Playing Quake for the Story (A Franchise Retrospective)

out of all the classic ID Shooters Quake is by far the least discussed Doom's incredibly successful reboot and even faster paced sequel has solidified the fame of that series for a whole new generation Wolfenstein reinvented itself even more boldly as a primarily story-driven franchise the four Quake titles have evaded modern interpretation rather than being rebooted or remade the older Quakes have instead been painstakingly remastered trying to preserve their original look and intention as much as possible while making them more accessible for modern audiences I have kind of sort of wanted to cover the Quake games for years Quake 2 was a huge part of my childhood but Quake 1 was not for those reasons I bounced off of Quake 3 and I loved Quake 4 but it had been almost two decades since I played some of these games was it even really worth going back the modern remastering has given me the push I needed to find out they're not exactly the same games but they are improved in subtle and clever ways that don't Conflict at all with what I enjoyed about them in the first place so many years ago if nothing else things like radial wheel selection for items and weapons just allow the games to move faster and I'm so glad that I did come back the Quake games are fascinating because while doom and Wolfenstein all made relatively sensible and steady leaps into the future with their sequels each Quake title represents a point of transition for ID as a company artistically contorted to be a game for a given moment and not to stand the test of time time then has largely ignored them there are frozen moments from the earliest primordial days of 3D gaming that still tell the tale if you go down deep enough into the cave to shine a light on them what I've always treasured most in game design is narrative immersion a good reason for being there a compelling set of goals Quake 1 and three don't have those things at all and Quake 2 and four have those things somewhat awkwardly learning experiences in the process of merging theater with technology in terms of identity I can hardly think of a game franchise whose titles are so chaotically contrasting in both presentation and intention that confused me as a kid but as a game critic this same chaos is just intoxicating what does it mean can it be made to somehow cohere is there any kind of narrative through line to follow at all quake as a pure action challenge doesn't really appeal to me that much that's largely why Quake 1 was never a part of my life even when a game like Doom was because Doom did make a kind of narrative sense it even had a novelization although both book and game are as simple as they are bloodthirsty from a storytelling perspective I could never figure out what to make of Quake I still don't think I've got the whole of it because I'm not the kind of person who's able to play Shooters on their maximum difficulty and master them I feel plenty of pressure on on medium or normal the most subtle aspects of the mechanical experience are lost on me flailing around making clumsy mistakes where Staying Alive is more about luck than skill for me much of the time which makes me in the eyes of many viewers completely unqualified to discuss games at all as a medium and if there was any justice in the world I wouldn't even be allowed to talk about them but there is no justice and there is no Santa Claus so I critique as I please I'm going to tackle the Quake series from a narrative perspective and there's nothing you [ __ ] can do to stop me the most important story there is in my understanding of Quake one comes not from the manual but from masters of Doom by David Kushner an absolutely tremendous biographical book about John Ki John Romero and ID's rise to prominence in pop culture as a game development Studio published all the way back in 2003 the book is still one of the most Vivid and readable deep dives into the personalities and processes of game development ever written Quake features within the book as the middle turn of the dramatic structure the last game that the the two Johns worked on together the game that heralded the end of classic ID as both a company and a concept the book frames the game's Inception like this quote the development of every ID game began with Kik telling the other guys what his next graphic engine would be capable of when Kik first described his vision of the Quake technology Romero nearly combusted they had all talked about doing Quake after all for years the idea came straight out of their Old Dungeons and Dragons games Quake was the character karmic had invented who possessed a powerful Hammer cap AP of destroying buildings as well as a supernatural Conjuring object the Hellgate Cube floating above his head ID had first worked on a quake game back in the early Commander Keen days but gave up because they felt the technology was not powerful enough yet now karmi said the time had come end quote so for a year Romero and the rest of the team besides Ki worked on Art and level design for a fantasy game based off of elements and fragments of their old long- ended D andd session while Cari worked fishlyn real world wizard on a technology for 3D rendering that was more advanced than anything else get programmed globally Quakes 3D engine was world changing technology and yet to be a game and not just a technology this engine would need to be married to some sort of artistic intention the team felt Romero's time spanning fantasy influenced crushingly ambitious ideas were a poor fit a Time sync Romero would later take many of his design goals for qu Wan and update them into his New Vision for a game called dutana but that as they say is a story for another time before that split while the two Johns were still working together on Quake there was a fateful office meeting where the idea was floated that they should abandon the Dungeons and Dragons fantasy aspects level designer American McGee said quote I think it'll be better if we make a game with rocket launchers and stuff like that end quote to which another level designer named Sandy Peterson replied quote yeah let's do Doom 3 and then the next game we'll do something Innovative end quot quot the choice was made Space Marines again but the majority work had already been done using the fantasy style so ID just merged and Blended the two Styles winging it with one level designer per world for each of the four primary chapters of Quake 1 for the most part Romero and cari's working relationship deteriorated considerably in the weeks following the choice to abandon Romero's designs towards the end it was decided that Romero's levels wouldn't even be used for world one the Shar Ware distribution version of the game newcomer Tim Willets got that honor instead Kik told Romero flatly quote Tim's levels are more cohesive end quote this story is the key to making any sense of the game at all it is a fantasy game deliberately and apathetically subsumed by a science fiction shooter it is four worlds of levels made by level designers who are intensely competitive with each other working Crunch hours in unpleasant conditions Quake 1 has neither narrative nor artistic cohesion because it is the result of artists working at odds with each other instead of in parallel contentious Jagged idiosyncratic Quake 1 is such a strange and raw thing that it would be essentially unmarketable in a modern context when the full version came out on July 22nd 1996 it escaped these judgments because there was no context nothing quite like Quake had ever existed before and nothing would never quite be the same again either now that gaming had truly crossed the threshold into three full Dimensions if Quan can be said to have a story of its own separate from its developmental history the themes are uncannily similar it is a game explicitly about exploring New Dimensions how unreality bleeds into reality at these points of magical transition there's an official story kind of it was literally thrown into the manual at the last moment it has no real bearing on how the game was designed or for what the game experientially is the manual says that you're a soldier and at 4:30 in the morning you're called in to listen to some emergency Exposition quote an enemy code name Quake is using his own slip gates to insert death squads inside our bases to kill steal and kidnap the hell of it is we have no idea where he's from our top scientists think quake's not from Earth but From Another Dimension they say quake's preparing to unleash his real army whatever that is you're our best man this is Operation Counterstrike and you're in charge find quake and stop him or it you have the full authority to requisition anything you need if the egg heads are right all our lives are expendable end quote it then immediately pivots to one single paragraph of framing quote while scouting the neighborhood you hear shots back at the base damn that Quake bastard Works fast he heard about operation Counterstrike and hit First racing back you see the places overrun you are almost certainly the only Survivor operation Counterstrike is over except for you end quote the whole thing is kind of funny and how apathetic it is as a story it's like four cliches stapled together with a shrug and a belch to follow you're our best man you can have anything you need except you never receive any help and are always alone Quake that fast-working bastard is about to unleash an army whatever that is because even the developers didn't [ __ ] know in an interview with YouTube documentary series no clip Tim wetz talked about the change in story and how the allnew enemies in Quake 2 was a deliberate attempt to correct course on how chaotic and discordant the enemy list in Quake one ended up being what's interesting to me is how as utterly and spectacularly halfast as the manual story is there are parts of the game that are reflective of the general ideas it suggests while Dark Fantasy and Gothic architecture make up the bulk of the game these are separated with an introductory level in each of the four worlds that is just exclusively sci-fi you must find the dimensional slip gate and use it to enter these more surrealist Realms this is a narrative touch but it isn't how you actually begin Quake starts in an oddly fourth wall breaking Way You Begin by choosing game difficulty but not with a menu you choose a corridor in the environment and it will lead you to a slightly different version of the level list hard is kind of the true difficulty because Quake doesn't adjust damage and health to Define difficulty it adds or subtracts enemies and puzzles as well hard has all the enemies and all the puzzles normal has all the puzzles and less of the monsters easy has reduced puzzles and considerably reduced enemy populations I went for normal and I found it plenty difficult most of the time once difficulty is chosen you choose a world you can do them in any order any modern game would just use a menu to do it but for Quake the engine was the point so in creating a short interactive level instead of a game menu the game feel becomes part of choosing even how to begin Quake is immediate immersive even in difficulty selection each world is accessible through a dimensional portal whether the Hub actually exists within the fiction is unclear because of the Sci-Fi facility levels that you always begin with within the world the idea is you begin each journey in the real world of sci-fi Space Marines and computers returning to the facility after collecting a rune from the end of each world and its surreal conclusions collect four rooms and open the portal to the final boss lying in weight in some strange interdimensional pocket so there is a small amount of narrative intention in the level order if you dig and if you squint really hard each of the four worlds from each of the four level designers is completely different Beyond this facility level anchor at the opening of each chapter and even then each facility level has a very different feel to it the strongest sense of narrative and the most tonally consistent levels are absolutely John Romero's dark fantasy F focused ones in World 2 they're clever and often sadistically playful there's a lot of ways to do storytelling traditional plot and narrative framing are just one method Quakes levels with such a strong sense of developer personality behind each world and chapter do storytelling in a purely mechanical way they establish expectations and then playfully undermine them they create separate rhythms of progression with how and when they allow a player access to the full arsenal each World values the possibility of the 3D engine differently Puzzle first or thematic level design tricky and punishing or fair and challenging enemy placement moody or utilitarian use of the art design each World stands in complimentary contrast at around 5 minutes a level with such wide divisions between levels and level designers the chaos of quak one's production becomes a larger driver of player interest than any thrown together nonsense in the game manual I am playing the game but I'm also playing through a contrasting gallery of four of the earliest artists to work in 3D level design as a medium I don't often enjoy Rog likes very much for the most part because I dislike the sense that a level was designed based on a process instead of by a person with minimal story and an AI assembled environment I don't always feel like something meaningful is happening or something is being artistically communicated Quakes levels speak they speak in their own dark and Moody language with their own internal logic but the personality of that logic changes from world to World from Level designer to level designer modern level design is often such a team effort or so committed to naturalism that the sense of dialogue between player and developer is often absent for Quake this relationship fills the Gap created by a lack of story and other tangible handholds on the game world with no plot no dialogue no meaningful frame of any kind the game still elicits strong emotional response from me I laugh I startle I'm intrigued I'm anxious I'm aggressive it draws these things out of me through the dialogue between game and player game critic Chris Franklin whose Long running children of Doom series is well worth watching observed that Quake is primarily a mood piece above all it's emotional from top to bottom as Franklin points out but it's tied to very teenage emotions of deep angst and prickly despondency Romero's World 2 is the most eloquent of the four chapters in expressing these particular emotions of angst so if Romero's world has the strongest personality why was Willets given the honor of the shareware world what made his levels more cohesive I can't speak for karmic but I can speak for myself as a player will its levels are better as introductory levels tonally thematically world one is perhaps less cohesive than Worlds 2 and three but it is simpler more straightforward world one teaches a player how to use weapons through encounter design and the order in which these weapons are introduced and the enemy difficulties scales up more gradually throughout the level progression Willets seems to have taken seriously the idea that a new player might be confused by the new 3D design and ought to be eased into it gradually Romero just Chucks you right off the deep end his levels expect a person to keep up which makes them an excellent way to separate the shareware and Retail release you've gotten the idea now prove your work in a much more complicated and difficult circumstance as frustrating as it may have been to Romero to be moved down the market in a certain way it led to stronger and more legible game design in the product as a whole to arrange world 1 and two that way the world one Willet levels are very clever on their own and run a wider range of Aesthetics and ideas than the other worlds showing off the possibilities of what's to come but that's also why they don't cohere they are a set of experiments exploring the possibilities offered presenting a sampler platter of ideas and Innovations within the 3D space which is perhaps the best way to start things off if you're going to change the medium at large if Willets doesn't establish a sense of a normal rhythm of play in world one Romero can't so cleverly undermine those expectations in his world 2 it's not narrative drama but it is inherently and meaningfully dramatic in a player's exploration of the space given to them where World 2 was Dark Fantasy a kind of eulogy for the game Quake was originally meant to be before it became just another game with rocket launchers and stuff