Be Excellent To Each Other

After being hugely disappointed with Duke Nukem Forever, I've mainly been playing Doom/II, Duke 3D and Quake/II all week.

My main observation is: How fucking good is Quake? And Quake II. I don't think I've played either of them since 1998, and at the time I thought they were great, but mainly because I was 13 and anything 3D and gory was automatically the dog's bollocks. After that, Half-Life came out and I was lost in its mod scene for the next seven years or so, plus Quake 3 and UT. But they're genuinely great. I fired Quake II up yesterday for a quick nostalgia blast and wound up sitting for three hours without so much as a toilet break. I've just done the same with the original Quake this afternoon.

They're fantastic, and they serve excellently to point out just how wrong they got Duke Nukem Forever. Quake and Quake II are linear, there's no doubt, but there are so many secret passageways and secret rooms to hunt out by going off the beaten trail, you wind up pissing around in the same level for up to half an hour in an attempt to find them all. Enemies are varied and require different strategies, the weapons are meaty and satisfying, and it's so quick and smooth. I implore anyone who may have forgotten how good these games are to grab them on Steam immediately!

How much does shilling pay?

From what I remember of it, Quake's solo mode today would very quickly get boring after the first episode.

Quake II, however - the solo campaign in that is something of an unheralded lost classic.

I am much more of a fan of the level design as it was then as compared to alot of what we get nowdays.

The attempt at realism has made it all a bit homogenous now.

I'm nearly through the second Episode of Quake after three hours or so of play and I'm not bored yet! It's surprising - it's more of a satisfaction thing than a "this is a great campaign" thing. Quake II remains pretty excellent as well though, you're right.

The way they're put together is just incredible. Secret passages and rooms all over the place. Same with Doom and Duke 3D. I'm not sure if I'm impressed at just how complicated they managed to make the levels back in those primitive times, or disappointed that modern game designers are generally so lazy that they fail to think any further than funnelling you through a corridor to the next set piece. Likely both. But why could they manage it back then - when 3D was completely in its infancy and I imagine a good deal more fiddly and cumbersome - but not now when more or less anyone with cursory programming knowledge could knock together a FPS in one of many pre-built engines?

Or maybe that's the answer. Levels can be knocked together by anyone now, and therefore they're being churned out by unimaginative idiots rather than geniuses like John Carmack.

I agree with this, I think part of the issue now is that very few games are designed with just single player in mind, and it is obviously easier to reuse a bit of the single player in multplayer, that you end up with a generic single player game. Also weapons, it doesn't matter how much a weapon gfoes bang on single player, because well, that's the point, if it takes out half a block and kills everything in 500 yards, fucking great. But you can't have weapons like that on multiplayer because you get people moaning about the overpowered weapons.

Quake 1 was a pretty terrible single player experience, the campaign mode was somewhat uninteresting. IIRC it was one of the first games that really had LAN/internet play in mind as primarily a multiplayer game. (When the demo was released I was still on a wheezing old 486 DX2-66 with 4MB RAM, so it ran like shit. But not long after the game was released I was on a moderately capable Pentium based PC, and I still thought it was crap. The multiplayer however, even with all its 350ms+ latency on flaky dial-up modems, was excellent.)

Quake 2 however had a brilliant single player campaign, that bit on the alien ship (or whatever it was) where they were dicing up the humans was seriously creepy. It was also one of the first (the first?) games I played with the earliest of the 3DFX cards (4MB of RAM just for the graphics!) - me and my mates nearly wet ourselves.

You can run Quake 2 all pimped out on a bloody typewriter these days (pretty much any PC or laptop built with the last ten years), and it still holds up as a quality game IMO, definitely worth doing once.

How do you mean uninteresting (re: Quake)? I mean, there's next to no storyline, but it's still incredibly good fun! It's Doom with better graphics. Plus I love the Lovecraftian gothic-y style of it all. Quake 2's campaign is better, but Quake isn't a terrible experience. It's great.

I recall I found it all a bit brown and dreary and repetitive and constantly hunting around for stupid switches and secret rooms just to get some ammo, there was no plot as you say - (and one of the things I was really enjoying about PC games at the time, having finally realised the Amiga was never going to 'make it' and thus being a fairly new recruit to the PC ranks, was the depth of story and character that was possible in games, Command & Conquer was one I was playing fanatically at around the same time) - and I didn't much care for all the puzzle stuff either.

Mind you I never liked Doom either, so I'm probably not to be trusted

So basically you like the direction FPSes have gone in up to this point. i.e. Narrative driven, no hunting around, no secret rooms, etc.

