Saldrone]

Quake 4 is truly one of the games of all time. The gameplay is about shooting things, graphics were designed, sound effects were made and there is a story, making it definetively a videogame

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

Doom 3 sold 3.5 million units
Quake 4 barely sold 400k

Stop coping lol.

Fortnite, a dying game, had 44.7 million players players in 2023, while Quake 3 sold under half a million copies worldwide, under 200k in the US, when it was the most active, but probably passed one million sales with cheap digital keys during sales over the years, but the majority of those sales are sitting unplayed in steam libraries.

I guess Fortnite is the better game.

Quake 4 was literal generic garbage.

Yeah, it was faithful to the series, with a couple of additions popular in the genre at the time. The only way someone can say something looks "generic" is because another game, or piece of media, went and established something in the first place. Quake 2 is one of those games, establishing a more goal based structure that many of the more pure shooters lacked at the time, as well as the bio-mechanical cyborg theme. If Quake 4 had been released in 1997 it would have seemed fresh enough, but it didn't in 2005. Again, Quake 4 was a conservative sequel, it wasn't a literal relic of the past that Prey was, but it lacked impact because you had seen it all before already.

You could make the same claim, and very justifiably, about Doom 3 too. Not every game can establish a genre or new conventions, that doesn't necessarily make them bad and they often range from good and decent to mediocre. The biggest failures tend to be when innovation goes horribly wrong. Like the ambitions that John Romero had with Daikatana that were way ahead of what technology and the industry was capable of at the time.

 

[Beans00]

Doom 3 sold 3.5 million units
Quake 4 barely sold 400k

Stop coping lol.

Fortnite, a dying game, had 44.7 million players players in 2023, while Quake 3 sold under half a million copies worldwide, under 200k in the US, when it was the most active, but probably passed one million sales with cheap digital keys during sales over the years, but the majority of those sales are sitting unplayed in steam libraries.

I guess Fortnite is the better game.

Quake 4 was literal generic garbage.

Yeah, it was faithful to the series, with a couple of additions popular in the genre at the time. The only way someone can say something looks "generic" is because another game, or piece of media, went and established something in the first place. Quake 2 is one of those games,

Quake 2/4 is absolutely generic trash compared to quake 1. I'm not particularly a fan of quake 1, but it definitely has character.

Quake 3 low sales can be attributed to 2 things (although 320k in 1 year might not be considered 'flop' territory back then)
1. Unreal tournament blowing it the fuck out of the water(sorry luj1 I also liked quake 3) <- I'm not sure if UT actually sold that much better, either way they stole sales from eachother
2. No single player campaign.

I have never played fortnite and I don't care about it. Mass market multiplayer games released in the last 10-12 years aren't comparable to sales numbers back when people had to track down physical copies.
Quake Live(which I never played) is just updated quake 3(which luj1 taught me). According to steamspy somewhere between 2-5 million people have played it. Which is more(if its on the high end) than quake 1-2-3-4 combined(as physical media).


Doom 3 had a fair amount of detractors, I didn't particularly care for it. That being said It was still relatively well received at the time by most people.
Quake 4 was literally on the welfare shelf/bargain bin within like 3-4 months tops.

I played these games when they came out. I'm going to assume you didn't and this is part of some hipster revisionism.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

Its a bad game, being better then other bad games does not make it good.

It's fine if you don't like it, but if you can't even articulate why you don't then why are you even posting? Forums are for discussing things, so what the fuck am I supposed to take from that?

As for it being relatively good you need to establish some sort of grading, a hierarchy, to be able to say anything about it in the first place, as well as reference points for comparison. It's also useful to take into account what people were saying and thinking back then. When Doom 3 came out people complained endlessly that it was a slow plodding shooter that thought itself a survival horror game but wasn't, Quake 4 by comparison is much more in line with older id Software titles, throwing more enemies at you at a quicker pace, and letting you move around quicker, especially with the cyborg legs.

At the time Quake 4 was considered a big throwback, and it was, but these days the issue people have with the game is that of theming, with the popular opinion and drone consensus being that Quake 1, a game that was thrown together from scrap parts and didn't make much coherent sense, is the peak of 90's mood, probably by kids that weren't even alive then, and Quake 2 sucked. Ironically these same people tend to love it when modders turn Doom from the abstract designs purely focused on good level design it had into something aiming for realism or aping cinematic console shooters.