American McGee's World 3 levels establish a whole different vibe than anything that came before they're hyper Gothic levels taking every kind of Black Candle black metal modern Gothic affectation there is and smashing them together into the metal and marble that make up World 3's trap filled labyrinths World 3 is the shortest of the chapters but it makes up for this in pure deviousness McGee's levels are much more deliberately cruel to a player than the previous sets there's a lot of jokes at the player's expense take this one at the very end you've come so far fought through so much and there lies the room you get halfway across the bridge before two leaping enemies spawn in each end of the bridge ready to clothesline the [ __ ] out of the player in seconds it completely undermines that sense of Triumph in seeing the Rune by doing a Lucy with a football kind of move reminding a player that no matter what a situation appears to be they are never truly safe or Victorious It's just deliciously mean game design a big part of the Quan aesthetic is weird metal catwalks and lava traps and that's all done most iconically in these levels Romero had wanted a story-driven game originally and while World 2 isn't story-driven there is a casual sense to a lot of the indoor and outdoor areas World 3 is way more abstract than that in a much more Jagged and aggressive way than the abstractions of world one world 3 is monochrome and a dark more confusing and labyrinthine by Design it's a step up and difficulty all around from the the encounter design to just a basic navigation it's the monochrome aspect that creates the most friction for me there's vast differences in the level design in terms of visual art and indoor outdoor balance from one map to another but the mazike twistin of these levels never lets up it becomes rather than a collection of discret levels a large conglomerate maze with many pieces and many processes it just never lets up it feels like one condensed maze which I imagine is a plus for most players who especially at the time were more likely to be DieHard Studio fans than bright-eyed newcomers the newer Dooms have largely embraced that sense of relentlessness but emphasize it with encounter design more than level design compared to McGee's World 3 any given Doom Eternal level is an absolute Breeze to navigate and find your way through Modern game design in general outside of Indie revivals who embrace it deliberately has grown tired of the labyrinth and I'm sorry to say that I have to to be permanently lost in a world of black and purple lit by torch lamps for a cumulative hour feels exhausting what's especially interesting is where American McGee went later in his career as a game developer although he was the one to say that they ought to make Quake K shooter at that fateful meeting he would later creatively chafe against the limitations of its particular aesthetic when given the opportunity to pursue his own Creative Visions American McGee created a dark fantasy version of Alice and Wonderland that was full of all the clever variations in tone and Landscape that I was missing from Quake 1 his work with ID made him famous to the point that his name was on the box American McGees Alice creatively Alice has got the same Gothic focus and relentlessly dark mood but its Embrace of narrative creating an eerie and 90s style subversive Wonderland is so much more vibrant than Quake so much more colorful than quake and especially more colorful than this some of American 's more prominent early work it's a cool contrast to see artists evolve in their own directions when given the chance like that World 3 is sour spiteful and so according to David kushner's book were the working conditions World 3 was made under it's interesting how once this core team of developers split they all split in such Divergent directions John Romero went on to found ion storm and work on his passion project American McGee eventually found his way to his passion project project as well releasing not only Alice but an even more creative and colorful Alice sequel called madness Returns Tim wetz continued to work on quake and the final level designer World Forest Sandy Peterson pursued his passion project by creating the Age of Empire strategy franchise which I feel makes a kind of sense because none of the other worlds were balanced with higher order strategy in mind quite like Sandy Peterson's Elder world there's not a huge amount of love to be found for The Elder world and the reason for that is that it just isn't designed much around player experience all these finicky puzzles and roundabout progression only feel sensical in hindsight trying to approach World 4 as an action title fighting for my life to stay alive against monsters that murder me in just a few moments in intention I am often stopped dead in my tracks more often than I had been before was it this room or that room I've been to was there a switch did I miss the switch did I Branch all the hallways at the Rotunda [ __ ] man the geese labyrinths didn't have wrong ways as often as they had Wild convoluted intentional paths Peterson's labyrinths aren't nearly as legible they are the most abstract Mazes of them all by a good margin part of this is that world 4 has a kind of bland and disappointing art Direction there are so many corridors that all look the same nothing to thematically break them up The Mazes are more visually varied than McGee's World 3 but only because Peterson uses level texture as wallpaperer and little else he Blends this with that without interest in tone and mood the interest in tone and mood that defined Worlds 2 and three the progression is obtuse it'll make sense after but most often in the way where someone tells an over complicated joke explains the joke to you and then asks you get it now right right I I do but my enthusiasm is all burnt up in the exposition Quake can often feel like a maze full of dead ends throughout many of its worlds and levels but the skill of the other levels is that there really often is only one way to go and the level always Loops back around on itself World 4 is a process puzzle it feels less fluid and more like steps I would prefer to follow if I had a repair manual the rationale behind putting these levels last is a hope that their more abstract design will help with understanding that the final boss is a puzzle and not a combat problem the game's only previous boss after all came at the end of the shareware levels back in world one a big lava man named cathon despite the round Arena the big guy is also a puzzle boss a pretty simple puzzle and a pretty simple boss two switches each drop a metal pillar then a third switch runs an electric current between them electrocuting the guy world's 2 three and four are designed without bosses opting for different flavors of dirty tricks instead the world selection screen opens a secret basement for the final encounter when you're done with them the setup is explained by Romero's World 2 Victory dialogue quote you learn the inmost lore of the hell mother Shu Naro you now know that she is behind all the terrible plotting which has led to so Much Death and horror but she is not in Violet armed with this Rune you realize that once all four runes are combined the gate to shub nuro's pit will open and you can face the witch goddess herself in her frightful Otherworld Cathedral end quote this basically throws out anything that was written in the manual wasn't Quake like some guy world one suggests that this is a land of Quake World 2 reframes the whole thing as being against this inscrutable lovecraftian witch goddess world three Vamps for a bit stalling for time then Peterson's world four offers on its Victory screen as many lore complications as the levels had navigational complications quote Beyond Good and Evil Beyond life and death the Rune pulsates heavy with import patient and potent the Elder being Shu nurth weaves her d plans to clear off all life from the earth and bring her own foul Offspring to our world for all the Dwellers in these nightmare dimensions are her descendants once all Runes of Magic Power are united the energy behind them Will Blast open the gateway to Shu naroth and you can travel there to foil the hell mother's plots in person you sense tremendous invisible forces moving to unseal ancient barriers Shu nuro had hoped to use the runes herself to clear off the Earth but now instead you will use them to enter her home and confront her as an avatar of avenging Earth life if you defeat her you will be remembered forever as the savior of the planet if she conquers it will be as if you had never been born end quote time hopping Dimension hopping Quake one is a game that Embraces magical thinking as a way to stitch together ideas that simply do not fit in any rational or linear way so you set out to destroy Quake then we confident pivot away from the idea that Quake is anyone or anything in particular besides the title of the game all this disperate chaotic Dimension hopping Madness eventually comes down to you and all shs what is shs exactly beyond your imagining foolish mortal none can Intuit it the meaning of its horrifying pale flesh that's the utilitarian hatrick of claiming lovecraftian as a legacy you too can sidestep actually pinning down what you're talking about by emphasizing ing its Abyssal on knowability what Chubs is weak to is a trick from The Game's Deathmatch multiplayer to most this is the real Legacy of Quake 1 and especially its modding Scene It was one of the first most navigationally free competitive multiplayer Arenas available designed to be that way from the ground up the meaning people created within multiplayer felt more tangible and real to many than the Moody worlds of its single player campaign the way to win can definitely be intuited from the level design itself but only from familiarity with Quake multiplayer could a person immediately know that taking a portal to an occupied space kills whatever was standing there before you occupied it at the other end of the lava pool is a device which allows you to portal to wherever a floating thingamajig happens to be when it floats through shs that's your time to strike Quake accomplished whatever that means you've defeated the armies of Quake all without any individual part of the exposition agreeing on what Quake actually is this boss encounter is a much more interesting puzzle than kathon and feels fitting enough for the idea of a weird hell beinging in some forsaken pocket Dimension as a level it's equally as isolated a pocket Dimension from the style of the rest of the game as well I have followed the narrative and the narrative is largely only about the history of Quake 1's game development here at the end I am only congratulated on beating the game the story is already forgotten by the game itself and yet the story continues twice one of the best aspects of the remasters of Quake 1 and two by Night dive Studios is that night dive also remastered all the official campaigns including two expansions per game the Nintendo 64 campaigns by Midway and new content from machine games who are the developers who have done such a remarkable job with the new Wolfenstein expansion packs from the cdrom era and downloadable content from the modern era are often ignored in the conversation about games as a whole even long after all the content for a given game has been collectively released but I love them for how they provide alternate perspectives on the original work paths not taken unusual and experimental connections to subsequent Works Quake 1's two original expansions are both of those things they explore unused ideas and preface what comes later with Quake 2's complete reboot of the entire Quake concept Quake 2 is an interesting example of a story-driven campaign in the era before that was such a subtle concept its levels are interconnected within units that have discrete objectives that emulate physical places like factories and prisons the abstraction is still there in some of the level design maybe even much of the level design but the wild chaos of Quake 1 is rained in to create a more believable and consistent immersion but that didn't start with Quake 2 it actually began hesitantly and inconsistently with scourge of armagon the first expansion pack for Quake one scourge of armagon is still largely abstract and even more arbitrarily punishing than the base campaign but it's divided into three chapters that all connect in a linear way the story from scourge of Aragon's manual is even more focused quote the hum of a nearby computer trimal catches your attention appearing closely at the glowing screen you read the final orders from the base commander it says Quakes forces have infiltrated the weapon storage facility and are receiving reinforcements through slip Gates located at the research center all Personnel are ordered to proceed with evacuation procedure Evac 44A your heart sinks as you realize that the commander has ordered the base to be sealed to prevent quake's forces from infiltrating further into our realm all weapons and vehicles have been removed to reduce any military advantage that could be gained by taking the base any means of escaping or defending yourself are gone with loss of Hope comes resolution grinning your teeth you decide you can either cow here waiting for quakes forces to arrive or you can take the battle to them infiltrate the storage facility and take out as many of the bastards as you can if you were the cowering type you wouldn't have survived as long as you have who knows maybe you can find some way of destroying the portal that allows Quake to perpetually send reinforcements end quote so we're back to Quake being a guy I guess for now this story as simple as it is improves on the original by actually saying what it means and letting that inform what happens chapter 1 is a string of levels that all use the military facility level template they never abandon the Space Marine theme until the end where you actually do reach the storage facility and use the portal to reach an alternate Dimension and take the fight to a quake Simple Story yes linear actionable story El surprisingly yes this new expansion pack was made by hypnotic software later known as ritual entertainment whose main claimed F would be the the shooter sin released a year later in 1998 scourge of Aragon's levels are deliberately more complicated and even more deliberately aggressive than what came before some are exhausted some are plain old mean but they do at least try to cohere into actual environments more than any of the levels in the main campaign take the Mine level it's very large and very vertical beginning on the upper levels and catwalks of a mining complex and then descending deeper and deeper into the mines reconnecting you with the opening areas via express elevator once you've gotten the key from the depths of the mine the mine falls apart when you're in it it'll crush and incinerate a player pretty randomly and constantly and little besides patience or familiarity with the level can help against it a step forward and environmental legibility a step backwards In fairness perhaps towards the player for me though it was at least somewhat worth slogging through the first chapter to see a prototype for Quake 2's aesthetic created before that aesthetic had even been determined the end of the first chapter is kind of a highlight of the expansion for me that way it genuinely does seem like a giant industrial Fusion of the Arcane with military sci-fi the game even handily gives you the objective for the next chapter destroy the machine that powers this portal to shut it down for good so you go into the dimension of Dark Fantasy for a clearer purpose than there's a rune down there somewhere I guess I expected this new narrative Direction however slight to perhaps clarify or improve my player experience but to my surprise it did not instead the Dark Fantasy levels kind of need obscurity and abstraction to function they are Mazes of mystery the mystery should not have been Disturbed ultimately and that's the curse of getting what one asks for as a player or as a Critic I sometimes think that I know what I want out of a given game or a game design philosophy sometimes Common Sense things like Quake should have a story it's good to be wrong about things that's where artistic novelty and genuine prize live scourge of armagon is a negative example proving the inscrutability of Quake one's main campaign to have been a strength after all that's what makes little discussed content like Scourge varagon so compelling to me as a game critic without it I would not have gotten to see that my longing for a more