Wirehead Studios

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/quake-iv/653516p1.html (http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/quake-iv/653516p1.html)

So what does everyone think?  So far I don't like the visual style.  It's too... funky, not enough functional, and dammit, no banana clip on the hyper?  I don't think they have all the weapons up there either (No chaingun? Tthere WILL be a chaingun, right?  Right?  RIGHT?!?).  I sure hope they perform better than they look...

Gauntlet: Too goth. What's a Gauntlet doing in Q4 anyway?
Blaster: Did somebody mention UT?
Machinegun: Looks like a glorified Doom3 MG
Shotty: Actually looks the business
Hyper: Where's the spinning part?
Railgun: Too short and chunky. Looks more like a GL
Nailgun: Looks as though it should work like a Team Arena NG
GL: Er, which way do I hold this thing ...?
RL: Looks more like a Dyson vacuum cleaner
LG: That's a gun??

I hate to say it, but it looks as though Woods' remarks about a fake Quake game are coming to fruition. What the hell are Raven doing? It looks like they've ditched all of Q2's style in favour of some grotesque fusion between D3 and UT.

I am not impressed.

I think I'm going to like these weapons in-game. The hyperblaster can be modded to bounce shots off walls. The nailgun is closer to the q2 chaingun than its predecessor. There's a railgun for long-distance work, machineguns, shotguns, grenade and rocket launchers.

If there's a BFG i'll be happy.

I personally am very impressed with the weapon design, and am looking forward to buying this.
BTW Pho, if you read, the nailgun acts like the chaingun.

For some odd reason, I really like the railgun. The rest? Meh. These weapon designs fit a game like UT, not something in a Quake-Universe.

It looks to me like the end of the nailgun spins.

I don't really mind the weapon designs, provided they work ok. mind, I play a lot of UT, so i'm used to this sort of design.

Gameplay. will it have it? or will it be another Doom3?

time will tell.  :ownage:

I've heard there is no BFG in Q4, but there will be some kind of BFG-like "super weapon", like a "black hole" gun or something.  Just rumors, mind you..

The lightning gun is probably the only one I actually like visually, as it looks closer to some kind of energy weapon I would design for kicks.  One of the big issues I'm having with the weapons is the "adaptation" stuff mentioned in the pics.  That is, tacking a handle for "human use" on the railgun, etc.  Just a second... this stuff is CAPTURED STROGG weaponry?  Why?  In Q2 the Marines had their own weapons, all of them built on Terra Firma.  If Q4 takes place AFTER the initial assault, why such a huge change?  Why must the weaponry that was "issue" in Q2 now be captured Strogg stuff?  If this is the main assault force, why the !@#!@ did they leave the big guns behind and take along weak sauce?  I don't buy the progression here.

Con:  If they play well (and yes I like the ion-ripper nod to the hyper, provided it's as effective as my favorite Q2 toy) I might be willing to overlook the "wtf" factor here, though all this secondary fire stuff and all the freakishness does make this feel a lot less like a Quake game.  Click-Click-BOOM.  That's the simple Quake formula I know and love.  Oh well, like everything, I'll reserve final judgement until I play it, but what I'm seeing so far is painful.  I think I'll go to my Happy Place (http://www.wireheadstudios.org/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album35) for a while.

since when needs a railgun a lock future like in UTs rocketlauncher ???
I mean , 1/2 sec in sight and your dead anyway.
and its called strogg energy rocket launcher.

since when does a shotgun need a GUI , its just click boom.

The way it sounds to me.. that nailgun acts more like a Super Nailgun than a q2 chaingun.. just add a windup time to get the barrels spinning. Chainguns shoot bullets... I don't care what you say, or how the nailgun acts, a nail is a projectile that has to fly towards a target.. therefore it will never compare to a chaingun.

[bias]But whatever... like Doom3, I'll probably not play this. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is getting tossed out the window with every new game that is released and, more often than not, it's for the worse.[/bias]

I believe the reason for the Strogg weaponry is because you are a Strogg in the game. Watch the trailer again, it mentions to beat the enemy you must become it and in the same video it shows a human on an operating bed, then turned into a Strogg then the action starts in the video.