This is all important to keep in consideration when you evaluate the reception it got at the time, and why people are so against it now. Back then it was because we were transitioning into console shooters and there was no place for the Quake series anymore, just as multiplayer Arena shooters aren't competitive in the market of today. Call of Duty 2, Halo, all that slop. Now it is because of this new manufactured and artificial idea of what a "boomer shooter" is that is being pushed by some people to sell crap games. A supposed return to fundamentals, but badly understood ones.

This is what IGN said at the time:

It's a curious direction that Quake 4 has taken this time around, with the heavy emphasis on single-player, apparently at the development cost of multiplayer, previously its very selling point. And while the SP production values are certainly expensive-looking and sounding, the actual combat mechanics feel a step behind the evolution of the genre, and not in an intentionally retro way.

So if you're into older shooters, and certainly a Monolith-is-number-one guy like me, at the time it was the okay sequel to Quake 2, overshadowed by F.E.A.R. which is the peak of spectacle shooters, but not nearly as bad as the console slop that dominated the market. I'd agree that it lacked the raw 90's energy that almost all shooters had lost at that point, but if you're going to compare everything to the best the genre has to offer, and say everything below that bar is bad, then you're going to be calling all games but those shit. I could be calling all games that aren't Blood shit simply because they aren't Blood, but that's not very interesting nor a very useful way of spending my time.

Quake 4 was doing something most stopped doing as the age of console shit dawned, and for that reason I'd say it is underrated. Especially in light of what issues people had with Doom 3. Raven never had the best of level designers and they never had a finely tuned sense of what made shooters satisfying, the small details, but they did an okay job, as they always did. I already said what I thought was wrong with it but it's not enough to turn it into a terrible game. Feel free to argue otherwise, if you have any arguments that is.

 

[NecroLord]

Its a bad game, being better then other bad games does not make it good.

It's fine if you don't like it, but if you can't even articulate why you don't then why are you even posting? Forums are for discussing things, so what the fuck am I supposed to take from that?

As for it being relatively good you need to establish some sort of grading, a hierarchy, to be able to say anything about it in the first place, as well as reference points for comparison. It's also useful to take into account what people were saying and thinking back then. When Doom 3 came out people complained endlessly that it was a slow plodding shooter that thought itself a survival horror game but wasn't, Quake 4 by comparison is much more in line with older id Software titles, throwing more enemies at you at a quicker pace, and letting you move around quicker, especially with the cyborg legs.

At the time Quake 4 was considered a big throwback, and it was, but these days the issue people have with the game is that of theming, with the popular opinion and drone consensus being that Quake 1, a game that was thrown together from scrap parts and didn't make much coherent sense, is the peak of 90's mood, probably by kids that weren't even alive then, and Quake 2 sucked. Ironically these same people tend to love it when modders turn Doom from the abstract designs purely focused on good level design it had into something aiming for realism or aping cinematic console shooters.

This is all important to keep in consideration when you evaluate the reception it got at the time, and why people are so against it now. Back then it was because we were transitioning into console shooters and there was no place for the Quake series anymore, just as multiplayer Arena shooters aren't competitive in the market of today. Call of Duty 2, Halo, all that slop. Now it is because of this new manufactured and artificial idea of what a "boomer shooter" is that is being pushed by some people to sell crap games. A supposed return to fundamentals, but badly understood ones.

This is what IGN said at the time:

It's a curious direction that Quake 4 has taken this time around, with the heavy emphasis on single-player, apparently at the development cost of multiplayer, previously its very selling point. And while the SP production values are certainly expensive-looking and sounding, the actual combat mechanics feel a step behind the evolution of the genre, and not in an intentionally retro way.

So if you're into older shooters, and certainly a Monolith-is-number-one guy like me, at the time it was the okay sequel to Quake 2, overshadowed by F.E.A.R. which is the peak of spectacle shooters, but not nearly as bad as the console slop that dominated the market. I'd agree that it lacked the raw 90's energy that almost all shooters had lost at that point, but if you're going to compare everything to the best the genre has to offer, and say everything below that bar is bad, then you're going to be calling all games but those shit. I could be calling all games that aren't Blood shit simply because they aren't Blood, but that's not very interesting nor a very useful way of spending my time.

Quake 4 was doing something most stopped doing as the age of console shit dawned, and for that reason I'd say it is underrated. Especially in light of what issues people had with Doom 3. Raven never had the best of level designers and they never had a finely tuned sense of what made shooters satisfying, the small details, but they did an okay job, as they always did. I already said what I thought was wrong with it but it's not enough to turn it into a terrible game. Feel free to argue otherwise, if you have any arguments that is.