linear story without complimentary linear level design was misguided fundamentally misguided the second chapter ends in a way that is interestingly similar to how Doom 64 ends and how the lore of Doom Eternal would pick up from there by completing morn's keep and destroying the device you find yourself a drift in space and time quote a wave of nausea suddenly flows over you and you find yourself cast out into a liquid void you float lifelessly get aware in a lavender sea of energy after what seems like an eternity you feel the presence of a diabolical intelligence you are helpless for a moment as your mind is open to that of armagon quakes General and master of this realm recognizing you as the one who foiled his attempts to conquer the earth a hellish howl fills your mind and blots out all Consciousness when you awake you find yourself on the shores of reality but in a time and a place unknown to you end quote this phrase the expansion to make a third chapter in the style of Peterson's Elder World a deliberate hodgepodge of textures and patterns nonsensical by Nature the aggression and cruelty of these levels scale with the complexity of The Mazes they take longer and longer to complete more and more quick saves to manage my progression what they're leading up to though is an important Missing Link in the transition between Quake 1 and two the boss fight with armagon himself Aragon's fight is a straight combat Challenge in a round arena with pillars more importantly he's a biomechanical sci-fi kind of monster weapons for hands mechanical feet grafted to a monstrous fleshy torso this is what Quake tw's strog are made in the image of an interesting aspect of the shores of reality approach of blending eras and Styles without regard for sense or consistency is that sometimes the mashups are really good consider the chapter 3 secret level there are tons of secret levels all throughout Quake 1 and 2 I never found most of them but this one I did called edge of Oblivion it's just a bunch of interconnected sci-fi Platforms in a Dark Void designed for multiplayer so players can use rocket Splash damage to knock each other into the nothingness that's the practical reason why the level exists but I also like it as fiction at the end of time here is some lonely platform crawling with monsters somewhere in space long after the stars have gone out pretty neat and it only takes like 4 minutes so pretty neat is all it really ever needs to be scourge of armagon isn't the best expansion pack ever made or even for the Quake franchise if you're weird enough to play Quake for the story though this is the first time that story coheres into something tangible enough to follow the hidden predecessor to quak to's stros campaign the second expansion for Quake one the dissolution of Eternity is the hardest by a large margin the levels reach an even higher level of complication going from an average of 5 minutes to complete upwards towards 15 minutes and eventually 20 minutes the expansion completely changes the rhythm of combat to do so Quake 1 has a very limited set of weapons with an even more limited set of ammunition part of the difficulty curve in scourge of armagon is in juggling The increased enemy count with a constrictive ammunition limits dissolution of Eternity introduces alternate ammunition for most weapons basically doubling the player's capacity to store lethal Firepower the new ammunition is rarer sure but just being able to switch to it for a little while takes the stress off of the original Arsenal the new ammunition adds new functions to some weapons as well like turning the lightning gun into a cannon instead the comat combat is Messier this way weirder but the increased difficulty is actually well mitigated by a rocket launcher that fires four rockets at once from a separate pool of ammunition from a mechanical perspective it's more engaging and more experimental than the previous expansion pack narratively it's actually the biggest mess of the three original campaigns possibly because it tries the hardest dissolution of Eternity was developed by Rogue entertainment whose previous claimed Fame was a title called Strife that actually Blended fantasy role playing with the first-person format Strife was wildly ahead of its time and El received a modern remaster for contemporary audiences from night dive Strife actually had plot it actually had dialogue it is an antique prototype for many modern titles but what's funny about it in comparison to the original Quake is that strife's blend of first-person action with NPCs and dialogue is likely to be more familiar to a given modern player than the dark Moody labyrinths of Quake one game design Trends ultimately favored Strife over Quake even if the contest took two decades to reach that point Strife has a lot of sci-fi elements in addition to the fantasy Vibes it's like quake in that way in other ways Strife is more similar to the game that Romero wanted Quake to be than the Quake he actually helped develop so was dissolution of Eternity an opportunity to Pivot back towards that design might have been instead it just creates a more complicated top heavy Quake experience the story assumes that Quake has messed with the fabric of time itself to render your previous accomplishments void from the manual quote let it be known that in this moment our Master brought forth from the void of order and light a new existence of Glorious Darkness his mighty hands fashion this world of chaos violence and pain our past our present and our future are molded by the seeds that he has sown through his wisdom he has given us ancient Guardians to tend the chain of time their suffering is our link and lineage throughout all time and forever in honored service we come before him to pay our age-old debt we whisper this humble prayer with a knowledge that he will hear our thanks for what he has brought to pass end quote and this is cool and all but what about old shs what was shs and what did destroying shs matter is Quake a God a land or what somehow they have created more lore than ever for the franchise and none of it clarify as a goddamn thing the linear progression of the first mission pack was so structured each unit of missions had a clear athetic and a clear goal dissolution of Eternity only has two units and only one of these units has any kind of thematic organization whatsoever the first unit which can even be skipped if you want to is just kind of a random assortment of very intense Dark Fantasy mazes kind of like Sandy Peterson's Elder world but less visually confusing than what Peterson did that sense of consistent personality is kind of absent some of the levels have memorable or interesting moments and encounters but they don't seem to add up to anything that conveys either thematic weight or personal playfulness in the first unit it's like playing a record bide first there's a lot of chaff then suddenly you flip the record over and makes a lot more sense unit too has you moving backwards through time through a progression of levels that all move further backwards into strange fantasy and at the end you fight a boss so obscure in the ID software cannon that Tim Willets himself has forgotten that it ever existed in that interview he did for the documentary series no clip Tim Willets was asked if there were any enemies that never got implemented into Quake he immediately talks about the dragon there was an early pre-release screenshot that had a dragon in it before the idea was abandoned along with a lot of other work that had been done before the game became another one with rocket launchers and stuff willz talks about how making the pathf finding and AI work for the dragon was a total nightmare and they couldn't actually drop the idea fast enough once they started working on it the dragon is here though look at him go to be fair his AI actually is very awkward and easily confused his level is just the shub arena without the other enemies in the puzzle it is one of the worst boss fights in all of Quake possibly the entire ID catalog but it does actually exist well it's not remembering that the dragon was ever even implemented is very interesting to me because it highlights how obscure these expansion packs actually are and how little of an impact they actually made being included in the modern remasters is likely bringing them to a much wider audience than ever played them in the first two decades of their existence forgotten artifacts of the old days of gaming so much of the abandoned content developed for quck before it was finalized made it into dissolution of Eternity not just the dragon like all these Antiquity themed levels before moving backwards in time you need to pass four Elemental challenges which is kind of interesting to convey with such limited 3D tools so the air challenge becomes moving through accelerator pipes like some kind of Mario level after the Silent Hill air raid siren Rings the fire levels challenge lies mostly in confronting tiny versions of cathon compromises then with what's already possible within the instead of creating expensive new set pieces once you pass the elemental trials your time traveling begins in Earnest first ancient grease identifiable mostly from the pixel tile mosaics and the big pillars it is still Quake but after so very very many levels based on the same templates and textures it is very exciting to get a new kind of look for the game it's in congruous awkward and strange but that is exactly the appeal at this stage of Quake Quake 1's appeal lies is so much more in the messy confusion of it than its technical successes it was a pioneering prototype but it was such an odd prototype that much of what the game actually is never carried forward into newer titles take the next level Egyptian themed it looks completely unique from pretty much every other Quake level but at its heart it's still an over complicated Maze of corridors it's also one of the longest levels in the entire game taking almost half an hour sometimes one of the darkest and Bland levels too hey how about that stinks though the game pivots oddly to an Aztec theme next that's the least of the levels and the one that got me asking is this a story of some sort this moving backwards in time or is it more of just an organizing theme with the absolute minimal amount of narrative investment is there a difference between theme and story for whom does the story exist is it for the player to understand the context of their play or is it for the level designer to create a structure for coming up with ideas for levels if all the game is boils down to labyrinths and bloodshed and that's why the player is there then doesn't the story at that point become just a method of organization and little else in the early years of gaming this was often the mindset that story didn't matter much compared to the Vibes and the verbs of the game mechanics quake's historical irony is that the transition to 3D game worlds was how narrative became such an important pillar of game design in general as games evolved from abstracted experiences into more directly representational ones as the distance between how the real world looks and how these digital world looks continued to shrink cinematic design came to almost completely replace the labyrinthine style quake's technology allowed this transition to happen and so the game itself feels oddly backwards this way rejecting The Narrative driven future the games like Strife had already been pushing to towards at the end of dissolution of Eternity you fight Your Dragon at the beginning of time destroying the machine that was disrupting the regular flow of events everything goes back to normal it was as if it was all a dream or all a nightmare a vague journey of mood and sensation through a place that makes no logical sense that has no permanence upon Awakening Quake 2 agrees with this assessment of Quake one as essentially a dream it takes the entire concept and starts over taking it from the top focusing on narrative more than any other ID Shooter had at that point in time Quake 2 doesn't just have any old story it was developed as a very loose sci-fi adaptation of the 1961 World War II movie The Guns of Navarone which is in speculation the developers have explicitly said as much in Guns of Navarone a group of Commandos assault an isolated island where German anti-air implements are making it impossible to launch a rescue for the Island's many prisoners of war the guns need to come down and the Commandos have to put it all on the line and make considerable sacrifice to do it if there's any consistent criticism of Guns of naon as a film it's that it's formulaic even for 1961 that formula is exactly why it could be adapted into a 3D video game about fighting biomechanical space monsters almost 40 years later all the character work in the movie is tossed out Quake 2 has no characters for the most part besides a handful of names the setting from the movie gets tossed the majority of the actual scenes of the movie go by on reference in any way so in what way is Quake 2 adapted from Guns of navon The Vibes man just as Quake 1 was primarily a mood piece designed according to emotional suggestion Quake 2 works on the same principles but instead of the disorganized chaos of the first games production the mood is channeled and molded to be imitative of an action thriller from the early 1960s characters scenes and setting are not necessary when all Quake 2 wants to steal from Guns of Na own is the emotional tone so the story of Quake is completely Rewritten and retcon in the manual which I remember reading with interest in the passenger seat of my dad's Toyota Camry when I was like 12 this is where childhood me picked up the game although it was far too confusing in the level design for me to finish until I was in my teens the manual exposits quote Long Shadows claw desperately away from your dusty comat boots fueled by the Relentless Sun of a late Texas afternoon shading your eyes against the glare you squint for the thous thousands time at the line of soldiers ahead of you it stretches on endlessly across the rubble disappearing at last into the cool shadows of Troop Carrier soon you'll walk up the ramp into the chip climb into your oneman cocoon tear through the interplanetary Gateway and Smash down light years away from the blowing sand and blasted ruins that surround the Dallas Metro crater slightly rocking back and forth under the sweltering August Sun you spit out of the side of your mouth rub your eyes and think back to the day when The Wretched creatures first attacked like flaming meteors their crafts pounded into the Earth and unbelievably these biomechanical aliens these hideous cyborgs swarmed out while their ships still sizzled with re-entry heat they killed or captured anything that lived we figured the strg were after our planets resources minerals metal and water things like that but their onboard storage facilities did little to disguise what they considered to be resources fleshy Limbs and organs for new cyborgs and of course food you recall your first official day of training your unit Commander discussing how these damn parasites made it to the Earth and other nearby colonies in the first place by employing our best satellites in Long Range scanners we learned how they travel Lighty years so quickly the stro Ed these black hole like gateways as their Highway to Heaven we still don't know if they created these rips in the fabric of space and time or if they simply discovered them by accident either way it's like opening the door to an all you can e a restaurant for these bastards in about 2 hours we'll be entering the same Interstellar portals to hit them where it hurts on on their own turf end quote so from Guns of naon we steal the framing device of world power versus world power playing for the stakes of global survival but seen from the perspective of a single Marine within that conflict from Quake 1 we still the teleporter technology the general idea that there was some kind of previous conflict and now we're doing a sequel that turns it around like Guns of Navarone it's an underdog story where the villains are clear and unrepentant focusing on bringing down a giant piece of artillery that keeps the conflict necessarily Limited in scope until that artillery can be destroyed to make room for the new Space Marine stuff all the old Space Marine stuff from Quake 1 had to be completely overwritten no mention of Quake that fast-moving bastard whatsoever which is fine because you left off the last game altering the flow of time at its route because the last expansion pack went so nuts with its plot that plot astoundingly does not conflict with a top