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Some of these things seem like oversights (especially the grenade behavior) and if they're reported, there's a good chance that Nightdive will fix them; Doom 64 and Quake both received patches to fix things that weren't quite right with the engine changes they made, or at least they got "close enough."

Stuff like the chaingun windup/down, machinegun not pushing your aim upwards, and railgun damage were definitely intentional. I personally don't think the chaingun needed a buff, but I never understood the need for that bit on the machinegun. The railgun change seems like someone went "I don't understand why the damage values are different in multiplayer" and figured they were making enough other changes to single player things that they'd just wrap that in, as well; I wonder if that's a change Id intended to make at some point and just never did.

Intentional or not, I definitely echo Pho's want of a way to toggle things back to their original behaviors. Q2R is a large departure from how Nightdive handled D64 and Q1, and while there's clearly a lot of love for the game that went into it, the omission of a full "classic" gameplay option is definitely a thing to be addressed.

Either way, the reception to Quake 2 Remastered has been extremely positive, from what I've been seeing, and I think that's great. The game has been derided by a lot of the talking heads on the internet as slow and mediocre for much of the last 20 years, and it's nice that it's getting its day in the sun again.

The stealth mechanic has always been there.  Best place I can use as an example is there are two gunners on a ledge above you with the laser control switch in the Processing Plant level.  If you start up the stairs just enough you can rail them without them seeing you, and they would gib.  Well, they used to gib.  Now it just kills them.  The railgun damage in single player was reduced to 100 points.

Grenades are completely off now.  Since they upped the internal timer from 10Hz to 20Hz they now bounce like Q1 grenades.  I had to deal with this issue when coding the grenade physics in Gen.  The launch angles are wrong now as well.  If you look straight up and fire a grenade it should arc back behind you.  In the remaster it arcs forward no matter what.  I am not really happy about this change in particular.

In single player you've always been able to carry the powerups except for the adrenaline.  The original CD release of Quake 2 had the rather laughable ability to carry multiple copies of the same powerup.  The Makron had to deal with a completely invulnerable Quaded marine.  That was later patched to only allow you to carry only one at a time.  Multiplayer had them instant by default, and that's a good thing because playing with powerups anyone can activate at any time was not fun.

So yeah, they did make changes where I think changes should not have been made.

[lot]

I'm currently  halfway through Ground Zero, and looking forward to seeing the brand new episode soon! I've played a lot more Q1 than Q2, so it's been fun to go back through it start-to-finish. I still think that Q2 probably has the most fun movement physics of the series! And those weapon designs? Perfection!

There are some things that feel off to me though. Without loading up an old copy of the game, I'm going to chalk them up to a faulty memory, but though I'd put it out there anyway. The aforementioned Berserker jump is obviously new, as is the way a lot of enemies react. But beyond that, it feels like some weapons have been nerfed — especially in regards to the railgun's damage output and the way grenades interact with the environment. While others were made "simpler" to use, by making the chaingun spin-up and down quicker, or removing the machinegun's climb. It also seems like exploding barrels have a delay, which often makes them kind of pointless in setups.

I also have to ask... did the stealth mechanic exist before, or is it a wholly new invention? I like it, especially when paired with the previously underwhelming silencer item, but it doesn't feel as though many levels are set up to really make use of it beyond one or two enemies. And speaking of the silencer — adding power-ups to the inventory is neat, but being able to spawn invulnerability and quad damage whenever I want (and at the same time) has made a lot of areas completely trivial, while also removing the fun of areas designed around quad runs.

It's just a shame that we'll have to wait quite a while longer for the release of the mod.... eh. And just a couple of days ago came out a great remaster of Quake 2. 

p.s: I wouldn't be surprised if Nightdive Studios released a remaster for the third installment of the game as well.

And can we just take credit here for the Adrenaline becoming a holdable item?  Just a little?  We did that first. 

If anyone at Nightdive happens to have gotten that bit directly from Generations, still takes a peek here now and again, and wants to admit to where this came from, please let us know. Just for fun.

I've seen some posts that existing gamex86.dll's aren't compatible with the new engine.  Since the source was released, as long as someone has the original mod source I'm sure there's a way to port existing mods to work with the new engine.

I do have some nitpicks.  I like playing with the improved enemy AI, however I do think a vanilla option should have been in place to turn off some of the enhancements if someone wants.  Biggest gripe I have is pretty much the same one everyone has had so far.  I get that the Berserker needed some love to make him more dangerous, but that leap attack is just absurd.  His jump speed would make a Quake Fiend jealous, and he can leap pretty much across a map to knock you flying.  It needs some tweaking I think.  It's nothing game-breaking, just a petty nitpick.

There's a lot good though.  The gibs.  Oh the gibs are just glorious.  Every enemy has its own gibs now.  What they did for exploding Fliers and Icarus is just fantastic.

And can we just take credit here for the Adrenaline becoming a holdable item?  Just a little?  We did that first. 

Night dive is really doing god's work as far as bringing classic shooters to modern platforms.

This is absolutely banging.

The presence of the N64 campaign and the extra enemies from the Playstation conversion shows just how far above and beyond the Nightdive boys have gone in bringing this oft-maligned game bang up to date.

Also the weapon scroll ISN'T crap anymore

I'm curious to see how compatible existing Q2 mods are with the remaster, I haven't seen a note on that yet. I know most of the major Q1 mods worked with that remaster out of the box, it would be nice to see the same here.

At least the tools are available to fix potential issues, should they crop up and someone feel so inclined.

Downloading now.

Also, here's a shocker: They just put the source for the remaster and the reverse-engineered port of the N64 version on Github. Holy SHIT.

This is more than what I had hoped for.  I was afraid since Bethesda bought Id that source releases might be a thing of the past, but this is beautiful.  Modders can still mod.