They got it done right with Heretic and Hexen.
Hexen especially, since you don't see a lot of dark fantasy shooters with the same atmosphere and different weapons (like the Axe of the Warrior class or the Serpent Staff of the Cleric).
Also had things like lighting and the use of deadly traps.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Quake 3’s sales were also probably hurt by gaming-cafe culture which went bust shortly after.

Thats the reason that I never bought QQ3, despite playing a ton of it back in the day.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

I have never played fortnite and I don't care about it.

If millions of people do then clearly it is the better game. Another all time classic is also Call of Duty, when you consider the playercount. And Baldur's Gate 3 is the best CRPG in years, clearly, sales never lie, right?

Arguing from a position of units sold is very retarded, it doesn't say anything about the qualities of a product. Quake 2 and 4 had a distinct setting and art direction, how many other shooters did you play where there are human torsos used as mechanical parts in buildings?

They got it done right with Heretic and Hexen.

Sure, but I'm pretty sure the team was very different back then. Although the one level designer on the original Hexen went on to become the project lead for Quake 4, so it might just be that what they used to get right on that front didn't transition as well into the new tech and industry standards. Moving from first essentially Doom maps and then to brush based ones, and finally to models. Hexen 2 for example is great, while Solider of Fortune 2 was pretty poor, even if it looks more realistic. Level designers who worked on the first game, which was much better in that regard, also worked on the sequel. So what gives?

Hard to tell without doing any deep dives into the company history, changing personnel, key people, and the culture there.

 

[Beans00]

I have never played fortnite and I don't care about it.

If millions of people do then clearly it is the better game. Another all time classic is also Call of Duty, when you consider the playercount. And Baldur's Gate 3 is the best CRPG in years, clearly, sales never lie, right?

Arguing from a position of units sold is very retarded, it doesn't say anything about the qualities of a product. Quake 2 and 4 had a distinct setting and art direction, how many other shooters did you play where there are human torsos used as mechanical parts in buildings?

Ah, so this is a serb body horror fetish thing. Now I understand lol.
I would play any call of duty before quake 4. Not even close.


I'll give you a rundown on why quake 4 sucks, to spare markec the trouble.
1. it has shit level design, it's completely linear. Maybe even more linear than call of duty.
2. it's full of shitty cutscenes and story nobody cares about
3. the weapons suck
4. it has shitty vehicle sections and turret sections
5. it has bad enemy design, along with bad enemy encounters
6. it's generic as fuck

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Some pretty weird overreactions itt. It wasn't a great game (I have my doubts over whether you could actually make one out of the extremely meh strogg setting), but action, atmosphere and presentation were ok-ish and the clear inspiration by the starship troopers movie fairly amusing.

Or maybe let's put it this way: if I got a game of q4's quality as an actual sequel to q1, I'd be pretty butthurt. As a sequel to q2 it's mostly "yeah ok".

 

[Freedos]

Well, I think Quake 4 had these problems:

1) It was a Quake 2 sequel. Don't take me wrong, I think Quake 2 is a good game...but far less interesting and memorable than the first one.
2) It wanted to be Quake 2 with lots of elements of Doom III AND cinematic military shooters...with mixed and weird results. It felt so watered down in many ways. It hadn't the Quake II's level design and movement or the Doom III's atmosphere and art design...with railroaded CoD style segments and vehicle parts which nobody asked.
3) What about that poor man's Quake III multiplayer? Yap.
4) Quake 4 and F.E.A.R were released in the same day. Yeah, a watered down sequel in the same day than a new, fresh, technical mindblowing and more focused horror FPS with its amazing gunplay, one of the best enemy AI of the genre and spectacular bullet time. It didn't make any favor to the Raven's game.
5) The original 2006 Prey game, another FPS game with Id Tech 4, was showed in E3 2005. A Id Tech 4 game with more impresive graphics, less recycled content of Doom III and more promising and unique gameplay elements and aesthetics. This game and F.E.A.R took more of the hype cake than Quake 4 (I feel a little bad for the Raven's game).

Again, not a bad game. It has a good gunplay and moments like the stroggfication part. It's entertaining for the most part (well, its vehicle parts were awful). But it's less memorable and interesting than Doom 3 and Prey as a whole, and the worst Quake single player game. It was a little mistreated, yeah...but not without understandable reasons.

