rebb: did quake have a clear design goal ?
negke: yeah, pretty much
negke: i mean, no
SleepwalkR_: rebb: I think Quake is a case where the lack of a coherent design led to something extraordinary by chance.
negke: various styles mashed together
negke: that
rebb: i thought it was "lets make an RPG, oh wait maybe not, oh shit lets put this together with duct tape"
negke: heh
rebb: SleepwalkR : yeah, it's not a bad thing
SleepwalkR_: It works only because all parts fit together in an odd way. And the original engine is a big part of that because its visual style is perfect for the kind of environments Quake has.
Stuffbler: sleepwalkr i agree
SleepwalkR_: no, in this case it's not bad
Stuffbler: the core vibe of quake is not that hard to pick up on
SleepwalkR_: Yeah, that's probably what holds the entire thing together.
SleepwalkR_: It all feels alien and strange.
SleepwalkR_: Even the human bases are strange. Sound is also an important part of this atmosphere. The environment sounds in Quake are fantastic.

raptore: To me the quake shotgun added to the sensation that I was in a weird, unfriendly place, and my pitiful human technology was not going to protect me here.
SleepwalkR: raptore: That's an interesting observation. I never thought of that.
SleepwalkR: But yeah, it rings with the feeling of loneliness and alienation I described above.
SleepwalkR: Btw, loneliness is also something I will forever associate with Quake.
SleepwalkR: You're lost and lonely in this strange, evil place where you will die if you give in to your fears. 

I really liked the second set of quotes. Just when every game was trying to add NPC's, special features, RPG elements, multiple gameplay styles, a big story, and a tie-in to some previously established intellectual property, Quake just PUT YOU THERE. And it was dark. 

no cut scenes, ever, seems like an important part of the original quake. not even any win screens. if id ever makes a new full Quake 1 sequel they better not try to make a story, with cut scenes that explain everything about the game (why there are the weapons/environments/monsters there are). The total lack of cutscenes - the fact that you could just wander around these dark brownish environments for hours with no help and a minimal interface, was important.

I suppose you guys have all seen the semirecent video "If Quake Was Made Today" on youtube. If not, look it up. 

If quake was done today
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZtBCpo0eU 

Really?

http://i41.tinypic.com/2449riu.jpg

(Oddly enough, this one also follows a cutscene). 

And they were an integral part of the pack. One map was nothing but cutscene, in fact.

I'm not nitpicking, just pointing out that if one is going to take a stance on this, one must at least be consistent, otherwise one comes across as if one is just looking for excuses. 

Q1's win screens were in the engine, in the lamest way: no NPCs, it was basically just the level exit camera and some text. It was, above all, before Half-Life. Most importantly you never see the outside world. What's the difference between being in a weird blue cave, and seeing a shot of a weird blue cave with some text saying "you win this episode." They never gave the sense of an outside world or a larger context. Even the intro story in the manual was bullshit they obviously made up in a few minutes.
The Zer ending was good for what Zer was. Hell the Nehahra movie was a great interpretation of Quake, and it was nothing but a 4 hour cut scene. But these were interpretations.
But the original Quake did not have that story element, it was minimialist. No characters, no cut scenes, no explanation, and what they did provide was just some random pseudolovecraftian shit probably just before the deadline. 

(Oddly enough, this one also follows a cutscene).

that's not a cutscene. that's an ending cinematic.

there is no gameplay after shub blows up. a cutscene is a scene that breaks up gameplay. 

what I meant was the total lack of characters the player interacts with, except to kill them. I don't consider the shub end a real win screen or a cut scene. It doesn't involve anything that wasn't in the gameplay. You don't ever get "out" of Quakeworld. The game is claustrophobic and everything that reacts to you with any kind of intelligence, is trying to kill you. I think those factors are part of what make Quake unique. 

I dislike cutscenes in general, but I particularly hate in-gameplay cutscenes, because they are so jarring and 99% of the time pointless... They are particularly bad in FPS games because of the nature of you being the character, but they usually annoy me in third person games too :p

Half-life style I'm fine with, if thought has gone into how the game merges the scripted sequence with the player, but even Valve have started getting sloppy about that sort of thing in Episode 2...ie the multiple sequences where they just flat out remove your control and point the camera for you.

If you want more story elements you have to trap the player and break their control in some way, even if it's just trapping the player, but it should be done with some thought and grace, and cutscenes strike me as the laziest option. tbh if I was going to add major features to quake, improvement in scripting options would be what I'd look into :E


As for the atmosphere thing, well I guess that is the essence of all this cack. The isolation and (dark) otherworldliness. The idea of being a lost explorer, the first human to walk into a strange other-worldly labyrinth.

It's a tricky line, when you think of specific cases... say, Death Knights, fantasy element, fine. Those stupid Gremlin thingies from the first addon... yeah too dumb and kiddy. No menace to them. 

the concept of the gremlin; stealing player weapons + spawning new gremlins from corpses isn't bad, but it's a combination of them not really being threatening most of the time and their animations being incredibly bad.

if you look at a monster with similar mechanics: the archvile, who can respawn monsters, it's a completely different feel. those guys are dangerous and when you hear their sight sound, it's never a good thing.

i think the gremlin was a missed opportunity. the gremlin spawning behaviour could have been played up more while also making the monster itself more dangerous (and perhaps eschewing the weapon stealing) to make their presence be more menacing. maybe with the threat of swamping you in gremlins for example.