to bottom retcon of every single element of setting and storytelling which I think is just so [ __ ] funny and more it's illustrative of how weird of a franchise Quake is and how wildly it varies from title to title anything goes broadly speaking anyway the funny thing about Quake 2 is that once you get past the novelty of the framing and the confidently complete reworking of the basic concept this game is the most fundamentally straightforward out of all of the Quakes one of the most Illuminating anecdotes about Quake 2's production I think is that as reported by game history website hardcore gaming 101 musician Trent resner declined to do the soundtrack for the second game like he did for the first because he thought Quake 2 had no atmosphere resner soundtrack for the first game is a massive element of the original success in building a consistent immersive mood Quake one's music does not sound like what one might expect it's not loud it's not fast moving in an interview from back in 2000 resner himself explains it like this for insight magazine quote with a music of Quake there was this approach it's dark depressing dingy kill everything tense okay what films have that same sense of dread the decision on my part was not to make it amped up so I kept everything subtle so you wouldn't get sick of it the second time you play the game but it would set up elements of tension and because it was off the CD it could be as many instruments as I wanted it could be an orchestra it could be one thing that was a huge relief though they were always sighing on the side of gameplay over say having the shotgun sound in Stereo but then they should be the game is about playing the game I remember when the game came out I saw it at the Virgin mega store and on the box it said New 9in Nails music but I always thought that was an inappropriate way to look at it for what it was it's good but it's not meant to be listened to on its own what I was hoping to achieve with it was not so much some adrenaline pumping let's go kickass Rob Zombie kind of music but more like the music in films by John Carpenter the tension and uneasiness or David Lynch the dissonance or sound as atmosphere enhancement end quote Quake 2 in contrast uses exactly that kind of music which creates an adrenaline pumping Rob zombes let's go kickass atmosphere onean German Rock sensation Sonic Mayhem did the soundtrack for Quake 2 instead of Trent rner Sonic Mayhem even helped out on the soundtracks for the expansion packs which is cool because the Quake 1 expansions did not carry over resner sound or sound style at all and came out kind of generic Sonic mayhem's work on Quake 2 and also on Quake 3 isn't generic at all it's perfectly paired with a player experience a creative precursor to the way Doom 2016 and doom Eternal used heavy metal soundscapes to support and channel the frenzy of gameplay Quake 2's soundtrack is equally good as Quake 1's as is the game playay but differently competent Quake 2 experiments only so much as it contributes to the core gameplay Loop Quake 1 successes were as accidental as they were intentional Quake 2 successes are all coordinated and planned refinements on the messy first draft that the original Quake laid down I really disagree with the idea that Quake 2 has no atmosphere the atmosphere is just ultimately more familiar to Modern players the tense and dreary oppression of wartime violence that modern visual media has been iterating on since The Guns of Navarone and long before Quake 1 was exciting for resner because it was novel it was experimental he got to make Strange Music to accompany strange art little about Quake 2 is actually strange but like the new Sonic Mayhem soundtrack what it lacks in novelty it makes up for in Verve and intensity it's wild how much closer Quake 2 feels to Modern rhythms of play than Doom 1 and two or Wolfenstein 3D did by a huge margin and maybe this was the idea in remastering instead of remaking the early Quakes on release Quake 2 was a transitional title its linear campaign was a step forward but not enough of one to feel like a shift in the whole FPS sub genre Quake 2 came out on November 11th 1997 on November 19th 1998 a game using a heavily modified quick 2 engine came out called halflife the ways in which halflife revolutionized the presentation and pacing of first-person shooters are almost too many to count halflife created so many of the moments and motifs that still Define cinematic naturalistic presentation in hundreds of titles half-life's primary pacing device is arranging its interconnected levels in an unbroken chain creating a sense of linear progression and a cumulative Journey Quake 2 was designed with something similar similar but not quite as naturalistic Quake 2 divides itself instead into units of levels which are arranged in a linear order but it breaks them up with short video showing you moving between the unit areas it's kind of like how Doom 1's levels were shown on a little world map as you moved between them it seems like such a small difference for Quake 2 to have these Transitions and for halflife not to to but half-life's deeper creative choice is that it never uses pre-rendered cutscenes at all for anything it begins in engine with the player in first-person control and remains that way throughout the entire Climax and even the brief epilog conversation with a mysterious Gman by allowing you to play the game immersive soundscapes and level design also encourage a player to forget that they are playing it creates an experience that always exists within the player's present tense Quake 2's more deliberate structure the factory Palace unit the prison unit and all the cut scenes tying them together remind a player they are playing a video game and should probably treat it as such players are given a tally of Secrets found and enemies killed for a level of a unit on completion of that unit it reaches towards a kind of narrative immersion with the way the units fit together and paint a cumulative portrait of the strog in their home world of strogo Quake 2's individual pieces are made with a visible seams however where half-lies are invisible beyond the minimalist loading text at these visible seams and unit transitions you are treated as the player and graded as a player not a player character Quake 2's narrative elements are too slight and its gestures towards immersion too Antiquated to feel like a modern campaign the way its gameplay still actually feels in meaningful conversation with modern FPS conventions so if you remade it all shiny and new something would feel off about it it would feel just as stuck between eras as it was UN Rel by remastering it instead these points of friction also become points of historical interest keeping the original aesthetic preserves the original creative intentions it preserves that sense of playing some kind of forward thinking but odd or awkward prototype like going to a car museum and seeing the old steam-driven buggies whose engines would have to come up to temperature before even being used the fascination is not in comparing with the modern day but in appreciating how it was done then the imagination and Tech technical creativity involved in creating an industry that had never existed in the world before Quake 1's chaotic development is reflected in a lack of cohesion in the campaign Quake 2 on the other hand represents a much more deliberate and business-like refinement of all the production methods that had been learned on Quake 1 it was not the era that came before where 3D was new and completely undefined and it was not the era that came after where 3D gamespace was interpreted as a stage onto which more conventional cinematic and Theatrical narrative could be projected Quake 2 has always been somewhere in between stuck in a period of Industry transition that leaves it a bit of a creative orphan a remake would have no power to resolve that transition and would hurt its own presentation in the process a remaster though a good remaster like this celebrates that period of transition and illuminates it placing the art in the context where its imaginative leaps can actually be appreciated the opening cinematic sets a perfect mood for for what's to come the human warships green and Medicine pulling into orbit around an Angry Red Planet your personal pod released as part of the grand Invasion just like it said at Wen in the manual so the manual story isn't just stapled on much of it is exactly as visually portrayed here in the opening cut scene creating a greater sense of immediate narrative than Quake one had then your pod crashes and off you go blaster in hand in terms of 3D level design this is exactly the opening as well here is your smoking broken pod behind you you and the whole of strogo ahead of you Quake one like halflife allowed player interactivity from the very beginning even for things like difficulty selection and World selection but by integrating these abstract menu choices into the interactivity Quake one never created a feeling of natural immersion like halflife did creating these narrative bookends with cutcenes and player statistics allowed Quake 2 to attempt to portray a more linear cinematic Journey for the player without sacrificing the self-awareness as a shooter that was part of the personality of ID games that self-awareness is even a major part of the Studio's personality today with the ironic metam mythology of Doom Eternal that's what sets those games apart these days though game design as a whole followed half-life's example so much more than it did Quake one or Quake 2 Quake itself as a franchise is as convoluted as it is because it contorted so strangely trying to chase some of those Trends with Quake 3 and Quake 4 and Quake Champions Quake 2 is an anchor of sorts for the franchise it makes the most sense and plays the best out of all of them at least from my perspective as someone who prefers campaigns to multiplayer from this crash site on the edge of the capital city you need to fight your way closer and closer to the core taking down the Navarone influenced artillery piece disabling the city's defenses and eventually storming the palace to take down the ancient emperor of the whole strog empire narratively the strog are actually very fascinating because they're kind of a speculative end point of what any society that exists so solely for the sake of conflict will look like industrial abuse and endless Wars left strogo what it is now a desolate Wasteland of heavy industry populated only by slaves the strog Ed cybernetics to take all the useful pieces of their enemies and reanimate them for the war machine's purposes it's an infinite suffering from which death Is No Escape The Flesh and the Machine and a foul symbiosis where neither half lets the other half wither or die because the strog can only conquer and process not grow or create they use the slipgate technology to take the fight to other worlds but they done did Mess with Texas didn't they and after the crushing defeat they suffered in Dallas it's time for Humanity to reverse the tables and take the invasion to the strog directly as a hive mind taking out the macron their General should end the war considering how much time I spent trying to figure out what was even going on in Quake 1 this narrative Clarity of Quake 2 is very refreshing the plot minimal as it is works very well as a a Horror concept it's using sci-fi to present an enemy that's both visually disturbing and thematically disturbing even thematically satirical in some ways in terms of immersion and how the game fuses horror elements with environmental storytelling their research labs and prisons are the most fascinating levels of quick to all throughout the game are these moments where giant machines are being used to mutilate and Pulp human prisoners of War turned into slurry biomass fuel for the war machine while quak 2 has given up almost entire IR L on fantasy tropes or imagery in favor of sci-fi these massive industrial torture devices are visceral and sadistic in a very obviously Spanish Inquisition kind of way these torture rooms tie Quake 1 to Quake 2 aesthetically in addition to creating some of the strongest imagery in the game they tow the line between cartoonish absurdism and genuine horror driven despair sad and El silly and also preposterously Gory for the time this has been part of the tone of ID shooters ever since the original Doom a huge part of the vibe in Quake 1 just because Quake 2 is very Brown in places doesn't mean that it isn't part of that tradition of creative sadism or doesn't have that same kind of tone it's just a little more hidden beneath the more surface elements of earthtone military sci-fi qu 2's focus on Military sci-fi is ultimately what defines the pacing of the game though more than any aesthetic flourish Quake one's levels were so individual from each other with minor exceptions like the element trials in the expansion so that the succession of one maze after another became eventually exhausting each unit of Quake 2 is so tightly oriented around its end goal instead that this fatigue never sets in and a unit of levels all three levels will tie into each other there will be parts of a level that you return to and pass through differently backtracking heavily would be annoying but the level design rarely requires this it Loops back around on itself in ways that always feel so clever and surprising this is all driven by by complications in the military goals you can't blow up the thing ofama jig while the whoa watet is still active you've got to go down into the service ubet and readjust the widget valve so the power Cube can power up all these little complications bounce a player from one map to another and they also build anticipation so that achieving the unit goal feels like something that actually has a little drama and a little heft to it these goals get more interesting the deeper into the game a player gets by the time you get to the factory unit every unit goal is about destroying key pieces of strog War infrastructure cure the power plant unit is a particularly interesting example of the contrast between Quake 2 and halflife because both games have this set piece where you have to navigate a gigantic power plant in the climax of halflife you're powering up the portal to Zen the alternate Dimension and everything is done up in these bright whites and oranges it looks like a big machine Quake 2 has you shutting down a gigantic reactor plant instead but it chooses not to mix up the aesthetic in any major way it's still mostly Rusty corridors and Rusty machinery halflife even ultimately requires more platforming from a player than Quake 2 does yet despite the platforming halflife feels less artificial than Quake 2 because of its more careful visual design and its more deliberately immersive setting Quake 2 reaches its peak of design I feel towards the end the Palace of the macron is such a cool departure from what had come before a little pomp a little decoration it's interesting to me because of its suggestion that the strog have some sense of culture but that it's faded and vestigal like an echo of something they can no longer remember the way Quake 2 ramps up its difficulty over time is very kind compared to Quake 1 and because of this the last levels are the only parts of the game that are very difficult the way Quake 1 so often was in Worlds 2 through 4 giving the tank enemies an even more powerful Royal Guard version of the climax is a great idea too from the encounter designed the levels Aesthetics Everything feels appropriately climactic it genuinely feels like treading on on forbidden ground hunting for The Hidden Hand behind the strog and finding him is even better the macron instead of Leaning into the horror of biomechanical Fusion is almost totally devoid of visible flesh the macron looks in some ways a little underwhelming those little robot guys that look like Wall-E with legs and a terrible disease those are made in the macron's image I love this design because of how it emphasizes the str's indifference to pain and suffering that all humans are nothing but spare parts if the ma is primarily a robot or too far removed from the flesh to remember then pain is in fact an alien concept to it and it has no reason to feel any sympathy at all it is an insurmountable Gap in perspective which is what often feels alien in science fiction villains your final fight with the macron takes place on a secret base in the asteroid field around the planet he flees the palace as you fight your way through and Retreats through a portal to this final Arena which sets up itself such a memorable little ending post battle the station