 

[markec]

Its a bad game, being better then other bad games does not make it good.

It's fine if you don't like it, but if you can't even articulate why you don't then why are you even posting? Forums are for discussing things, so what the fuck am I supposed to take from that?

This point of the post is not to dissect the game but to point out flawed reasoning of "it's better then other bad games thus is good" which is as flawed as saying that more popular game is better.

As for it being relatively good you need to establish some sort of grading, a hierarchy, to be able to say anything about it in the first place, as well as reference points for comparison.

You compare it to all games of the same genre ever made not just those made at the same time. It compares poorly to both classics of the genre and previous ID games from which it draws inspiration.

It's also useful to take into account what people were saying and thinking back then. When Doom 3 came out people complained endlessly that it was a slow plodding shooter that thought itself a survival horror game but wasn't, Quake 4 by comparison is much more in line with older id Software titles, throwing more enemies at you at a quicker pace, and letting you move around quicker, especially with the cyborg legs.

People complained it felt more like a sequel to Doom 3 not Quake 2. In reality it was like a mix of the two that doesn't do anything particulary well.

At the time Quake 4 was considered a big throwback, and it was, but these days the issue people have with the game is that of theming, with the popular opinion and drone consensus being that Quake 1, a game that was thrown together from scrap parts and didn't make much coherent sense, is the peak of 90's mood, probably by kids that weren't even alive then, and Quake 2 sucked. Ironically these same people tend to love it when modders turn Doom from the abstract designs purely focused on good level design it had into something aiming for realism or aping cinematic console shooters.

At that time Quake 4 was not considered a big throwback, it failed because people saw in it Doom 3 and a console oriented game. I can't speak for everyone but in case of me my issues is that the game by itself is simply bad and not worth the time, nothing to do with anything else.

This is all important to keep in consideration when you evaluate the reception it got at the time, and why people are so against it now. Back then it was because we were transitioning into console shooters and there was no place for the Quake series anymore, just as multiplayer Arena shooters aren't competitive in the market of today. Call of Duty 2, Halo, all that slop. Now it is because of this new manufactured and artificial idea of what a "boomer shooter" is that is being pushed by some people to sell crap games. A supposed return to fundamentals, but badly understood ones.

This is what IGN said at the time:

It's a curious direction that Quake 4 has taken this time around, with the heavy emphasis on single-player, apparently at the development cost of multiplayer, previously its very selling point. And while the SP production values are certainly expensive-looking and sounding, the actual combat mechanics feel a step behind the evolution of the genre, and not in an intentionally retro way.

I don't understand why do you keep harping about what others think and why you think it's important, I do not care for such things. I played it when it was released and I replayed it recently, I disliked it then and I disliked it now.

So if you're into older shooters, and certainly a Monolith-is-number-one guy like me, at the time it was the okay sequel to Quake 2, overshadowed by F.E.A.R. which is the peak of spectacle shooters, but not nearly as bad as the console slop that dominated the market. I'd agree that it lacked the raw 90's energy that almost all shooters had lost at that point, but if you're going to compare everything to the best the genre has to offer, and say everything below that bar is bad, then you're going to be calling all games but those shit. I could be calling all games that aren't Blood shit simply because they aren't Blood, but that's not very interesting nor a very useful way of spending my time.

No I will grade the games in multiple categories beyond just good and bad. There are great, good, ok, decent, bad and horrible games etc. Quake 4 is a bad game, better then some worst then others. But saying it's better then a lot of bad games thus is good is just silly.

Quake 4 was doing something most stopped doing as the age of console shit dawned, and for that reason I'd say it is underrated. Especially in light of what issues people had with Doom 3. Raven never had the best of level designers and they never had a finely tuned sense of what made shooters satisfying, the small details, but they did an okay job, as they always did. I already said what I thought was wrong with it but it's not enough to turn it into a terrible game. Feel free to argue otherwise, if you have any arguments that is.

They tried and they failed, maybe they made the good console FPS but that doesn't make it a good game.

Why do I consider it a bad game?

1. Level design, overall architecturally it's boring and uninteresting (with few exceptions) which you can say for lot of games but other good games compensate it with interesting level layouts. Levels of Quake 4 on the other hand are too constraint, it feels like a whole game consist of narrow corridors and small rooms with no verticality. This negatively impacts both encounter design and exploration.