Well it's no secret that you become "Stroggified" later in the game, which I think was a huge bummer that they spoiled that early on.  Still you'd think some standard USMC Q2-era weapons would be part and parcel to the game, above and beyond the shotty, machinegun, and blaster that is.  Even then the "Stroggish" weapons, and the monsters themselves, have a completely different look and feel to Q2.  The Q2 Strogg looked pretty straight-forward mechanical - pistons, tubes, caution stripes, hard lines and sharp angles.  The Q4 Strogg look a lot more alien.  Maybe I'm just being an old-school nitpicker (I reserve that right) but I'm seeing a huge break in consistency all around.  Then again, this is the Quake series, where Q3 had pretty much nothing to do with Q2, which had nothing to do with Q1, so who am I kidding right?  I was just hoping to see a Strogg Tank in high detail.  I'm not going to judge the gameplay before I've played it, but I think that's what's disappointing me so far about the screenshots and video I've seen so far.  I wanted to see all my favorite old enemies in glorious high-rez, bumpmapped textures.  Same with the guns.

I will have to agree with the weapons not fitting at all.
As for the games linking... lol very true on that the ONLY tie in that I see from Quake 1 to Quake 2:

Take a look at some of the boxes in Quake 1, they have the Invulnerability powerup from Quake 2 on them.
Quake 3 only worked as it had the characters from Quake 1 and Quake 2.

I will agree on the monsters too, the only new concept I like is the Gladiator, I hated the look of the Quake 2 Gladiator, they have improved the look alot now. As for the other enemies, I will have to say they look nothing like Quake 2's, eventhough they are suppost to be the same enemy from Quake 2. I am all for ADDING new content to sequels, but never modify something so much that it looks nothing like the orig. and call it the same.
EX) In a screenshot it shows 2 enemies, one is crouching and you are holding a machinegun. (I will get a link later).
Those appear to be the new "soldiers". They look nothing like them.
What would of been better would be to have the classic solider with variations:
No helmet, broken helmet, cracked body armor, different ethic skin colors, ect.

There is too big of a consistency break, hate to say it but it is a greater consistency break than Doom 3 (you mentioned in a different post that you can't run it, believe me you are not missing anything).
Doom 3 at least had the weapons roughtly the same:
BFG was most def. recognizable a BFG (not regcognizable as the Doom 1/2 BFG though).
Chaingun, Pistol (if you reskinned it, it could look somewhat like the orig), Shotgun ect...
The reason I hated Doom 3 was they changed everything else around too much. The levels fit the orig. Doom story better yes. However the game looked like crap (I encounted rust textures which shined... WTF?), enemies didn't act the same as the orig (having the same attacks doesn't mean they act the same), levels were beyond repitious, many of the old enemies were ditched, they had Doom 2 only enemies in the game but couldn't have the Doom 2 only weapon: Super Shotgun?
I too am an old-schooler, I'd play Doom Ultimate/2/Final over this so called sequel: Doom 3.

Yeah, funny how the Q1 crates have Strogg symbols on them, but then again, how do we know that Strogg aren't actually in the employ of the mastermind known as "Quake"?  Sure, you  defeat Shub in Quake 1, but Shub was not Quake itself.  Besides that, those Enforcers in Q1 tote around the same kind of blasters as the Strogg flyers and Icarus.  Makes one wonder where ol Shubby got the technology from, hmm? And what about those Slipgates?  Similar to the black hole techonology and teleporters used by the Strogg... which is remarkably similar to the gateway tech found on Phobos and Deimos.  Who's to say that Quake didn't acquire this technology from an even older race nobody's ever seen?  ;)

I'll play Doom 3, and Resurrection of Evil, when my hardware can handle it (got both for dirt cheap) because, well, I want to.  I want to play them for myself.  I WAS able to run the demo when it came out, so I imagine the program will function on my machine, but running at "stripped down to nothing" settings to maintain a barely playable framerate, to me, does not constitute "being able to run it".  I wrote a very long rant about the Doom 3 demo on a prior post, if you use the forum search settings you can find it.  Mostly I hated the ultra-wide pattern of the shotgun, and the stupid 60FPS lock for reasons too detailed to delve into here.

Doom 2 really had the "sequel" formula down right.  It was more Doom, and then some.  Sure it only added one gun, but it added a LOT of nasty, powerful monsters.  The maps got bigger, and the fights got bigger.  In Doom 1, you were getting used to the baddies.  Weaker monsters like shotgun zombies actually posed a threat when all you had was a pistol.  Each episode had you starting new, so you had a tougher time with weaker monsters if you didn't watch your ammo.  You had 9 levels in each episode through which to tank up on supplies - or else run out of ammo and health at the worst possible place when the monsters were getting toughest.  Doom 2 just started throwing things at you, and the further you got, the more you had to face.  It broke from the episode format, but that was a part of the "bigger and badder" formula.  The exception to this is Episode 4 of Ultimate Doom, which was produced AFTER Doom 2 was made.  That one just throws stuff at you from the first map and doesn't let up.