begins to deteriorate you can go looking for Secrets or just Escape as the gravity goes sour for the final cut scene you hurdle back towards the planet surface just like you had at the beginning but this time you pop the door off the Pod and your character's hand sticks out to give a quivering triumphant it is so simple so self-consciously fun Quake 2 is a game that refuses to over complicate itself and in doing so it is equally more coherent and satisfying than its predecessor the first expans pack for Quake 2 the Reckoning was released by zetrix entertainment this is notable for the kind of expansion that it turned out to be the Reckoning takes the basic frame of the lone Marine with a difficult Mission and tries to add even more cinematic setpiece touches it's very playful if less consistent than the main campaign the expansion's main interest is in creating a sense of long journey and constant escalation of environment the manual story mostly just retails a marine pod Landing gone wrong until the last few lines which I enjoy very much not because it's good but because it's cheesy and awful in the most ideal possible way it reads quote something's out there mud coating and aching you dropped into Crouch behind a Mossy Boulder in search for a weapon even a rock would be something hot damn better than you could have hoped for it's your shotgun loaded and ready to rock and roll splash splash splash you rack a shell in the chamber and jump up aches and pains forgotten too many damn fine Marines didn't make ground fall today the strog are going to pay you swear that soon real soon there will be a reckoning end quote God damn a shotgun loaded to rock and roll that's all a growing boy needs really it's this kind of Pulp from which the modern Doom series is built the basis of all the storytelling and doom Eternal so you can see why Quake fits in awkwardly with the modern ID catalogue it's already been scavenged in so many ways and reinvented in so many others all of which conflict with each other even if the fundamental impulse of all of these games boils concisely down to hot damn a shotgun the new levels begin on the outskirts in Bland Canyon lands fighting weird beasts this portion is the one that feels the cheapest it's an understandable impulse to want to explore the outdoor setting a little more but the visual effects are just Bland and murky all of this is a Prelude anyway the real meat of the mission pack is in the labyrinthine strog military installation head the Reckoning has a tremendous understanding of everything that made Quake 2's levels feel cohesive the surprise recursions and the colored lighting the blood and the boxes what it adds is a more sensical progression and a more grounded set of goals a fascinating mid- expansion moment comes as you're reintroduced to the outdoor door Canyon lands you need to find an aerial strike Beacon but it's been stolen by the weird singing poison lizard men so you need to track them back to their layer when the air strike comes through it's a special effects Bonanza that opens up A New Path forward through the level what's interesting about this is that zetrix is journey to fame as a war game Studio sort of began here previously they had published Siberia 1 and two an odd but lovable Adventure game on rail shooter hybrid and also two goofball Shooters called redneck Rampage the Reckoning was a chance to do something a little more grounded as strange as that sounds zetrix became gray matter games which developed the ahead of its time expansion to the original Call of Duty United offensive United ensive was a considerable improvement over the main campaign in terms of cinematic immersion and level cohesion just like they did for Quake 2 later on grey matter was absorbed into Treyarch and has worked on Call of Duty ever since but the Studio's very first attempt at a military first-person shooter started all the way back here with the Reckoning here's how ambitious the level design is on the unit transition map the climax looks to be unit for the Spaceport but it isn't the Spaceport is a huge huge sprawling thing where your objective ultimately comes down to stowing away inside of a crate to be loaded onto a frighter then you spend a very difficult level shooting your way up to the bridge of the freighter with a boss fight of sorts against the bridge crew once hijacked you land the freighter on the moon and infiltrate the moon base which looks suitably more high-tech and fancy than any of the regular level textures once other games began to explore the possibilities of a 3D gam space Not Just halflife but also titles like the original Jedi Knight these sorts of visually dramatic narratively grounded level progressions became the norm even within the campaigns of Quake 2's original release there was so much room for improvement zetrix improved on these ideas immediately seizing on that faint Phantom thread of The Guns of Navarone influence and iterating on ideas that would have the studio later be something of an authority on World War II game design it's a step towards that more modern era similar to how a scourge of armagon refined the linear aspects of Quake 1 and paved the way towards a more familiar future the last original expansion for quick to Ground Zero is a much larger step backwards for the franchise and its gameplay than the Reckoning was a step forward developed by Rogue entertainment just like strife and dissolution of Eternity for Quake 1 I figured Ground Zero was going to be great instead it's possibly the most Niche out of all of the early Quake campaigns dissolution of Eternity was experimental unpredictable Ground Zero is just over complic ated and dense out of all the Quake 2 content this expansion most closely resembles the disconnected labyrinthine design of Quake 1 the Reckoning was focused on unit objectives but in a way that felt in keeping with the main campaign of Quake 2 they were balanced objectives that helped the different levels cohere into a composite hole when the unit was done ground Zero's objectives are so complicated and constantly shifting that this cohesion is lost why do one thing when this can be split into four subsections the levels for the most part are not meaningfully different from others in visual design it's just the same boxes and rust as always these boxes and rust just take so much longer than usual to get through Quake 2 had mostly solved the issue of bazarre overly obscure level progression that made Quake one so frequently frustrating what seems to have happened is that Rogue tried to top themselves in a way that's out of step with Quake 2's actual strengths it's an expansion that is much more complex than dissolution of Eternity and this just makes it slow as molasses in most places the number one greatest convenience that the remastered version adds is a quest compass that actually works very well I used it sporadically throughout the main campaign mostly to understand the level transfer in the power plant unit I used the compass more in the Reckoning and in ground zero I used that Compass about once every 90 seconds to figure out where the [ __ ] I was supposed to go there's not a huge amount of interviews or documents around from those days but a rogue developer named Jim molinet once wrote a level design process guide called level design strategies and pitfalls there's a section called the level of detail rule it goes quote the level of detail rule is something that is quite different for each designer but basically this rule is a guideline for the designer to follow in case major changes are needed the level of detail is basically designing the room or area in layers of detail that can be removed or changed as needed if you can afford a giant fireplace with a great scroll work mantle it and the cathedral ceilings then hey that's perfect however if the room becomes too costly then the designer must choose the layer of detail to change is the fireplace absolutely necessary can the ceiling be lowered to decrease size what if the fireplace became a bookshelf instead these are some of the options available but all designers should remember that in the end nothing is sacred as the constraints become more of an issue the designer will be forced to delve deeper into the detail layer in order to accommodate changes if the changes needed are drastic enough the designer may be forced all the way back to the basic structure and layout of the area and forced to start fresh again end quote that's the contrast between the two expansion packs the Reckoning sacrifices complexity of Labyrinth for a visual spectacle where Ground Zero has barely any visual spectacle at all to allow for maps dense enough to have three or four goals a piece even at the end why just use a bomb when you could be asked to assemble that bomb from a casing and core that are kept in entirely different levels and areas of those levels I have been resisting calling out Quake 2 for being an endless repetition of the same boring corridors but that is genuinely what Ground Zero feels like hallways and boxes and locked doors without purpose Without End it's hard now to picture this being the dominant form of the game but for a while Corridor shooters were a ubiquitous feature of the game Market they were like how open worlds with RPG progression and crafting became the standard today it was an oversaturated format now the tight linear FPS is much more rare the new Wolfenstein besides Young Blood are notable for how they Buck against a modern Trends and return to the source format but the new Wolfenstein are also highly cinematic narratively driven to focus only on the Labyrinth is a narrow design philosophy the narrowness of which is well demonstrated by Ground Zero alone a maze cannot often stay exciting all on its own it becomes rote predictable even when a given solution is unknown the only way to keep it truly fresh is through the only thing that can't be programmed human interaction at the bottom of the strog castle in the main campaign is a secret Museum of sorts it contains within it the disembodied head of John Ki which then becomes an item that you can use at the end of Doom 2 fellow developers hid John Romero's head behind the main boss in the place where you're meant to do damage Romero's inclusion in Doom 2 is famous kik's hidden head in Quake 2 is not his head isn't even really the most important display in the hidden Museum anyway instead it's this out ofpl poster of kic in front of his first Ferrari in 1997 in celebration of Quake 2's release Ki gave that exact Ferrari away as a prize for the red Annihilation Deathmatch tournament at the Electronic Entertainment Exposition It Was Won by Dennis Fong now recognized as one of the world's first professional Esports players red Annihilation itself was one of the earliest major Esports events before Fong won his match Ki addressed the crowd saying quote I bought my first Ferrari after the success of Wolfenstein 3D doom and Quake have bought me three more four Ferraris is too many for me rather than sell off one of them or stick it in a warehouse I'm going to give it back to the gamers that brought it to me in the first place the king of Quake Deathmatch is going to get a really cool Crown end quote and Fong did he kept the car for 10 years Fong even wrote the official strategy guide for Quake 2 although Quake 2 has an actual narrative a story to follow the next iteration of Quake only makes sense with this story in mind the story of how quake and doom didn't just establish what the first person shooter is for an entire generation they also built the entire concept of competitive Esports from scratch the very first major Deathmatch tournament was put together by Microsoft for the launch party of Windows 95 Dennis Fong was there in an interview with David Kushner not from the book but for kushner's website in 2013 Fong recalls quote I remember I was on stage this was actually in the semi-finals against an opponent who I thought was going to win the event he was a very cocky individual his name was murlock when I defeated him I remember he slammed to the keyboard and kicked the chair off the stage basically it had all the emotions that you would expect to see in a real sporting event which is obviously what we see now with orts it was the first time I really played in front of that many people Spectators on a stage people people were cheering the opponent was raging and losing it had all the feelings like there was definitely something there I would say that definitely that was a very seminal moment for me that said hey I think this has all the emotions and intensity and stress and entertainment of a real sport I thought it really had a chance end quote and you know what it really did Quake 3 is game built from that world for that world at the absolute exclusion of everything else the story is much simpler than Quake one or two barely more than a basic hook eons ago the Eternal Arena was built champions from across the universe are abducted to participate in its Blood Sport you are one of these esteemed Warriors Quake 3 released in December of 1999 half-life's released the previous year had been the massive Catalyst for change that Quake 2 had not been narrative was the new Norm Quake 3 completely defied that Trend it decided that the core of what Quake meant to people was not the strange fractured fantasy worlds of Quake 1 or the military sci-fi of Quake 2 the core of Quake was Deathmatch so what Quake 3's campaign does is introduce the maps one by one with bots of varying levels of challenge at their highest level these Bots are meant to simulate actual human reaction speeds but on the lower difficulties this is toned down quite a bit on the easier levels the Bots are just sheep to be sheared on the medium levels they're obviously artificial but provide some Challenge on the higher levels they are shockingly aggressive I didn't really bother to play Above medium for one somewhat insurmountable reason I hate the way they move I genuinely do the way they simulate human movement in Death Match is by being in a constant jittery motion bouncing here and there zigzagging always jumping at random intervals this is accurate to death match but also a reason I never really did get into multiplayer games very much I have difficulty following and predicting these kinds of movements enemy AI in Quake 1 and two was never like this monster movement never is the movement of enemies in a single player setting is a way of characterizing these enemies and counter design relies on them behaving in consistent predictable ways with multiple enemy types in Balance throughout a given encounter to create different flavors of challenge death match is pure Twitchy reactivity death match to me feels like a single flavor of Challenge and I don't even care for The Taste the levels of Quake 3 are divided into tiers which have their own mostly distinct rosters of enemies to fight but they never feel distinct there are dozens of different enemies or player types the protagonists of Doom Quake 1 and Quake 2 are all here along with many variations on the Aesthetics and themes plus a lot of other characters with a dated amusing edgelord Vibe like zombie bikers and bikini Vixens and an eyeball with legs it's a managerie of cast off ideas and idea fragments kind of like Quake one in a way nothing coheres nothing fits well together but not in nearly as interesting a way as Quake one one failed to cohere there aren't even weird complications like how the lore Exposition in Quake 1 contradicts itself so constantly there is no lore for Quake 3 just fight first to 10 first to 15 first to 20 on and on up the tiers who you fight doesn't really matter only that you fight a little faster with real humans Behind These character models that's a little different at that point the massive managerie of opponents is a means of player self-expression who you choose becomes a statement of sorts silly sexy grotesque masculine while the modern hero shooter is distinct because all the Hero characters play differently and all Quake 3 characters play the same there is still some small hint of what's to come for all these new subg genres to flourish game modes Beyond Deathmatch would have to gain popularity modes its direct competitor had already implemented in many ways right after Quake 3 was released Quake 3 and onreal tournament were in development at the exact same time unaware of their Rivals existence and until they were released onreal tournament came out 1 month earlier on November 30th 1999 it was itself a multiplayer only sequel to A previously singleplayer oriented game but onreal tournament contained so much more than just Deathmatch Capture the