2. Encounter design is lacking, due the way the levels are made the game entire game feels like going trough a long narrow corridor as enemies slowly pour in in small groups. Only at the end of the game when we get more creative enemies to fight and it becomes bit more interesting. As said the Waste Processing plant is the best part of the game that proves that you can have some creativity of level design in this game but that creativity seems absent before and later.

3. Enemy design is ok at most cases with main issue that more interesting enemies like Iron Maiden only appear very late in game and even then not very often, which makes early game due simplistic level, encounter and enemy design rather boring.

4. Boring turret/vehicle sections.


The issue with the game is that if feels and plays like your average console FPS, long, narrow, linear areas lacking any exploration or verticality while everyone moves on a snail pace. Everything looking as the same brown metallic corridors as enemies slowly pour in small groups. Its not fun or interesting gameplay, when your game feels most of the time as a chore trying to get to the "good" parts its not a good sign.

So I really dont see what argument for it being a good game someone could possible have beside, few interesting segments, its better then other game made at the same time and they tried making a good game.

 

[Xorazm]

I feel like Quake 4 would be easier to defend if I could remember a damn thing about it.

 

[Morenatsu.]

I forgot to finish it after mommy told me to stop playing and go to bed

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Something tells me you weren't exactly on talking terms with your parents.

 

[Semiurge]

Played Doom 3 BFG edition a while ago and liked it quite a bit, there's nothing really wrong with the game at all. I didn't like it back when it came out but I think that's mostly because it bore the name "Doom" on the box, playing it back these days and treating it as its own thing, it's totally solid. It's the clear winner between itself and Quake 4 IMO.

Original Doom 3 is way better than the BFG edition.

I've played both and I think overall the BFG version is superior. I don't get why it's said that it bleaches out the shadowy areas of the levels. I didn't notice any change for the worse. There's still plenty of pitch black where it actually matters.

 

[NecroLord]

Played Doom 3 BFG edition a while ago and liked it quite a bit, there's nothing really wrong with the game at all. I didn't like it back when it came out but I think that's mostly because it bore the name "Doom" on the box, playing it back these days and treating it as its own thing, it's totally solid. It's the clear winner between itself and Quake 4 IMO.

Original Doom 3 is way better than the BFG edition.

I've played both and I think overall the BFG version is superior. I don't get why it's said that it bleaches out the shadowy areas of the levels. I didn't notice any change for the worse.

You're kidding?
Also, it is way too generous with the health and ammo pickups.
It also fucks with the lighting and removes the flashlight (which, although being dumb, was part of the original's design principle).

 

[Lemming42]

I'm gonna have to try the original to compare them, most people tell me that it's better. Though I have to admit, I remember the original's flashlight mechanic pissing me off and the perpetual darkness of the levels just being annoying rather than atmospheric. The game isn't scary so all the parts where you're plunged into pitch darkness and made to switch to the flashlight just feel like a pointless lull before you're allowed to get back to shooting, which is the only fun bit of the game.

 

[NecroLord]

It really should've had the gameplay of the original Doom games, BUT with the graphics and lighting of Doom 3.
Would've been really awesome, but one also has to remember the technical limitations of placing too many monsters at a time (I can't remember what the limit was before the game would start to get unstable).

 

[Semiurge]

Played Doom 3 BFG edition a while ago and liked it quite a bit, there's nothing really wrong with the game at all. I didn't like it back when it came out but I think that's mostly because it bore the name "Doom" on the box, playing it back these days and treating it as its own thing, it's totally solid. It's the clear winner between itself and Quake 4 IMO.

Original Doom 3 is way better than the BFG edition.

I've played both and I think overall the BFG version is superior. I don't get why it's said that it bleaches out the shadowy areas of the levels. I didn't notice any change for the worse.

You're kidding?
Also, it is way too generous with the health and ammo pickups.
It also fucks with the lighting and removes the flashlight (which, although being dumb, was part of the original's design principle).

Eh, it bundles the official expansions into one package that works with modern machines. The flashlight is still there but it's now shoulder-mounted, the original way was retarded. The ammo and healthpack pickups increase is divisive, but I can live with that. It's not like this was ever a masterpiece.

 

[Semiurge]

It really should've had the gameplay of the original Doom games, BUT with the graphics and lighting of Doom 3.
Would've been really awesome, but one also has to remember the technical limitations of placing too many monsters at a time (I can't remember what the limit was before the game would start to get unstable).

Doom 64 is really close to what you're describing, not with its graphics but the overall atmosphere. The ambient music is incredible.