The mission packs for Quake 1 and Quake 2 follow the Doom 2 "sequel" formula more closely than Doom 3 or Quake 4 seem to be doing.  That is, they add a few guns, add a few bad guys, and are generally tougher than the original game.  This is what I was hoping to see from Raven - a logical development of the style Id created with Quake 2.  Instead they rewrote everything from the ground up.  I'm sure I'll play it eventually.  I just hope the gameplay makes up for the drastic changes.  Maybe it'll turn out to be quite decent as it's own game.  Who knows.

I personally love the look of the enemies and most of the weapons.  The only thing that I'm really disappointed at is that the Strogg are still only human-based.  The Strogg are a space-fairing, bio-mechanical alien race that depend on organic hosts to survive.  Humans couldn't be and shouldn't be the only base organism.  (Star Trek pisses me off because they mostly ignore this notion with the Borg too.)

I also have to say that most movies and games never make sense continuity-wise unless they're released relatively near each other.  For instance, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars takes place during the initial invasion of Earth.  How the hell are there human-based Strogg soldiers when the majority of humans haven't even been captured and harvested?  How are there giant walkers in Quake Wars and Quake 4 but not in Quake 2?  The only reason why, in my opinion, is because the developers thought it would be cool, and I'm in agreeance with them. :)

The only other comment I have to make is that DOOM 2 was a great game, but it was a poor excuse for a sequel.  The alterations that DOOM 2 made to the DOOM formula are what I expect out of an expansion pack.  (Although, I don't mean to say that I expect expansion packs to have 40 levels too.  Hell, I think most FPS games are too long, expansion packs tend to get the length right.)  Don't get me wrong, I think Quake 2 was a great game, but if I wanted Quake 2 with better graphics, I'd just play Q2 with a custom engine or Generations Arena.

A sequel is meant to look like a sequel. It's why I hated Quake 2.. and vanilla Quake 3. If you make a game that not even closely resembles the game it's a sequel of.. PLEASE name it something else. Quake 2 should have had a different name instead of using 'Quake'... same with Quake 3. Quake 4.. I can see as being probable.. but Quake 2 sucks, because it's not Quake 2 to me. It's some other game with the Quake name. Therefore Quake 4 automaticly sucks.

The whole Quake 'series' is screwed up because retards don't know how to make sequels and/or name games.

(end more bias)

The first Quake was pretty un-sequel-able. Besides, Q2's design was damned hot. It's this set of weapons (and, to a lesser degree, the Q3 ones) that just looks like it should belong in an Unreal Tournament universe - they look pretty good, but not Quake to me. They lack an originality that id software was able to express in only a handful of polygons in older games.

Spawn:  I don't think I'll ever get the "Hate Q2 because it isn't Q1" mentality.  Forget the name for a second.  Think of it as "The Strogg War".  Does the gameplay suck if the name is changed?  If you still wouldn't like it if it had a different name then fine, but if it's just because it's got "Quake" in the title, I'd say you're trashing a perfectly good game for no good reason.  There are plenty of people who like both Q1 and Q2.  Now I don't like Q1 much at all, the reason is because I really don't like the gameplay, the monsters, or the universe it takes place in.  The engine itself caused me problems because I can't stand anything that's choppy, and the model movements were extremely choppy in Q1.  Q2 I liked very much.  I loved the gameplay, the setting, the monsters, the weapons, and the engine - especially when I got my Voodoo 2 card and could see it with colored lighting and a nice high framerate.  It wouldn't make much sense to me to hate Q2 simply because it shares the "Quake" name with, well, Quake.  In fact, when I heard there was a Quake 2 I initially avoided it because I thought it was more Quake 1, in much the same way as Doom 2 was to Doom.  It was only when I decided to peek at a demo of it that came with my Wolfenstein 3d CD (I lost my old Spear of Destiny floppies, doh!) that I saw it was something completely different and something I liked.  I think I bought the game the next day after playing the demo, and it takes a hell of a lot of convincing for me to plunk down over $40 on a game.

Now Q4 is another matter completely.  Q1 and Q2 were obviously intended as separate games from the ground up, even if a few minor assets were shared between them (crate texture, grenade model, blaster bolt, etc).  Q4, on the other hand, is a direct continuation of Q2's story.  It's in the same universe, on the same world, in the same war.  That's why my biggest gripe is this break in visual continuity.  The complete visual style of Quake 2 was unique, the same as Doom and Quake 1 were each unique.  The weapons in Quake 2 were believable as far as their design goes.  Sure, there were some questionable areas, and a few things that don't make perfect sense (like when the hell does that Q2 grunt add more shells to those shotguns), but knowing what I do about firearms visually the weapons in Q2 at least look like they could be actual weapons.  They sound like actual weapons.  The chaingun has an entrance port on one side for a bullet belt, and an ejection port on the other that's about the size of an empty casing.  It's this "attention to detail" that I liked and did my best to try to carry over into Gen's models for the Strogg Troopers class (at least the ones I did myself anyway).  I also loved the "I just fired a cannon" sound when the SSG goes boom, and that "shred anything that gets in the way" feel of that chaingun.   All the guns were distinct, to the point, easy to grasp, and a blast to use on the baddies.  That's what we really want, isn't it?

