Quake is still good for you!

[sfried]

There was a moment in my life where I detested first-person shooters: I believe this was around the time of Bioshock and post-Half-Life 2 shooters where gameplay gave way for more narrative driven experiences. This was also around the same time Call of Duty, Battlefield, and its ilk rose to popularity, and suddenly first person level designs started becoming...flat. It became more focused on gunplay and encounters; this was very apparent in the Shadow Warrior reboot, and games like Borderlands capitalized on roguelite elements like stats and elemental effects for the various weaponry it prominently emphasized.

But something was lacking with all these shooters, and it wasn't something I was able to put a finger on until I played Arkan Studio's Prey (2017). From there, somebody recommended to me to go play Arcane Dimensions, a very prominent mod for a 20-year old something game.

That game was Quake. Nope, not Quake 2, but Quake 1.

I decided to play the original campaign... For the first time in my life. And suddenly parts of its design started to make sense to me: Enemy placements from the start design to teach the player, the weapon layouts...Secrets! Bloody secrets! "Don't they all harken from Doom? I mean Quake is just the poor grungy bastard child of Doom", and yet everything that DOOM 2016 borrows from seems to harken back to this game.

First of all, there was no interact button. Just bump into something and boom, it was activated. Just shoot at something and...boom, it was activated? This game further streamlined the mechanics of Doom and Doom II as could be seen by its weapons: A shotgun, a super shotgun, a nailgun, a super nailgun, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher, and the thunderbolt (oh yeah, "and my axe!"). The super variants took twice the ammo but oftentimes packed twice the punch, which was useful for bullet-spongy enemies that needed to be taken down quickly, while the grenade and rocket launchers were more about dealing explosions based on trajectory: Got hard-to-reach enemies that are just right under you? Grenade launcher. Got grunts up on the distance? Rocket launcher. And while no BFG, the thunderbolt was almost like the type of last resort weapon you'd use against big, yeti-like Shamblers.

Did I forget to mention about the enemies? Well I could spend all day talking about grenade wielding Ogres, faster-more-furious Pinkie-demon-like Fiends, poison-spitting Scrags, Death Knights, Vores, Spawns, and other Eldritch abominations. Somehow they managed to create even scarier enemies than the demons and hell minions from Doom...and perhaps refreshing that, unlike its sequel, the setup involves less space marines and more other worldly oddities and mystique.

Perhaps the biggest draw for me, and the highlight at which I'm getting at, is the level design of Quake's campaigns: From the very beginning, you can sense that levels can feel sort of sprawling despite feeling small, and at times they even loop around and back to starting areas. Not to mention, there seems to be plenty of verticality from a shooter from the 90's. Does this all sound familiar?

Yes, Quake is a Metroidvania...or sorts. Okay, perhaps that might be a bit of a stretch (though Arcane Dimension directly challenges this notion even!). But definitely Metroid Prime's level design owes a lot to Quake! (As a matter of fact, one of Prime's programer's, David Kirsch, got his chops from the Threewave Capture mod he made from Quake.) There's certainly a lot of Quake's DNA that could be found in many first person games that place focus on exploration, most notably the Dishonored series and the aforementioned Prey 2017 (which could've otherwise been named PsychoShock), and more recently Titanfall 2 and it's excellent (though still largely linear) single-player campaign which gave me Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 vibes during its peaks (Time-travelling traversal in Titanfall 2 = crashing ship in Dark Forces). Certainly the growing popularity of so-called "boomer shooters" isn't just because of early 90's "edginess" and otherwise "gamified mechanics", but more because certain players yearn for that kind of cleaver level design that was thought to have been lost to time.

So maybe do yourself a favor: Get Quake (it's really cheap) and play though both old the brand new campaigns made by MachineGames (of Wolfenstein: The New Order/The New Colossus fame) for the Quakecon anniversary, or if you don't want to spend any money on a good time, get vkQuake and install Arcane Dimensions. The amount of creativity in the stage design is insane. Afterwards, why not try your hand at level design with Trenchbroom? You just might something facinating about just how getting the player's attention to look at something is an art of itself.

And if you need more history and context of Quake (for those born after the 90's), I highly recommend watching Digital Foundry's Quake Retrospective:

EDit: I wasn't aware Errant Signal made an update to his review recently.