Except I absolutely loved Deus Ex.

In fact, I still think that's pretty much the best FPS game ever made.

Thinking about it, the problem I had with Quake was you HAD to go looking around for all the secret shit or you mostly had crap guns with extremely limited ammo and bugger all health. (And indeed, just to get off the bloody level you were on you usually had to find some stupid switch somewhere.)

Deus Ex made the game's baseline far more palatable, you had decent guns and augmentations and you could get through it OK. It was only on my second (and then third) playthroughs of the game that I discovered all the extra stuff you could do, except then it felt like a bonus, not part of the DNA of the game.

Quake 2 had more of the Deus Ex philosophy about it, which is probably why I liked it more.

Deus Ex is fantastic and one of my favourite games of all time as well. But, it's an RPG!

An FPS RPG

Certainly I didn't feel I'd 'crossed genres', despite having never had an interest in RPGs before.

Just bought Deus Ex. Sod it. Been meaning to for a while anyway - itching for Human Revolution! Might as well have another nostalgia trip.

Is there a proper Win7 compliant version of Deus Ex available these days?

I reckon I could fire the old girl up again for one more playthrough. (Although having said that, I've still got the original disc downstairs in my archive collection.)

GTAIV reminds me of Deus Ex in terms of its 'world complexity', how people and the world around you respond to what you do, it makes such a big difference to the game. And yet somehow after Deus Ex it all just disappeared for years, and to bring some relevance back to this thread, just look at the crap we're spoon-fed nowadays.

Seriously, things have gone fucking backwards.

The Steam GOTY edition works on Win7 - in proper 1080p, too!

Colour me interested.

To the Steam-A-Tron!

I totally agree with everything that's been said about level design. Past design was intricate and interesting. I remember spending ages just on Doom's first level trying to find all the hidden passages. And that was only Level 1! But I'm annoyed that one game has been missed out in favour of these high profile games of yester-year. And that game is BLOOD which is equally as good if not better than Doom. The level design was fan-tastic and the multiplayer was pure genius: the football stadium, the two castles, that one in the caves. Good lord, I'm glad broadband wasn't around in those days at the speeds it is today cause I'd never have left my bedroom. Genius.

I don't think I have even heard of blood, never mind played it.

Blood was great. It's on GOG too.

I found this damn insightful. The coupling of campaign and multiplayer has really hampered the single player campaign. A scripted walk through the multiplayer maps with an emphasis on realism in comparison to the construction of interesting levels.

Levels > Places basically.

It was The Greatest of that era. Better than Duke 3D? You bet your ass.

I didn't know there we're any expansion packs though (well, according to GOG, which I've never used before). I'd love to be able to play this on the big screen with a joypad. The campaign to get it on XBLA starts here! Or whenever someone can be bothered. I mean, look at it, it's only 200-odd MB, couldn't be that hard to emulate, surely. And didn't Monolith go on to create FEAR and Condemned? They can't be that busy these days and could probably do with a Win.

Oooh... Quake 2! Never did finish that...

Pertinent:

It's worth noting that older FPS games were never as non-linear as they appeared, because they always insisted on the collecting of keycards or pressing of switches to open up different routes. In fact, if you look at the route you have to take through the level, they were probably not far off as linear as modern FPS games.

Agreed, but they felt like exploring, and they felt like they were designed. Stuff feeling designed by a person is underrated.

Yeah I'd agree with that, (hence my criticism of Quake a few posts ago), where Deus Ex really did it differently is giving the player genuine choices with how to get through the various levels of the game.

(And that's also why I think Quake 2 is better, it's a similarly linear game as Quake, but it doesn't try to pretend it isn't by making you do all manner of shitty running around crap just to open up the next door.)

Deus Ex allowed and encouraged you to go scratching around for all sorts of sneaky things, but it didn't require it.

Oh, I fucking love Blood! I wasn't leaving it out or anything really, I guess I just didn't mention it!

Definitely wins the prize for most inventive arsenal. A voodoo doll!

Older games may have been basically linear, but they tended to a constructed environment or location *within* a larger space. Doom levels almost always have a feeling of inside and outside. There'd be a huge open space with a building *in* it. You're dropped of in a starting area, with a simple objective, usually 'get out of the other end alive' and the way was never obvious. Starting with Half Life, designers have tended to build a highly detailed path through a nice looking environment, but give little chance of working around something. The levels have no outside to them. I think that's why Minecraft has caught on with gamers of a certain mindset. I reckon once it's finished and in the wild, we'll start to see other games built in the Minecraft engine, but more traditional in playing style. For me, there's nothing more thrilling in a game than standing at the threshold of a giant, unexplored environment and beginning a new journey.

