|
Phoenix
|
Oh boy, down the Quake rabbit hole I go.
So Quake for me, initially, was... disappointing. I had seen preview articles and teaser pictures with the dragon, knights with arms missing from locational damage, and the general idea was that Quake was going to be some kind of medieval fantasy game in full 3D. I had just finished playing Hexen and was looking forward to this 3D castle romp... so that expectation was completely shattered when I got a copy of the Shareware and got to play the actual game.
But let's stop right there. I heard Quake before actually playing it. I put the CD in a player and listened to the... soundtrack? The Quake theme was awesome. Great stuff. Then... what was this other stuff? It's just ambient sound. What's going on here? That was a source of confusion. It only got worse....
I read the manual. Shotguns? Military installation? What happened to the dragons and knights? Oh well, let's see where this goes.
I installed the game. My first thoughts were in dealing with the performance. My computer was not up to the task, so it was very choppy. I got into the first level, and yikes. The animation on the enemies was nauseating. I was watching a slideshow playing another slideshow. And... I walk into buttons? I no longer have a "use" function? What if I don't want to push that button? And everything looks bad. Those shotguns... so weak. What happened to the punch from the shotguns in Doom? The Rocket Launcher blew stuff up, sure, but it all just felt so bland. Where were the gun animations? Why does switching weapons just instantly put up a new gun instead of letting me see the old one lower, and raise up the new one? Why no BFG?
I slogged through the first episode. I got to the end, and I didn't want to play again. Quake was thoroughly unenjoyable. I went back to playing Doom.
Time passed...
I wanted to revisit Spear of Destiny. I hadn't played it in a long while, and I noticed that my floppies had gone missing. I purchased a CD replacement. On this CD was a demo for Quake 2. Hmm... well, let's look at it and see how it is. I installed the demo, and I never looked back.
The performance was absolutely horrible. I was playing 320x200 software mode, it was choppy, but the gameplay was absolutely fantastic. I loved the cyborg enemies, the soundtrack was epic, and the weapons just punched where the Quake 1 weapons felt lacking. There was variety to the weapons and enemies. The gun models moved, raised and lowered, the enemies had personality in their actions.... I got a retail copy. Eventually I got a Voodoo 2 card and I was hooked on Quake 2 since. It was also my first foray into online multiplayer, as I was very, very slow in deciding to connect to the internet. I wasn't sure I wanted to. It was a tremendous personal risk that I wasn't certain I wanted to take. But... the access to all that information was too much to pass up, so internet access, then multiplayer gaming for Quake 2 followed after.
At some point I stumbled across a source port for Quake 1 that described itself as bringing in model interpolation, among other features, to improve the performance of the GLQuake engine. It was Q2K4, which was an evolution of a project called Phoenix Quake (I was not involved with that, despite the name). I gave it a try, and that changed Quake for me forever.
It was far from perfect, but the smooth rendering performance and addition of model interpolation fixed the problems I initially encountered with Quake the first time around. I found myself playing Quake and actually enjoying the game. I began to appreciate the atmosphere, monsters, and level design for the first time. Later sourceports such as Quakespasm further improved on the experience, and I finally learned to love a game I initially hated and largely skipped. I realized most of my dislike was due to the technical performance problems that plagued my hardware at the time, along with the aforementioned model chop. I'm visually very sensitive to certain kinds of movement patterns, so that was a huge fix for me. I was late to the party, but Quake finally hit all the right notes.
So enter Generations. Without going too far into the history of how I got involved, my joining the Generations Arena project pushed me to delve a lot deeper into all the Quakes than I had been before. I was dissecting model files, looking at weapons code, and seeing just how everything worked. During this time I also read the collective works of H.P. Lovecraft, so I also got to experience the lore that lead to Quake's environments and bestiary. That provided some understanding of some of Quake's odder design decisions. Learning more about the design changes that happened late in Quake's development brought the rest into focus.
My thoughts about the gameplay, design, and soundtrack have evolved quite a bit since my first experience with Quake. Quake is, had to be, and will remain a product of its time. The unusual combination of medieval knights, cosmic horror-inspired nightmare creatures, military weapons, and odd level structure was a result of the constraints of its development process. It's not a game made from careful deliberate choices. It was brutally Frankensteined together to make a mismatched whole that somehow managed to work despite all its problems. That same brutal crudeness is reflected throughout every aspect of the game as well, from the weapons to the enemies to the models and environments. True 3D games were a new thing, and Quake was pushing the hardware of the day beyond its limits. Everything had to be as simple as possible while still being truly 3D, so you got angular models that wobbled due to vertex precision limitations placed into chunky, crudely shaped environments with simplistic weapons that went from weak to insanely powerful with no real refinement. The soundtrack was even a huge gamble, favoring an ambient feel over the pulse-pounding metal music from Doom. Yet... somehow all this managed to work.
My experience with multiplayer Quake 1 was quite a bit lacking. I did not play Quakeworld until becoming involved in Generations development, and that was mostly to understand the mechanics of the gameplay rather than just playing it for the sake of playing it. I learned two valuable things from my experience. The first is that Quakeworld players are entirely fanatical. They play Quakeworld. Period. Many of them never moved on to Quake 2, and the ones that stuck around long after were absurdly skilled. The second point was that Quakeworld's super-shotgun lies. During development for Generations there was a constant nagging from some people to make the Slipgaters' super-shotgun pattern super tight like in Quakeworld. Yet... when playing Quakeworld I discovered that the SSG did very little damage even if the entire pattern was focused on another player. So I did some testing and discovered that it was all a lie to save on network bandwidth. The SSG ran the exact same pattern for doing damage that the SSG did in normal Quake, but it was transmitting a single network event, then drawing that multiple times on the client - but in the same spot. The result was visually the gun seemed to pattern all its shots in one spot when that's not what was happening on the server. A long-standing gameplay misconception was finally put to rest.
Looking back on Quake 1 from my present position I can fully appreciate it for what it is, what it tried to be, and I find it sad that it was never properly followed up on afterward. Overall I do like Quake 2 better. It is certainly a more polished game, with thought-out design, deliberate flow in the level structure, a very balanced progression of weapons, and the weapon variety just seems more flavorful. It's just more to my personal taste, but I certainly like what Quake 1 has become for me in the time since it's initial release and my very unpleasant initial experiences. It's hard to imagine a world of 3D games without Quake squarely at the beginning, like a brooding Great Old One awaiting for the stars to be right once again to awaken from its slumber and terrorize the unwary world.
|