Flag objectives driven assault mode there was so much more thought given to the possibilities of play in a 3D environment than what Quake 3 represents Quake 3 is primarily a refinement of the community that had grown up with quake since the first one oriented around Deathmatch exclusively for the most part in 1996 a mod for Quake one called Team Fortress was developed it wouldn't really take off until it was remade for halflife as Team Fortress classic after that it would get a major retail version called Team Fortress 2 cementing a path where the hero shooter as a concept would finally become a major popular pillar of the Esports Community it all goes back to Quake but ID as a developer did not embrace the full spectrum of possibility Pres presented by its creation Quake 3 has faster meaner more refined Deathmatch gameplay than onreal tournament it just doesn't have much of anything else a highly specialized product for a highly specialized Gaming Community ID crunched in the following year to add the kind of game modes that onreal tournament had at launch resulting in the much maligned team Arena expansion it's not the team arena is terrible it's just that it only does this very basic task of adding captur the flag and such and nothing else with some new weapon or old weapons like the classic nail gun which seems unnecessary because the plasma gun was basically nail gun 3.0 anyway there is no single player mode at all for team Arena not even a tiered one no expansion of the world or the lore just a last ditch attempt to close distance with a competitor whose Vision was wider nothing about Quake 3 The Way It Is appeals to me very much at all where Quake 2 was criticized for having no atmosphere I tried to dig underneath to find what was redeeming here with Quake 3 there is simply nothing underneath the technical advances no longer Shine the art feels bashed out and flat Quake 3 feels like it's missing half of itself without a single player campaign that's more than bot matches Quake 3 so confidently threw out the whole concept of a narrative because it thought that the future was Deathmatch but the next generation of ID games pivoted entirely in the mid 2000s for both doom and Quake the future was narrative the ittech 4 engine was one of the most dramatic leaps forward in gaming technology that I've seen in my lifetime as startling in its own way as the idtech 2 Quake engine was in 1996 as dramatic as the technology was it only ever wound up in a handful of games Doom 3 rebooted Doom as a slower paced atmospheric horror FPS Wolfenstein was rebooted in 2009 as an inconsistent though ambitious shooter with a semi-open world an alien abduction shooter called prey shared strong horror themes in common with Doom 3 plus a few smaller idtech 4 titles and then Quake 4 Quake 4 ignores both Quake 1 and Quake 3 entirely to create a full-throated sequel of the second game's war against the strog it picks up right where the last one left off with the defeat of the macron allowing humans to jump in more ships and resupply the war effort you're part of that second wave rather than pre-rendered cutscenes everything is done in engine showing off the engine's muscle in hindsight the dramatic focus of Quake 4 highlights the fact that as amazing as the engine was with texture and Shadow it never did get faces right there's a particularly plastic look to the faces in this generation of ID games that I do find kind of charming gaming used to be full of strange contradictions like that games with good textures and bad faces versus games with good faces and flat textures it wasn't so homogeneous as it is today but the Cinematic naturalism of today's games was the inevitable convergence point of all these many early attempts at making 3D spaces come alive Quake 4 like Doom 3 plays much slower than its predecessors and is is much more concerned with atmosphere the difference between them is largely format in Quake 2 and in Doom 3 you are always alone the game sometimes teased you that you were meeting up with other squads but they would always die in front of you or you arrive just too late it happened so often in Quake 2 and its expansions as to basically be a running gag in Quake 4 you have companion characters in many of the levels it works better without them so the game sends you out alone for the majority of your time but there's never hour that goes by where you don't interact with NPCs within the actual environment of the level atmospheric horror is what the engine does best giving up that atmospheric horror I think is why Quake 4 is thought of as the least of these initial releases replacing that horror with what seems at first like a very straightforward military sci-fi plot just doesn't have the personality of Doom 3's supernaturally decaying Mars base or prey's interest in making you feel lost in a giant alien biomass Quake for does not really deserve its reputation as the Bland one as much as it initially seems at least the thing that throws people is that Quake 4 gets off to a very slow creative start the game spends a great deal of time establishing what normal conflict against the strog looks like so that it can then escalate and complicate the story once the twist kicks in the game settles into a really fantastic and creative Rhythm it's just not obvious because at first the game's interest is in reestablishing the setting assuming perhaps correctly that in the nearly 8 years since Quake 2 there would be few who remembered the old fight against the macron Quake 4 was developed primarily by Raven software who first began working with ID way back in the 9s with their hexen and heretic dark fantasy shooters games that had a lot in common with Quake 1 tonally Raven however followed a different path later on as a developer after working with ID on Wolfenstein 2009 Raven began working as a support developer for the Call of Duty franchise so it's not just zetrix grey matter who who made a quake campaign influenced by World War II moods and imagery and then went on to just make war shooters permanently it happened to Raven as well there's a whole secret Quake to Call of Duty pipeline that I never would have known about if I hadn't started trying to figure out how the hell such a complicated odd series got that way in the first place it serves also I think to illustrate how Quake 4 begins in a way that feels over familiar to a lot of people it had been a long 8 years since Quake 2 asked what if guns of Navaro except Navarone is a badass space Fortress the cliche of the soldier being separated from their squad having to fight through a hard Landing this had already been used in everything from Half-Life opposing Force to Call of Duty itself introducing the squad one by one with a protagonist as the rookie who has to prove themselves this is as by template as it gets the first level plays it absolutely by the book and it was a book that anyone who was into Shooters at the time or now would have read many times over but then Quake for does something very interesting for a shooter like it at the time it introduces a non-combat hub level your ship drops from orbit providing a mobile Barracks Command Center and staging area a player can Rush straight to briefing or for the first time in franchise history pick up detailed information about the settings mood and Technology by listening in on ambient conversations it's nothing groundbreaking but it is grounding it creates a sense of human stakes and Casual believability it's not self-consciously a game the way Quake 2 was with its kill counts and secret counters its division of named levels into discret units Quake 4 has definite chapters to it but the narrative experience runs on Cinema logic and not arcade logic Quake 4 cares about immersion that's why it wants a slow start because by the time you see this ship again the context for who your character is and how they're treated will change completely for that future story beat to land a baseline of normality has to be established it even uses the pretense of a wartime newscast to recap the events of Quake 2 simple as they are the newscast adequately condenses the entire game into about 30 seconds there is a craft and a care to the World building in Quake 4 that's obvious even so many years later even if it is ultimately mostly conveyed over a 20-minute interlude Doom 3 also introduced a lot of narrative beats and World Building compared to previous titles in the series but Doom 3 does it in a way that is borderline ironic melding the satanic and the Demonic with a banale corporate sterility Doom 2016 and doom Eternal both borrowed from Doom 3 that way Quake 4 is different it is straightforward and sincere there is no irony no layer of metatextual commentary even prey was comparatively playful with its tone and influences Quake 4's only interest is in taking Quake 2 and making it more fundamentally cinematic a focus that's unambitious in retrospect but surprising ly compelling if you are one of the few bizarre weirdos like me who played Quake 2 for the story the first third of the game Hues to that familiar standardized war shooter format even within that limited format though are some really memorable excellent sequences like the modestly named perimeter defense station this is a level with a completely self-contained Arc of progression it begins quiet a momentary foot hold for tactical coordination and Medical Aid on the way to grander strog facilities and it stays quiet for a significant amount of time letting the player get quite deep into the facility then the Counterattack your position overrun the situation deteriorates in mere moments there's a lot of excellent scripted deaths and scripted ambushes that are every bit as clever and gory as the ones in Doom 3 you loop back around to the entrance and by the time you do you're the last one there it feels like an older Quake level because of this recursive design while also demonstrating what an impressive modern presentation it had for the time of its release all in one compact 20-minute sequence the tetron Noe your destination for this chapter is even more impressive it's got some genuinely excellent moments of visual sci-fi the structure itself has a great deal of Personality all blue lit and cold this is what ittech 4 did best this kind of intricate and dense industrial look the big reveal isn't much of a much oh no a new macron maybe he'll be a coconut one this time it's the baiton switch that's significant you can't win this boss fight you fail are captured and when you wake up you are one of those poor Marines who were tortured and processed into goo back in quak to's medical dungeons the stroggification scene of Quake 4 is I think an all-time great moment in horror gaming it uses the first person perspective in the on Rails design of the sequence to create a feeling of tangible hopelessness and helplessness you're visibly wounded in ways that are quite obviously close to fatal it doesn't take much to imagine the pain being endured here and the sound design backs that up with aggressive Machinery noises and saw whing where a movie like hostile uses Gore and torture of others to provoke nausea and discomfort Quake 4 makes it more personal and more intense with this firstperson perspective by leveraging the time you've already spent identifying as Matthew Caine and learning his short backstory Quake 4 unfortunately kind of Peaks at this moment it is so visceral and so compelling and while the back 2/3 of the game are better than the front third the game just never surprises as art like this again when your squad breaks you out just before the mind control is activated the Call of Duty Vibe continues just altered a little like how you can read the strog language now all the signage swims around into a much more legible font when you look at it now and you can use strog healing stations plus you get a durability Boost from being as much metal as flesh it shakes it up but consider the boss fight with your squad Co Voss Voss gets stogied El but in a way identical as a plot beat and almost identical as a monster to a fight from both Doom 3 and prey Doom 3 faces you off versus Commander Kelly one of the only friendly voices in the game until he gets all demony and stuff prey has a boss fight against Jen your character's girlfriend and the driver of much of your progression through the giant living spaceship prey came out a year later true but next to each other it is odd that all three games feature such close variations on that particular moment quake fors version is indeed the least of them which holds true for admittedly a lot of things big and small across its whole production what I mainly wish is that Quake 4 had gone harder than it did with the ideas that it had like the planet of strogo and the strog environments in Quake 2 the color was this deep and Angry Red Doom 3's Mars had already claimed red as the dominant landscape color for this game generation though so Quake four pivoted backwards to beige the Str are meant to be this Ultra industrialized civilization who have utterly ruined their planet and that comes through only some of the time not nearly to the extent that it could have in my mind the setting was one of the strongest elements of Quake 2 one of the essential pillars of its personality as a game here the game actually suffers for its use of ittech 4 it's an incredible engine as far as architectural detail and light is concerned but about the only thing it does worse than faces is Landscapes just like Quake 2 the most beautiful vistas of Quake 4 are all accomplished through Sky boxes and not the actual level itself the worst parts of Quake 4 are the traversal levels where you have to spend time out and about in these rendered outdoor areas the areas are never anything more than fishbowls and corridors of varying sizes and shapes and the vehicle combat is simple irritating and completely unnecessary as an inclusion halflife 2 had come out the winter before Quake 4 was released in 2004 perhaps these levels are some sort of stapledon response to halflife 2 to the sense of scale that Overland sections in halflife 2 create it's not like the original campaign of halflife 2 had a huge amount of landscape detail either but valve did it so much more artfully just like they had in 1998 Quake for's Outdoors feel so lifeless and so slight that they detract from the overall presentation no matter how cool piloting a Mech sounds on paper I feel like this could have been an opportunity to do some very cool visual World building to genuinely surpass Quake 2 by showing off a kind of players Journey the earlier game could not Quake 4 wants the sense of scale that Quake 2 tried to create in its between unit cinematics it just executes very awkwardly on the idea the middle part of the game is the worst offender where the pacing sags like crazy as you attempt to reach a far away extraction point but even this most mediocre part of the game has high points Quake 4 is neither good nor bad for long it's always weaving from one to another within a slog of forgettable environments is the waste processing center where you must kill a grotesque monster who processes the waste within the vastness of its gut it is a memorable creature design the level design becomes memorable for how you navigate around the big fella in moodly lit waste pits and drains filled with body parts blood and viscera old forgotten barrels contain failed Marine to strog conversions zombies effectively this switches up the flavor pacing and tone of the mechanical encounters while leveraging the lighting system to create very dark and anxious moods it's not a long sequence but it is a sequence that breaks up the Rhythm effectively at the exact moment it begins to feel pretty stale after this long irritating middle is your return to the command ship a not at all triumphant return people take one look at you in your new body and despise what do you have become the fact that you lived makes it worse for them why you why not all the friends and loved ones who were turned into monsters and paste without even the chance to resist it's a tremendous story beat for what Quake four actually is short unfortunately but incredibly compelling it's the twist that Quake 4 needed to take that classic war story Vibe and add some of the classic downbeat features of older War Stories That skepticism of how War changes a person the resentment that Bells against those who Survive by those who have experienced the full weight of loss upper command however is more than happy to use you as the tool you are in the last third of the game you take it from the top to execute one massive sprawling Mission you will destroy the macron and the entire