Incline Quake II enhanced re-release by Nightdive Studios

[Zlaja]

I never had any issue playing this at 9 years old on my PS1 & N64 like a consoletard

How did you handle progress in those versions? I assume you can't save in those. Got gud, or played on easy?

 

[Morenatsu.]

I never had any issue playing this at 9 years old on my PS1 & N64 like a consoletard

How did you handle progress in those versions? I assume you can't save in those. Got gud, or played on easy?

have you ever heard of memory cards

 

[Unkillable Cat]

So I gave Quake 2 (Enhanced) a go last night for an hour... and then quit.

The truth of the matter is, I was never a Quake 2-fan, even though I played through the game once 20+ years ago... and coming back to it after all this time shows how badly it has aged. Primitive mechanics, primitive AI, level design at least is somewhat clever. But in the end I wasn't that interested, and sadly nostalgia wasn't there to save it.

Quake 2 was a good step forward back when it was released, and its engine laid the foundation for the future of FPS-games... but as a game in and of itself, it has a little trouble standing on its own, especially today. Still, I'm glad this enhanced version got released, especially with all those neat extras. It'll make someone happy.

Oh, and it works on Windows 7 without issues.

 

[Tweed]

Does the remaster make the game not fucking boring? Because Quake 2 is really boring.

 

[Zlaja]

I never had any issue playing this at 9 years old on my PS1 & N64 like a consoletard

How did you handle progress in those versions? I assume you can't save in those. Got gud, or played on easy?

have you ever heard of memory cards

Yes, but I assume you weren't able to save whenever you wanted and had to complete large portions in one go.

 

[randir14]

I saw on the Steam forum that people are beginning to discover a few idiotic and pointless changes that were introduced with the remaster, like reducing the railgun damage in single player.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Normal damage or "sneak attack" one? The latter would not be a bad change tbh.

Edit: Found a thread, seems they nerfed the normal dmg which makes a huge impact on a slow attack/high damage weapon like railgun and it now takes one more shot to kill "medium" enemies (icarus, berserker) - 3 vs 2. confirmed.

 

[luj1]

I've never actually played it before and am weighing the pros and cons of picking it up for the first time. What fundamental issues persist despite the extensive facelift?

Q2 is an excellent game, deserves to be played just like Q1

 

[Ash]

I never had any issue playing this at 9 years old on my PS1 & N64 like a consoletard

How did you handle progress in those versions? I assume you can't save in those. Got gud, or played on easy?

Played on hard of course. Git gud, yeah. I was raised on git gud, that's how all games used to be, at the arcade, no matter what console you or your friend had, gameboy when travelling, just not PC games (unless you play multiplayer). Git gud was the standard back in the day and it's all but gone now. Utmost decline. Games are no longer games by my standards.

Yes you could only save between levels, a limitation as the design gods would intend, however Quake 2's levels are actually quite small and game difficulty not that significant as we all know, so it wasn't that much a challenge. Quake 2 N64 capitalised on difficulty a bit better from what I recall (it's the same game but aside from the intro level, all new maps which were tougher than normal quake 2).

 

[Eisen]

Quake 2 is good, not REALLY good as Quake 1, but still good

 

[schru]

There is probably a lot to say about the remake, but for now I'd like to present a little comparison of lighting and other visual changes to the maps.

It should be mentioned at the outset that it's uncertain what gamma and brightness Quake II should actually have. The method for adjusting the brightness in the game affects the textures themselves, so it doesn't seem optimal. On the other hand, apparently the miniGL driver in the original game, meant for the Voodoo Graphics 3D cards, had the gamma set to 1.7 or 1.6, which made the game considerably brighter compared to how it looks in the standard OpenGL renderer. There are some old screenshots that seem to demonstrate this:

Spoiler

However, can it actually be determined whether the textures and lighting in the game were created with this look in mind, or rather how the OpenGL renderer looks, just with a higher brightness or gamma value?

I've used dgVoodoo to capture screenshots of the 3dfx mode in the original game, but it doesn't seem to use the original gamma value, so I only increased the brightness in the wrapper to 150 % to make the game bright enough to make the shaded areas clear when viewed in a darkened room and on a monitor with a high brightness. To those who can't see the screenshots clearly, please try a different monitor mode or such.

The way the remaster looks, it seems like Night Dive attempted to approximate the higher-value gamma look of the Voodoo cards, but combined with the new lighting and fog, the result seems rather bland and washed out in many places. At the same time, some of the very dark places seem to be darker in the remaster.