 

[Mightyblue]

Quake's campaign is sort of forgettable, but the tech behind it is absolutely the only reason why full 3D games became a thing as early as they did; John Carmack figured out a programming trick to allow for easy 3D rendering of spaces (remember that Quake was designed to run in either DOS or Windows, the game predates most 3D graphics accelerators). Both that, and the licensed codebase became the linchpin for a vast array of 3D rendered games going on to this day. You don't get Unreal or its progressive engine iterations from Epic without having the drive to unseat id, you don't get Valve or Half-Life because Gabe worked on getting the WinQuake version running while at MS and so on. There are modern 3D engines that still use parts of Quake's code in their render pipeline because Carmack really is a tech wizard.

 

[Purple]

As someone who broadly speaking CAME TO RTS GAMES VERY LATE, a friend pushed me to try Quake just recently, recommended me a set of graphics options to get the proper oldschool experience (basically very low res but all other settings on very high, if I recall), and is quietly watching over my shoulder as I'm playing through.

So, OK first just to put my weird backwards take on the genre out there:
I played like, literally the first level each of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom 1 when they were new. Rare's N64 games. The first handful of levels of Marathon back when Parish was really pushing it. Half-Life 2 and Portal when the Orange Box hit, Half-Life 1 after that. Bioshock. Probably some other relatively modern things I'm forgetting. And... yeah now here I am playing Quake for the first time.

And I'm honestly quite impressed! Thematically it's a complete mess, but the level design is really solid through the whole shareware portion of it. Sensible structure, sense of flow, levels all feel like they have a mechanical thing they're about. Introducing the grenade launcher in a room with a monster that is showing off the sort of situation where you don't want to use it is neat. Good 3D spaces. Particularly knowing how old it is I'm really impressed.

Partway through the first non-shareware... chapter? Branch? Episode? Whatever they're called, that same sort of focus really isn't in here. There's levels that feel very much like they were pulled straight out of Doom with the general sprawl and constant ambushes and reconfigurations mixed in with the nicely ordered stuff. And the difficulty spikes a lot.

But I'm still generally digging it. Just, quicksaving a hell of a lot more than the not even once I did for the first chunk.

 

[sfried]

Quake's campaign is sort of forgettable, but the tech behind it is absolutely the only reason why full 3D games became a thing as early as they did; John Carmack figured out a programming trick to allow for easy 3D rendering of spaces (remember that Quake was designed to run in either DOS or Windows, the game predates most 3D graphics accelerators). Both that, and the licensed codebase became the linchpin for a vast array of 3D rendered games going on to this day. You don't get Unreal or its progressive engine iterations from Epic without having the drive to unseat id, you don't get Valve or Half-Life because Gabe worked on getting the WinQuake version running while at MS and so on. There are modern 3D engines that still use parts of Quake's code in their render pipeline because Carmack really is a tech wizard.

While a lot of modern 3D graphics (especially on PC) could largely be attributed for Quake pushing GPU adoption to the forefront, I disagree with the campaign being forgettable: While a certain console generation decidedly borrowed the game's aesthetics of greys and browns, many developers forget that part of the genius of Quake also lay in its level designs...and boy are some of those labyrinthine hallways really well thought out, at least for the earlier levels...

And I'm honestly quite impressed! Thematically it's a complete mess, but the level design is really solid through the whole shareware portion of it. Sensible structure, sense of flow, levels all feel like they have a mechanical thing they're about. Introducing the grenade launcher in a room with a monster that is showing off the sort of situation where you don't want to use it is neat. Good 3D spaces. Particularly knowing how old it is I'm really impressed.

Partway through the first non-shareware... chapter? Branch? Episode? Whatever they're called, that same sort of focus really isn't in here. There's levels that feel very much like they were pulled straight out of Doom with the general sprawl and constant ambushes and reconfigurations mixed in with the nicely ordered stuff. And the difficulty spikes a lot.

...and I agree! Later chapters are sort of a mess, as you could really feel the devs try to cobble together a campaign, but for what it's worth, the final boss' solution of telefragging to defeat them was quite unique. It justs feels a bit anti-climactic...which is why the MachineGames campaigns feel like the biggest course-correction.

I guess I could argue the "mess of D&D themes" is what gave Quake 1 its own identity. Meanwhile, Quake 2 has...Strogg. And space marines...

(And with Doom Eternal's The Ancient Gods DLC expanding the lore even further, the only missing thing to tie-in all of iDs franchises are the presence of Slipgates in every one of them.)