strog Communications Network in one coordinated strike insertion begins in a quake 2 style drop pod flying through the air before crashing into a tall tower to begin the assault what makes all this so good is the pacing the objectives are accomplished quickly with purpose and putting them all at the top of these towers creates a true sense of scale where you look from one to the other and see what you've already done a boss begins chasing you around the time that you're climbing the second tower culminating in a big fight at the top of the third Tower things move so quickly the encounter design is so aggressive the sense of progress and accomplishment so tangible this is just excellent FPS campaign design period it comes at the end though a consistency that simply isn't present in the first 66% of the actual game experience a lot of people made up their minds about Quake 4 long before the game seems to have made up its mind about itself Doom 3 rocks it from level one by contrast it's more focused on both the technology and the pacing of the campaign clearer with the mood snappier with the scares Quake 4 struggles to compare favorably to its peers within the limited pool of idtech games the best of Quake 4 is in how it adapts and remakes Quake 2 which is a much more limited particular definition of success in the last third quake 4 Nails every one of those particulars the biomechanical horror is pervasive and wonderfully gross the vibe is very World War II despite or perhaps because of the Sci-Fi filter the combat is Peak aggression with a mix of many types of enemies at once with a full arsenal to murder them with including the good old nail gun and other Staples from the Quake franchise nostalgic adaptations and remakes are such a common part of the modern gaming landscape so it's especially interesting to consider Quake 4 is one of the early examples of a game franchise going through that process of rebirth it isn't even a full decade between the release of Quake 1 in 1996 and Quake 4 in 2005 within the space of that decade 3D gaming as we know it today was invented refined made into a sport and then the 3D Tech gets pushed so far forward that the fourth game looks like it came from a totally different game development timeline the industry never moved so fast as the turn of the Millennium the differences between games in 1996 and games in 2005 is a broader Gulf than the difference between games from 2005 and 2023 Quake is there for every major step of transition not as the best games or the most classic games Quake is instead the connective tissue that holds the fabric of this period of game development together Quake is gristle and muscle chewy and strange as game development moved past this era of Rapid change and settled into a more stable corporate ERA this has made Quake increasingly difficult to reboot or remake the way they did it all the way back in 2005 which makes this game's last lines particularly ironic you've had your victory over macron 2.0 the day is yours they could have just left it there but no The Big Brass rolls in congratulates you and growls not to get too comfortable because there's another mission waiting which there was it would just be another 11 years before it came out and it came out for Quake 1 for quake's 20th anniversary in 2016 a brand new official map pack was released made entirely by one person jerk Gustafson actual name serious job is one of the founding members of machine games the developers behind the new Wolfenstein reboots between releasing the New Order and The New Colossus Gustafson made time to celebrate quake's 20th anniversary by releasing dimension of the past a set of Quake levels with the express intention to revisit that very chaotic primordial era of level design and game F this is so fascinating to me because of what the new wolfensteins themselves represent the most narrative Centric word heavy emotionally intell adaptation of an early entitle to date the new Wolfenstein are creatively so much more confident and clever of a franchise reboot than Quake 4 was in its era and yet Gustafson had this creative impulse to move completely backwards from that modern conception of an FBS campaign to make this level set that has no plot no dialogue no narrative whatsoever except for the sense of personal authorship that Quake 1's various worlds provided Gustafson made 20 years after the fact world five for Quake 1 what's remarkable about it and why I imagine it was made an official 20th anniversary release is that Gustafson completely nailed it there are some differences in the player experience like how it's a lot stingier with health and ammunition than the original campaigns dimension of the past feels balanced around Quake experts and not the general interest balance the original campaign had on normal difficulty my feeling is that this is fine since for the most part it is Quake experts who get this deep into the franchise anyway I'm just here because I'm stubborn and the quick save feature is basically a superpower it is well worth it to try and persist however because what Gustafson has mastered is the pattern of level design that defines Quake one so specifically every level is a variation on the recursive maze design where there are no wrong directions not really and the true path snakes in and out of every part of the level connecting them in surprising and clever ways in one level the gold and silver keys are placed above the opposite color doors at the very beginning of the level teasing you getting them is a considerably more complicated Affair and then there's a whole wing of the level after those keys are found dimension of the past is not just an imitation of the kind of level design that gave Quake Wan its unique peculiar personality it is a fine accomplishment of its own within that template I might always feel like vores are cheap as hell in any given encounter personally but that is part of Quake one's Spirit of sadism it's just mean as hell to the player in clever Darkly comedic ways has been ever since Romero touched it take this excellent key trap damn thing killed me like 10 times before I figured out where the buttons to turn it off are dimension of the past beautifully illustrates what I've been trying to talk about regarding level design as its own kind of art its own particular way of communicating emotion and mood to the player dimension of the past feels just as personal and individualistic a work as Willet Romero McGee and Peterson's levels felt in the original campaign while Elsa feeling in keeping with the rhythms and expectations established by those older artists dimension of the past deserves its place as world five at minimum this 20th anniversary release is a far better tribute to the series than some kind of convoluted corporatized live service sequel would be Quake Champions released in 2017 as an early access title and not officially finished until 2022 is exactly that convoluted cash Factory of a title at its core it is Quake 3 with really nice graphics and it didn't have to be more than that yet it is everything on top of that Quake Champions is a game drowning in Live service progression systems that encourage constant engagement with Petty rewards and prizes Quake 3 lets you be a weird little eyeball guy right off the bat Quake Champions makes you grind for it it hopes you'll pay for a random Loot Crate to drop the little eyeball guy as an epic prize prize prize this is annoying but not fundamentally devastating to the game more than other live service titles Quake Champions is perfectly playable without spending a dime on it it's free to play without engaging in the freemium aspects at all and the part that is free is you know Quake three but with modern Aesthetics there had been other Quake multiplayer spin-offs like 2007's enemy territory Quake Wars but that game was completely shut down Quake live was Quake 3 but in your web browser no installation needed since 2010 Quake 3 Arena has been essentially free for anyone via this Quake live version Quake Champions is different because with its live service progression systems it is demonstrably a different game from a different era not just Quake for quake's sake it reminds me a little of the team Arena expansion that way it's a bolt-on addition to Quake that tries to add in what's hot now in this case her gr shooter elements and loot boxes what's very funny is that as part of the many many many many many unlockables one of those unlockable categories is lore like for the ranger protagonist of Quake 1 default starting dude of Quake Champions Rangers lore is done up like diary entries our boy writes quote the place was a maze it was like the worst dream I've ever had but I know how to follow orders I just had to find quake and kill it no time to think about what the hell I was seeing why was the facility laid out like a death trap what about those psycho Marines the poor bastards who did that to him doesn't make any sense I was fighting for my life as soon as I got there and then things kept getting darker and weirder there were other slip Gates and I went through them nowhere else to go no idea where they were leading to I just shot anything that moved and I've been shooting ever since end quote here we are 27 years after the fact still trying to Grapple within the franchise with just just how little of a [ __ ] the first game gave about any kind of narrative sense at all this lore says Quake is old chubs but that's just conveniently leaving out all the other nonsense the expansions dumped on top of it and much of what Quan actually had to say for itself in the first place mostly Quake Champions just wants a long explanation for why Ranger has his particular hero power this redcon is hidden in the margins of Quake Champions because litigating what the first game was actually about is is basically impossible and I love that since I don't really even enjoy Quake 3 in its standard open form I definitely didn't care for it wrapped up in a fancy Skinner box of live service elements what I wanted was more Quake 2 or more Quake four strog [ __ ] single player campaigns and for a long time the only thing that even might have scratched that itch within the official releases was the version of Quake 2 they put out for the Nintendo 64 night div's remasters include the the N64 version of both Quake 1 and Quake 2 but only Quake 2's version is notable like Doom 64 it actually is a whole new set of levels produced by Midway games what's interesting to me is how when Midway did Doom 64 it leaned into that game's darker elements a little more it made the monsters a little nastier Quake 264 leans the opposite direction making things much brighter and more cartoonish it is still dark and Industrial in Parts but the N64 version has almost none of what landed the tone or setting of the original game sometimes to the point that it feels more like Commander Keen but mean than it feels like Quake 2 yet that's kind of what makes it Charming instead of the cutcenes showing a player moving from place to place with a moody green wireframe the N64 version uses a placem art map to show how all the levels are connected in your journey between them within those levels there are some things it does that are more ambitious than the original Quake 2 campaign like how it pulls from the Reckoning and has you steal a spaceship to move from one facility to another if as Chris Franklin suggested the early Quakes are primarily mood to Pieces then looking at an alternative version of the game where the mood is completely incorrect for the setting illuminates quite a bit the N64 campaign is still fun the gameplay Rhythm still hit it is still quake in the playing of it which gives the whole campaign in uncanny feeling where its fundamental emphasis on bloodthirsty heavy impact violence feels unsupported by the arcade sci-fi environments if the tone of the violence was lighter the levels would fit better they're not bad levels at all more than just stealing a spaceship the campaign takes the better parts of the expansions and incorporates them well some of the objectives and scripted moments are similar to moments from the original campaign like aligning these communication dishes but the look of them is so busy and so bright in comparison to the original presentation it feels like its own thing some things are more quaky like this midgame boss fight that aderes to the boss appearance template laid down by quak 2 and its expansions pretty much anything to do with the combat itself feels like it always has meaty and mean some things just don't land the same way at all though like the strog torture room levels sure there's this instance of lowering a cage of poor guys into lava but the environment isn't nearly as brutally industrial as it was in the original campaign it is easy to criticize the inescapable Brown Earth Tones of the original Quake 2 campaign but and Witnesses the exact opposite approach within an actual official campaign it becomes clear how well the muted pallet of the original helped sell the mood of the setting Quake 264 also does nothing to solve the essential conundrum of the franchise that's led to such fractured Divergent titles what makes Quake Quake because the gam playay even in the N64 version or the remastered version of it at least is more reactive and more actively enjoyable than the Gunplay in Quake 4 Gunplay play in Quake 4 is fine adequate it's just not as fast not as rhythmic it doesn't have quite the right flow that even Quake 264 has what made Doom 2016 and doom Eternal so remarkable is their return to that flow but that leaves Quake out in the cold as just some multiplayer hero shooter safely on a side stage so as not to pull Focus consider dimension of the past the best modern follow-up to Quake at this point had not been a reboot or a remake or a modernization it was just more Quake more of what made the original games special and unique more of the art style that defined them in their era of their release free from Modern gloss and RTX enabled beard stubble ID and Bethesda seem to have arrived at this exact conclusion because when night dive Studios released the remasters of the games in 2021 and 2023 they released them with brand new campaigns for each Title by the full machine game Studio actual sequels that the foundational Quakes in every aspect night dive Studios took Quake 1 and two and transferred them from the old ittech that drove them to their flexible modular kex engine kex allows developers who are still making levels for older titles to use a massive array of modern lighting tricks and build levels that are considerably larger than anything originally possible the machine games campaigns dimension of the machine for Quake one and call of the machine for Quake 2 make full use of all of these contemporary creative possibilities they each take the base experience and aesthetic of the original games and intensify those things to their most extreme limits the new campaigns never become completely detached from the old rhythms of play though they carefully tease out and intensify elements of the old campaigns instead it has been surprisingly difficult to find information about the development of these two new Quake games there's a series of interviews on bethesda's website called nods to mods one of which features machine games developer Christian grower he said that it began as kind of an in-office side project coming out of the office Quake Club quote we also have our weekly Quake Club at machine games where we try to keep ourselves entertained by showing off things that we make it started up as just a way for us level designers to flex our design muscles outside of work but we ended up creating a fantastic release with dimension of the machine I'm super proud of us managing to pull that off when a lot of our team members had never even played Quake before end quote and uh yeah kudos to the Quake Club indeed di of the machine has levels that are just as difficult as dimension of the past but the whole thing is much more visually impressive and well paced one it uses modified Quake 2 style structure with five units of two gigantic levels each unit is a different sort of world with a different sort of vibe and like the worlds of Quake 1's original campaign they can all be played in any order until all are beaten and the boss on loocks the levels are so massive that each unit takes around 40 to 60 Minutes it is likely that it will take a given player longer to complete the new campaign than the original 1996 campaign it is absolutely genuinely a full ass sequel to the original and I cannot believe it hasn't made much of an impact that way this is Quake 5 and then Quake