I look at the Q4 weapons, especially the design sheets, and I'm sorry but to me it looks like someone with an incredible amount of artistic talent came up with them, they're very imaginative, but their weapons knowledge appears to be the equivalent of a 12 year old child watching his or her favorite cartoon.  I'm not saying the Q2 marines should be running around with M-4 carbines, just that there should be some degree of believability to the design and some hint of the previous game's style.  I expect whacky looking stuff in something like Serious Sam, not Quake.  To me the guns should be mean, distinct, and make perfect sense the first time you pick it up and press the fire button.  The whole game should be that way.  All of Id's games (can't comment on Doom 3 since I've not played it) were like this, and that's something I've loved is you pretty much always could tell what did what, and what was going on.  I don't need 14 different fire modes and "upgrades".  Just give me one gun that blows stuff up, another that mows things down, something smaller and less ammo hungry I can use for trivial enemies, and the "mother of all guns" to either clear a room or put the hurt on some big nasty enemy.  Tab is right.  Alternate fires and funkiness belong more to UT, not Quake.

One thing I disagree with is Quake 1 being "un-sequelable".  Sure, Shub is gone, but what other Lieutenants did Quake have running around?  I look at the Doom 3 engine, and it's absolutely perfect for a Q1-type game.  Q1 was very Lovecraftian.  It was dark and gothic.  If someone did it RIGHT you could have something that really scared the shit out of people.  Take what Quake 1 was, flesh it out, make the environments even more foreboding, bring the monsters up to date visually, and add some new surprises.  It doesn't need to be scripted to death either.  Why not just have some really bad places with monsters lurking about as you'd expect them to be in such environs?  Sure there can be a larger backstory, make up whatever you want (like the Ranger was transported out of one realm and into another after defeating Shub and now discovers an even more sinister threat and takes it on alone, for example) but keep the game flowing, add some twists, and some really nightmarish stuff, and you'd have something I would certainly love to play.  Why nobody has done this, considering it makes so much damned sense, I do not understand.

My comment regarding "un-sequelability" wasn't meant to have anything to do with storylines and the like. Stories are easily re-told or continued - besides, stories have never been id's forte. I just don't think that palette, nor the basic weapon designs (which were, after all, rather simplistic - there was hardly a choice back then) would be good material for a sequel - I'm very glad they went the way they did, because Quake 2 weapons are still brilliant after all these years.

Well yeah.  Pretty much all the Quake weapon models were hexagons stuck inside each other.  That and the distorted texture mapping...  That's what gave me such a devil of a time making high-poly incarnations for Gen.  I do love the way they turned out though!

Well what do you know I just loaded up quake 2 today and played it for the first time. I gotta say that it kicks sufficient ass. The atmoshere was more genuine and real then quake 3, and the music is just mind blowing, I think it was Nine Inch Nails that did the music and Sound Effects for all the Quake games and Doom 3. And people actually play it online. Which reminds me, why can I kick people asses in any game exept for Quake 3? I played a few games of Quake 2 and it was a matter of time before I was owning everyone in the game.

Ok.. I'll restate with a modification.

Naming Quake 2.. 'Quake 2'.. is just one reason I don't like Quake 2.

I'm willing to bet that it was probably due to the people you played with - the people still playing here (in the Netherlands) are the nutcases that seem to do nothing but play Quake 2 all day long, and they probably kept that up ever since the game was released. I'm not too shoddy a Quake-2er myself (or was actually, I'm back to noob-status now :)) but the things these guys are pulling off nowadays are insane. If you can kick their asses, you're definitely the king, and you should be signing up for tournaments, there are expensive cars to be won ;]

Spawn: so you've just stipulated the worst reason ever not to like a game.. and then what?
I love the name 'Daikatana' but guess what I think of the actual game. My guess is that what you didn't like was the fact that Quake 2 wasn't the sequel you were hoping for, it could have been the best game ever made, but it still wouldn't be good enough in that respect. :]

From the Quake 2 manual:

Sound Effects and Music
Sound Design by Soundelux Media Labs.  Music Composed and Produced by
Soundelux Media Labs.
Level Music by Sonic Mayhem www.sonicmayhem.com
"Quake II Theme Song" © 1997 Rob Zombie.  All Rights Reserved.
"Climb" by Jer Sypult
Voice of computers by Carly Staehlin-Taylor

Yes, you read that right.  Rob Zombie did a piece for Q2. ;)

:wtf:  :huh:  :!:
You got crap for speakers or something?  Just what do you qualify as "good" weapon sounds?