Having been playing Quake all day, I can tell you that the game doesn't force you to swan around looking for stuff - you can charge through the levels in 30 seconds if you want (well, most of them), but as Lave says, they're designed so that they're begging to be explored and it genuinely surprised me this weekend how willing I was to do just that, despite having played pretty much every FPS since. Go try it out. The complete Quake pack is like £15!

Usual stupid question, but I can feed my original discs to Steam to avoid paying, right?

I doubt it mate. You can just install and play without Steam though. The CD key into Steam thing is only with Valve games and a few select recent games. For example I've tried Civ IV and Age of Empires 3 with no joy.

I thnk another aspect of the down turn is expectations. Again possibly due to multiplayer, I remember buying an xbox simply to play Splinter Cell, I loved the adverts and really wanted to play a game with a clever/realistic AI. I found it a complete let down. The point is, no AI (currently) can stand up to a human wrt behaviour and skill, so the real challenge comes from playing against people, so people design for this challenge. But also, the people don't (seem to) want a big gawking monster to shoot and hide from, or if they do, it is with the aid of a QTE. If you haven't played it the 360 version of Bionic commando isn't too bad, it is fun, you swing around a lot, and shoot stuff and you have big(ish) weapons and monsters to kill.

Playing Doom on my Amiga, after you get over the novelty of Doom on the Amiga you notice (a) it's shit and (b) indeed the level of exploration is about the same as the Freescape games (Driller, Total Eclipse, Castle Master, etc).

But then even on the rare occasion I've played Halo single player it seems to constantly push you along a pre-designed course. Which I guess you kind of need because otherwise you would be pointlessly rambling.

Doom isn't shit! And yeah, there's a set way of navigating through a level, but each one has a number of secret areas to find, which is more than can be said for current FPSes. Also, I'd be wary of lumping Halo in there because the levels are generally wide open and the AI gives you a new experience every time. Halo is an example of a modern day FPS done well.

Can open, worms everywhere. I agree, though. Always easy to suspend your disbelief about the AI when playing on the higher levels. For certain enemies.

Well, even if you don't like Halo it's undeniably more ambitious than your average corridor shooter!

Then there's corridor shooters that manage to be a bit innovative by having mental corridors, like Prey. Few and far between though. I think anything that can be called an FPS that isn't quite corridory gets into the RPG debate nowadays, from Deus Ex to Borderlands to Far Cry (2 especially).

While we're doing the "old FPS love-in" I feel I should mention Alien vs Predator.
Fucking incredible.

Marine missions = scariest game I ever did done play! It also handily illustrates "Duke syndrome" - the recent reboot was fucking gash!

The Scaryist game I've ever played was the aliens mod for doom (may have been doom 2)

Now as for Quake 2, I can't believe there is so much love for it, it really is the poor relation of the series.

Quake 1 is by far the best of the 3 (not even considering 4 in this!) with Quake 3 a close second due to its popularity.

Quake 2 is the sickly runt of the litter.

Malc

Care to offer a reason?

I loved Serious Sam when it first came out ten years ago, but after playing TFE again on XBLA have realised it was largely terrible.

Yes.

Speaking of old forgotten FPS gems, there's nothing better than Strife. One of my all time favorites.

Ooh, I've not heard of that one.

That's an obscure one! I briefly remember installing it and playing for an hour or so before going back to Doom/Quake/Blood. It reminded me a bit of Hexen. I had it on one of those dodgy CDs full of pirated games and porn JPEGs. I hasten to add - it was my mate's!

Quake I is good. I didn't really play it much. Quake II is great, I played a lot of that.

Doom/Doom2 are fantastic, but I acn't play them anymore. I've played the first 5 missions on each one so many times that I kind of groan when I see them. Plus: wacky key layout. (that was fine at the time).

Duke 3d was good fun, but often I would just be stuck in the level, having been emptied of enemies, running round looking for the key. That didn't happen as much in Doom and Q2.


BLOOD was great. I think it was the first game to add 'alternate' fire modes. I found that button by accidently mashing Z and my tommy gun doing some spray thingy. also: You could set the cultists on fire. Blood 2 was pretty good, also. But trying to lpay Blood on a modern machine is impossible without a slow-down thingy.

Hired Guns. It's not one of these though is it.