The fog (or ‘distance haze’) in particular doesn't really look good in outside areas because of the way it contrasts with the skybox, which seems to have already been altered a bit to make it hazier. Where the effect does look nice, its use still seems questionable because it alters the appearance of the maps considerably, while in itself it seems like an effect borrowed from the fashions of current Quake map-making. It's superficially nice, but cheap if added to older maps just for the sake of it. It also completely spoils the few scattered areas which are meant to be pitch-black, such as the third level of the Bunker, where power cubes need to be inserted to activate lights.

The new, more precise cast highlights and shadows also don't necessarily make the game look better. Having a stronger light against which the player casts a shadow while running around is a neat effect, but other than this, when there are multiple artificial sources of light in a single area, like the very first room, the lighting doesn't seem to mix in a natural way at all. The result is rather like an automatically rendered would-be realistic lighting, rather than something a level designer considered carefully and tweaked with a certain mood in mind. Should that many lights and wall openings even cast hard highlights and shadows given the way the skies look, the fact that the action generally takes place in day-time but cloudy weather?

One more note. I've set dgVoodoo to include dithering and its C.R.T. filter; the latter might not be very accurate to the real thing, but combining both adds a very nice grain and pattern to the picture which I think the remake sorely lacks, its own C.R.T. filter notwithstanding.

On to the comparison screenshots:

Spoiler

firstly, the UI elements look better with bilinear filtering applied to them:

 

[Bad Sector]

However, can it actually be determined whether the textures and lighting in the game were created with this look in mind, or rather how the OpenGL renderer looks, just with a higher brightness or gamma value?

I don't think there is a precise brightness that the game was created with in mind - remember that while 3dfx was the most popular, it had a stupid linear gamma (no other graphics card, GPU or whatever before or after had this) but at the same time Quake 2 was actually made using Windows NT machines running professional 3D cards that could do windowed OpenGL - which did not have that sort of blown out gamma.

Here is a screenshot of the original Quake 2 editor from 1997 which shows hardware accelerated graphics (notice the bilinear filtering), 3dfx voodoo was incapable of running OpenGL in a window (that'd happen way later with Voodoo 3 and even then the driver was very unstable):

Chances are they tried to use brightness that looked good enough for both 3dfx and non-3dfx users.

 

[randir14]

A Nightdive dev posted on Steam that they have some fixes ready for a patch but need to wait for permission from Bethesda. One of the fixes is to reintroduce animated textures (like flashing computer screens), somehow the game shipped with all of them static and nobody noticed.

 

[schru]

However, can it actually be determined whether the textures and lighting in the game were created with this look in mind, or rather how the OpenGL renderer looks, just with a higher brightness or gamma value?

I don't think there is a precise brightness that the game was created with in mind - remember that while 3dfx was the most popular, it had a stupid linear gamma (no other graphics card, GPU or whatever before or after had this) but at the same time Quake 2 was actually made using Windows NT machines running professional 3D cards that could do windowed OpenGL - which did not have that sort of blown out gamma.

Here is a screenshot of the original Quake 2 editor from 1997 which shows hardware accelerated graphics (notice the bilinear filtering), 3dfx voodoo was incapable of running OpenGL in a window (that'd happen way later with Voodoo 3 and even then the driver was very unstable):

...

Chances are they tried to use brightness that looked good enough for both 3dfx and non-3dfx users.

Thanks, this does seem like the most reasonable explanation. Did the Voodoo 2 and 3 lines of cards also have linear gamma? Was there a similar problem with how games from 1998 or 1999 looked on these cards? Or was it generally accepted that games at the time wouldn't really have very deep dark tones or saturated colours? I'm thinking of titles like Unreal or Thief.

 

[Ol' Willy]

I never had any issue playing this at 9 years old on my PS1 & N64 like a consoletard

How did you handle progress in those versions? I assume you can't save in those. Got gud, or played on easy?

I played Q2 on PSOne back then too

1vs1 deathmatches on split-screen were fun

 

[schru]

However, can it actually be determined whether the textures and lighting in the game were created with this look in mind, or rather how the OpenGL renderer looks, just with a higher brightness or gamma value?

I don't think there is a precise brightness that the game was created with in mind - remember that while 3dfx was the most popular, it had a stupid linear gamma (no other graphics card, GPU or whatever before or after had this) but at the same time Quake 2 was actually made using Windows NT machines running professional 3D cards that could do windowed OpenGL - which did not have that sort of blown out gamma.

Here is a screenshot of the original Quake 2 editor from 1997 which shows hardware accelerated graphics (notice the bilinear filtering), 3dfx voodoo was incapable of running OpenGL in a window (that'd happen way later with Voodoo 3 and even then the driver was very unstable):

...

Chances are they tried to use brightness that looked good enough for both 3dfx and non-3dfx users.