Are you still trying to make/distill sense (out) of Kruzader's comments? Amazing. :]

 But which audio track is it ?

I beleive its track 8.

See? I have no idea what this means. Am I saving the life of a sentence? Do I allow it? Maybe it was gently put? And if so, in which post does this sentence appear?

No offense mate, but questions like that pop up often when you post stuff :]
For exampe, when I saw:


I wondered: Alt(ernative) fire? Where? Not in Quake 2, surely? If it was in Q2, it must have been useless, since I never got round to discovering it existed. I'm assuming it wasn't Doom either, since that didn't even have an 'alt. dimension'. So perhaps it is in Q4, although that seems odd, because none of us can have tested the usefulness of anything in that game yet..

Add to that the fact that every post is orange, something that, just like pho's yellow, I've always understood as somewhat pompous (if so, he's certainly entitled to it :)), and I end up with more question marks than I set out with.

And yes, of course I'm just pulling your leg! But I do ask myself these questions, and am always happy to see others puzzled too, since that atleast indicates that I'm not the only one being left in the dark here...

In short: Amazing! Don't let me deter you though. (since at times people see my observations and opinion as a law of some kind, for some odd reason)

Off topic? Whoops! Proceed! :]

I wouldn't say that my ponderings are of a philosophical nature (and I should know), but you do provide puzzling entertainment, that's for sure :]

What about UT(99)? the alt fire for this game really made a difference. and that was back in 99.

What?  ME, the mighty, one of a kind Phoenix, The King of Birds, the Bird of Fire, known by many names to many cultures, feared by his foes, revered by his subjects, the universal icon of rebirth, change, purification, and chastity -  Pompous? :huh:

What, you think I'm a bald eagle or something?  I'm plumed in red and gold.  I like gold, hence my gold text.

Back to Q4 weapons, I'll judge their performance when it's time to play.  I'm just hoping this deviation from the "formula" doesn't bog things down the way people complained the PDA did in Doom 3.

Actually, I kinda liked the PDA, hearkened back to System Shock 2.

bias Q2 just wasn't Quake. It was out on a different limb than where Quake was. If it's the worst reason ever to not like a game, then so be it. I am the living embodiment of the word 'purest' when it comes to Quake (1). All these new/er games leeching off the name Quake is pure retardation. /bias

Need more bias? Just ask me.

That being said, there was nothing wrong with the sounds. Chaingun sounded like a pistol... lol. Now.. the Doom chaingun sounded like a pistol. ;p

Indeed it did.  It used the same sound file.  Although, ironically, the Doom 2 Chaingunner zombies and the Spider Mastermind used the shotgun sound.  Made their chainguns sound a lot beefier for sure.  Sounds like crap in Doomsday because of the sound code though.  In Doom/Zdoom starting a new sound on an actor interrupts whatever sound is already playing.  Doomsday lets the first one ring out.  God I hate that!  :doomed:

I still remember the first FPS game which had alt firing that made a big difference in gameplay.... Blood. God I loved that pistol-like weapon which alt fire caused them to burst into flames.

purist

hmm , a chaingunshotgun.

/me locks himself up in his lab together with a minigun and some shotguns .

Already been done. (http://forums.wireheadstudios.org/index.php?act=ST&f=4&t=630)

I'm not so much concerned about the look of the weapons as the in-game function. The semi-auto mode which switches on durring the zoom of the machinegun sounds like it's just compensating for lack of a first shot accuracy/recoil system. I'm sure, despite being a state of the art game, the MG will still feature static spread. While it doesn't effect multiplayer, the upgrades also sound cheesy. I also think delving into alternate fires on a few weapons, without having alt fires across the board is a little unwise, not too mention inconsistent. Oh well, we'll see...

Unfortunately, I finally got a new comp to replace the one that got stolen, but it hasn't been working right and needs a new motherboard, so I have to send it back to the shop and won't be able to play Q4 till a few weeks after it comes out.

That's ok, I doubt I'll even be able to play Q4, looking at the system requirements.

Heh Well I'm damn near being unable to run DOOM 3, so I'll let you know how bad it is when my copy arrives later on today.