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. 

A mashup of styles and origins; disparities that strangely work together and even in combination (possibly thanks to the limited palette). The game comes with at least four or more unique themes, and most of the monsters are universally usable. It also allows for all kinds of seemingly random custom content, new monsters from some remote dimensions, and it can be integrated into the game just fine.

I love the bulky, angular architecture - originally a technical necessity, it became a style of its own. No filigree stuff and realistic scales, just big 32/64 boxes with sharp corners.
Very atmospheric with its lighting or darkness and strongly contrasted shadows, strange places and hostile places to explore, badass soundtrack. Yet, fast and fun run-and-gun gameplay and uncomprimising deathmatch.

This, along with a good portion of nostalgia and fanboyism, creates a great mix that is, despite (or thanks to) the unfocusedness of it all, which would be held against games nowadays, still appealing to me even after 15 years. 

 

I'd say the very reason Quake's disparate themes come together so easilly is thanks to the lack of cut scenes or character/world exposition. In my opinion whenever anybody has tried (be it by way of mods, fanfic or machinima) to explain Quake's mysteries they've compromised its afforementioned "essence" because as soon as you try to fill in the gaps you enter a world of logistical deadends and contradictions, which are a storyteller's cyanide.

Quake's essence is chaotic and nondistillable at the best of times, and that's why it's the only game to ever have got "the nightmare vision" right. It will never be recreated. 

and lighting.
and proper 3d where you can get lost surrounded by the pseudo blind vores and fiends and death traps.

music as well. but most of all, sounds, especially combination of the water, wind, and scratching sound of chainsaw on the stone. 

I agree with that. Quake leaves a lot to the players imagination - you have to fill in the gaps with your own ideas. This is probably the reason why there are so many different views on what Quake really is. One example is that for me, the enforcers didn't speak in English. I simply ignored that because I imagined that they were possessed by some dark magic, which completely disassociated them from their previous human existence. They don't know what they are, they only know that they have to kill you. That, and I didn't have any good speakers when I first played Quake, so I couldn't make out what they were supposed to say anyway. 

I agree that the environmental sounds in Quake are probably the most important factor in creating its atmosphere. In their combination, they make me feel lonely, lost and isolated, as described above.

Lighting is also very important and I think that adding colored light to Quake changes the original atmosphere significantly because the white-light-only model of software Quake with its hard shadows created bleakness. The complete lack of color adds to the otherworldliness of the surroundings... when even the sunlight is completely white, you know you are not on earth anymore. If you are going to use colored lights, you must do it very subtly, using only tinted lights, because full colors detract from the original atmosphere. 

just like cinematic mood, some games have it and some dont. Quake does. In spades. 

ziggurat vertigo for me is one of the most genius q1 maps; it doesn't make any sense. the pyramid created this sense of "holy shit, this place is somehow connected to ancient civilizations" that Rogue's actual ancient egyptian maps never did.

post 13 wins. 

It's not just that it's all 3d but everything just feels very solid with a great sense of mass. All the models are very distinct and true low poly masterpieces.

All of id's engines and content have always had that solid feeling that has set them apart from much of the competition. 

...but I never managed to express it better than here:
http://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/teamshambler.planetquake.gamespy.com/rant1.html>

Shambler nailed all there is to say, really.

I remember reading it some 14 years back and going "Yes! That's it."

And be sure to read points 1, 5 and 6.

IMO, Zerstorer is still unmatched when it comes to capturing Quake essence. 

Digging up that old piece! 

The essence of Quake is interaction with the environment with merely movement controls.

No gadgets, no use keys, no "spells", no meaningful inventory.

Also no explicit training. However, E1M1 does say "You can jump here" and has a little secret compartment and a lift to subtlety familiarize you with buttons and has a secret green armor to adjust you to the idea of level exploration. 

 

try now..

http://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/teamshambler.planetquake.gamespy.com/rant1.html 

quaddicted has flat out stopped working for me. i just get redirected to a virgin media search site. dns trouble perhaps? 

Eww, your ISP is a bad ISP. See if you can disable that kind of redirection. It is none of their business nor should they profit from your misfortune (they usually show ads on such pages).

Everything looks fine from here. You can use 91.121.208.153 for emergencies. ;)

If you are on Linux check what nameservers are set in /etc/resolv.conf and then check what they return for "www.quaddicted.com", eg: dig @8.8.8.8 www.quaddicted.com 

that virgin page gives the option to disable it. so they aren't completely shit :)

i remember reading that article ~12 years ago; still holds true today. and damn if it doesn't feel nostalgic (the article, not quake) 

The essence of Quake is that there was nothing like it in 1996. NOW, many of the elements that made it so great would be rubbished. Now the reason most of us play it is nostalgia and because most of us are designers. If there was absolutely no Quake community left, would any of us still play it? 

You apparently play many FPS.
Give me some modern games like quake please. Fast solid shooter that doesn't try to be RPG or adventure game at the same time, with no fluff, no bullshit gimmick engineered gameplay and arbitrary design inconsistencies trying to make player a cog in a scripted mechanism of a game. With proper leveldesign, using 3d and having multiple paths. 

I dig up qi custom levels time and again for a quick fix.

I will admit to not really playing the original game that much but thats simply because I've played those levels heaps compared to the custom ones. 

...but, I disagree with Kona... To me, it's just a matter of how things are done. "Classic" FPS were simply more muscular and with way better gameplay mechanics than current day ones.

It's a matter of taste , really, but I don't think nostalgia plays a huge factor here. I think that even the more frantic of nowadays shooters pale before the all out fast pace of things like Doom and Quake.
To me, games like HL2 or Bioshock are more like interactive movies with very limited replay value, the goal there is not playing per se, but more seeing the narration unfold....

I quite like games like Painkiller or Serious sam, that offer a similar style of runnign&gunning but if I was to choose only one game for life, that'd be the big Q.

Hands down. 

Dark, atmospheric, gothic/medieval/industrial environment, proper monsters, straightforward visceral combat, general air of brutality.