Thanks, this does seem like the most reasonable explanation. Did the Voodoo 2 and 3 lines of cards also have linear gamma? Was there a similar problem with how games from 1998 or 1999 looked on these cards? Or was it generally accepted that games at the time wouldn't really have very deep dark tones or saturated colours? I'm thinking of titles like Unreal or Thief.

Heh, I searched for ‘Voodoo linear gamma’ on Google and this came up, so I suppose that's settled:

 

[Morenatsu.]

However, can it actually be determined whether the textures and lighting in the game were created with this look in mind, or rather how the OpenGL renderer looks, just with a higher brightness or gamma value?

I don't think there is a precise brightness that the game was created with in mind - remember that while 3dfx was the most popular, it had a stupid linear gamma (no other graphics card, GPU or whatever before or after had this) but at the same time Quake 2 was actually made using Windows NT machines running professional 3D cards that could do windowed OpenGL - which did not have that sort of blown out gamma.

Here is a screenshot of the original Quake 2 editor from 1997 which shows hardware accelerated graphics (notice the bilinear filtering), 3dfx voodoo was incapable of running OpenGL in a window (that'd happen way later with Voodoo 3 and even then the driver was very unstable):

Chances are they tried to use brightness that looked good enough for both 3dfx and non-3dfx users.

Of course, such editors don't have lighting, so using it to judge brightness would have been pointless.

 

[potatojohn]

It's good. The enemies seem to be a lot more aggressive which makes the game more difficult, but otherwise the changes are really minimal.

 

[Twiglard]

What a shitty q2 port:

Removed cl_maxfps and r_maxfps. Disabling vsync and the framerate limiter doesn't work. r_maxfps wasn't on release, it was added in r1q2 or q2pro, don't remember which.

Has awful input lag (probably is caused by the above, but modern source ports don't have the same problem with vsync on). Removed m_* settings and even uses mouse acceleration by default!

Added real dynamic shadows and changed maps to emit them, but they don't look good either.

No celshading. It looks good in q2pro actually.

No gl_modulate/intensity and friends, they were more flexible than brightness/gamma alone.

Fancy 'modernized' UI doesn't let you bind keys to multiple weapons, not allowing normies to avoid using the console.

With q2pro you can use the GL_NEAREST magnify filter and GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR minify filter (it's actually trivial to implement). No idea how this port does it, but probably uses GL_NEAREST for minifying when texture filtering is disabled (there are only yes/no options).

Source code for the client hasn't been released.

I doubt they implemented r1q2/q2pro protocol improvements for network play, especially given that they're released under the GPL by third party developers.

I wouldn't play it even if it was free.

TL;DR just play q2pro and configure it.

 

[Morenatsu.]

No gl_modulate/intensity and friends, they were more flexible than brightness/gamma alone.

Maybe if you liked having all the texture quality obliterated by clamped brightness. Those settings were trash.

 

[lightbane]

For those who care, there's a story in the new chapter of Quake 2:

Spoiler

It turns out that the creators of the Strogg are 2 of these electric-throwing monsters from Quake 1, in a final battle that's absolutely disappointing. In addition, the ending is pretty much "you win, enjoy being lost in the void!", similar to Quake 1's one.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

What, like, shamblers?

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

The Ground Zero XP is surprisingly good. The Reckoning XP however is trash.

 

[Semiurge]

For those who care, there's a story in the new chapter of Quake 2:

Spoiler

It turns out that the creators of the Strogg are 2 of these electric-throwing monsters from Quake 1, in a final battle that's absolutely disappointing. In addition, the ending is pretty much "you win, enjoy being lost in the void!", similar to Quake 1's one.

I always assumed that Shub-Niggurath and her spawn were not only from another dimension, but from the past as well, hence the "the mystical past comes alive" description of Q1's first episode. The strogg however seem to reflect the current futuristic times of Q2's human universe, maybe specifically tailored to do so by their creators.

 

[Twiglard]

No gl_modulate/intensity and friends, they were more flexible than brightness/gamma alone.

Maybe if you liked having all the texture quality obliterated by clamped brightness. Those settings were trash.

When tuned properly you could make the difference between shadows and highlights be arbitrarily large or small, and how bright were the textures overall (excessive contrast). It looked good with stock textures like ~~q2dm1~~, q2duel8 and other maps like that.

Nowadays reshade does this but not in lightmap space. It could be adapted actually.

seta vid_gamma 1
seta vid_hwgamma 1

seta intensity 1.25
seta gl_brightness .5
seta gl_modulate 1.25
seta gl_modulate_world 1.25
seta gl_modulate_entities 1.5
seta gl_saturation .6

seta gl_doublelight_entities 0
seta r_override_textures 1
seta gl_multisamples 0
seta gl_dotshading 1

seta gl_dynamic 0 // YMMV
seta gl_dlight_falloff 1