six for Call of the machine it's absolutely wild how much creative effort and developmental sweat went into the creation of dimension of the machine so why is it buried within the remaster instead of getting some sort of independent full release one reason I think is that it mostly makes sense in dialogue with the original it would be very confusing to Modern expectations if it was labeled Quake 5 this would suggest the same treatment that doom and Wolfenstein got no matter how much of a legitimate sequel dimension of the machine ends up being it isn't a forward movement for the franchise it's a backwards Expedition into its roots from a modern lens a successful Expedition but too far astray from what people think of when they think squl to be marketed that way squl is the word though an stalgic work would seek to recreate dimension of the machine surpasses the original at every turn using Quake 1's own established language of combat and environment Nostalgia isn't supposed to wear white to the wedding that way this deliberate and dramatic upstaging of the original is what a squel does to do this wall ELO being faithful in large part to the original is a hell of a needle to thread the deafness with which dimension of the machine manages it might make it the best of Quake one a quarter century is worth of refining in one remarkable package the frame is that you're Rune hunting again five Realms await each with its own mood and theme and Rune before talking about the best of them I want to talk about the most clever and Visually impressive the realm of the cultists is actually one of the shorter units starting is the most beautiful and ending is the most Sinister almost immediately at the beginning you approach a vast cathedral in the middle of a Green Canyon Land blue skies White marble totally unlike anything from the original campaign or Quake 2 at all and yet the doors have blood pentagrams and monsters infest its Halls this leads to a fun fight where upon winning the floor drops out and you fall into a deep pit it's an almost from software kind of touch yet the broader sequence feels so perfectly in keeping with the Quake Vibe it leverages those weird nights and toxic ghost thingies into something that actually feels artistically cohesive the cathedral basement has some weird Tech that culminates in a portal this portal inverts the whole Cathedral your turn backwards upwards on the ceiling and when you reach the main Chapel again the whole place is now some kind of Hell Dimension it's the coin flip inverse of the previous level in every way it looks tremendous there's such a visual drama to it and the tightness of the player progression through the two- Lev set makes it a joy to be in the hellish version feels surreal enough to actually give off appropriately dire and sadistic Vibes it feels evil it's evocative emotional and cryptic just like all the best of Quake 1 not all of them value the visuals of the world so highly as this realm like as a good counter example the realm of the machinists it's a pretty Relentless industrial maze where mean combat encounters and classic Labyrinthian progression is King it seems like the one that's meant to be played first it Hues the closest to the classic rhythms of the original Quake 1 campaign it does its best to toss in some Modern touches though the original Quake rarely ever bothered to create large combat arenas is and when it did so it was mostly to do a two-tiered kind of thing where there were a lot of enemies above you instead of just hanging out in a murder pit with you which made sense because that kind of 3D was such a novelty at the time being able to aim above so cleanly was something Worth showing off the modern Dooms are all about The Big Brawl in breathable Arenas dimension of the machine leans into that a little call of the machine leans into it a lot dimension of the machine modernizes this way mostly where it feels right for the the Rhythm climactic moments like this final big combat challenge in the realm of the machinists the environment feels like the original Quake even if all the spinning gears in the background Market is being a bit more of a modern production an arena fight feels right for the moment all the traditionally design encounters build up to it very well dimension of the past wanted to do something in keeping with the original campaign dimension of the machine even in its more classic feeling levels wants to improve on it with modern technique consider than the realm of the astrologers it's more ambitious with the way it incorporates fantasy and sci-fi into a heady chaotic blend than anything in the original campaign it begins in some kind of astral plane with floating platforms made of rock it's like Half-Life Zen but a little more mystical this leads to a big fantasy Temple mysterious and ancient so far so engaging then the level drops a Twist the temple is trapped and you get transported to a cell in a Sci-Fi prison a sudden complete tone shift like 5 minutes into the level fighting through the Sci-Fi base you reach a slip gate which takes you to another sci-fi facility but in a fantasy world with collapsed castles a dig site the base itself is weirdly detailed and even naturalistic in some ways with an actual Barracks that's collapsing into a lava field a cafeteria and a motor pool it is so much less abstract than any of the facility levels in the original campaign it uses instead the kind of environmental naturalism that Half-Life pioneered then the level twists again even more spectacularly the deeper down the Dig side you go the more it pivots back to Fantasy then Dark Fantasy there's a hellish shattered Temple down there in the depths that looks more actively demonic than anything the original Quake or the original Dooms managed to accomplish with their own engines and their own time it's metal as [ __ ] yet it keeps going down to a series of platforms that hang suspended over a blank void the bottom of the world which makes no physical sense but that's the point of fantasy it just has to feel right and Magic covers the rest so within just one of five units in this new campaign the developers demonstrate complete tonal Mastery over the conflicting elements of sci-fi and fantasy that the original completely failed to resolve here they are in actual Harmony a Sci-Fi civilization using their slip gates to explore a magical Universe filled with dark secrets man was not meant to know hidden Horrors never meant to be on earth the realm of the astrologers using only level design creates a more coherent narrative than anything in the first game and a more creative narrative than anything in the second game the realm of the astrologers isn't even the best most impressive unit which is astounding to me while spending 40 to 60 Minutes on two levels is a long time by Quake standards the density of the levels and their truly remarkable scale means that you're actually experiencing cool new things at a much faster rate than some games ever manage at all the realm of the black blacksmiths is one of the best levels of anything that I've ever played distinguishing between the two levels is pointless they are completely interconnected and function as a whole the art design for this realm is I feel the absolute peak of what Quake can be a beautiful example of what could have been if the original team had oh I don't know 25 extra years to figure out what the game was supposed to be about there's just a ton of implicit lore in the level two this Dimension or planet or whatever this is collapsed a long time ago now the Scavengers have come these ancient Cathedrals and castles have been taken over and burst open by a parasitic industrial infrastructure first level is just breaking open the castle Factory thing it's a complicated involved process but the scale of the castle is never compromised or forgotten as deep into the tunnels and corridors as you get the level always takes the time to orient you and show you that you haven't even gotten close to breaching the walls of the thing when you go down into to it the whole depths of the castle are bathed in red it's not just the brown industrial of Quake 2 and a lot of Quake 1 it is gothic industrial Trent resner would be proud in a lesser map this basement would be the whole of it instead the level climbs out of the basement back into the interior Courtyards and towers of the castle where the unit's Rune is trapped inside some kind of sinister machine all this massive sci-fi infrastructure that you've been snaking around for an hour All Leads back here to the source of magic that it was designed to drain as if all this Space Marine stuff was part of a vast military Empire that span Dimensions singularly devoted to expansion and power like uh the strog once were and say isn't that the symbol of the strog on the banner in the main unit selection room isn't that their symbol on all these computer screens and crates the strog symbol was featured on crates even in the original 1996 campaign but the reason for that was simply that no one had yet come up with the strog and its adoption that way was the result of a massive rebranding of all enemies and weapons in Quake 2 dimension of the machine takes a developmental oversight and makes it an actual narrative beat it connects Quake 1 with Quake 2 in a fascinating way and in a universe of infinite dimensions and possibilities why not especially if [ __ ] around with timelines in alternate Dimensions was already such a strong component of the setting dimension of the machine is such a fascinating object in terms of game design because it uses all of its modern tricks and techniques to enhance the Nostalgia and backwards looking elements it does not feel like a truly modern shooter it feels like a modern Quake It feels like the kind of thing one might have expected to get out of the actual Quake to back in the 9s instead of the big Rebrand to the strog to position itself as a middle transition between Quake 1 and Quake 2 allows both games to flow together in a way they never did before where Quake Champions just kind of shrugged simplified the lore and admitted it made no sense dimension of the machine has grappled with its nonsense in a way that is as elegant as it is cryptic I think it is such a shame that something so energizing to the franchise as a whole got labeled as little more than a bonus campaign tucked away on the back shell of a remaster where no one bothers to look call of the machine is a better sequel to Quake 2 than Quake 4 was I like Quake 4 I like it a lot but Quake 4 didn't try to understand or improve on Quake 2 and as comprehens of way as call of the machine did Quake 4 was a soft reboot more than it was a true sequel it was in line with current trends in its era of gaming and aimed that direction it wanted to be cinematic and glossy which it succeeded in especially for a game from 2005 call of the machine instead does the same thing as dimension of the Machine by creating a huge array of themed operations that all pull on some design thread of the original campaign creating more impressive more extreme versions of the old rhythms and environments this time it's six units with three or four levels a piece like dimenstion of the machine this campaign is actually longer and much more involved than the original in the 9s there were units of Quake 2 that a player could Blitz through in like 15 20 minutes back in 1997 and that just isn't the case here at all the levels are incredibly dense many of them requiring the light interlevel backtracking that was such a prominent part of the original campaign there is a great deal of respect for the traditional pacing and structure of classic Quake 2 levels without dialogue the personality that was conveyed by the game in the first place was done through the twin pillars of level design and encounter design these rhythms rhythms of combat rhythms of navigation were what made Quake 2 feel different from Quake 1 or Doom or anything that came after Quake 2 was such a unique idiosyncratic game that upsetting its particular balance too much runs the risk of destroying that sense of Personality it's a delicate thing which makes it all the more impressive that call of the machine completely disrupts the encounter design to modernize it much more than any of the visuals it's closest in terms of player experience to the new Dooms Doom Eternal particularly with the way it uses massive clusters of enemies with particular standout threats that require specific player responses and prioritizations Quake 2 originally was not horde oriented there are actively hundreds more enemies per level here than there were in the original campaign not even Ground Zero touches the total number of kills that a player backs up across the course of Call of the machine this rhythm is entirely new how then can the cumulative experience feel so in keeping with Quake 2 because they can completely change the encounter design without even laying a finger on the players Arsenal quick 2's weapons were wildly inaccurate and in the original campaign this was kind of a bid to get the player to behave more aggressively to close the distance and engage face to face instead of planking away from a distance plus a lot of the original weapons take advantage of explosive Splash damage in some way or take the rail gun which has always had the property of being able to slam through multiple enemies along its trajectory originally this extra damage would just be spillage the initial release only asked a player to juggle like a maximum of two dozen enemies in a given room which is part of why it has a reputation of being a little easy compared to other ID campaigns for Call of the machine these giant hordes of enemies reach such absurd proportions that they don't actually change the the threat level of the encounter these enemies never live long enough to even hit you for the most part instead all this leftover spillage damage catches enemies to the right and to the left of your crosshairs and takes down everything you your abilities and your toolkit are Faithfully preserved from the original Quake 2 there is nothing new nothing non-traditional about the way you play as a player if the new content had just added a lot of new enemies the difficulty would have actually spiked like it did did in ground zero when it had a serious increase in battle density by adding an absolutely absurd amount of obviously too many enemies instead that difficulty spike is actually lost in the chaos of it absorbed by the fact that every bullet that does not strike an intentional target takes down an unintentional one instead the enemy hordes actually die faster than a similar horde might in Doom Eternal being less mobile and less intelligent enemies as a result even if this kind of encounter design is extremely contemporary for the most part the entire feel of the game is actually still grounded in the chunky player feedback of 1997 this is what makes it such an intimate sequel it takes not only a full understanding of what made the original game unique to pull off it takes a treacherous imaginative leap to Intuit it that it could be bent this far without breaking the result is something truly special call of the machine also modernizes its approach to boss fights which actually does create create a significant difference with the original it adds a big health bar at the top of the screen and gives the boss a unique name which isn't a modern thing particularly but back in the 9s it was never part of the ID house style for shooters by withholding that feedback the original fights of Quake 2 felt a little more desperate you just kept piling on the damage and hoped the thing would die eventually the boss fights were also very uncommon in calling the machine there are multiple boss fights per unit sometimes once a level and a couple of them like darkest depths like with the regular enemies the new campaign cranks up its intensity by making these encounters much more dense and heavy while I do like the old style of withholding feedback for the purpose of tension the new style has more flare and personality the names for the bosses are often very playful and give an impression of how they fit into the setting they become another tool for the non-verbal storytelling the level design is trying to accomplish it's also another acknowledgement that especially compared to Quake 1 the player's weapons in Quake 2 are absurd irly powerful compared to the enemies since the release version in 1997 Quake 2 has allowed players to store their powerups like quad damage and invulnerability instead of having to burn them when you pick them up like in Quake one saving them for the boss battles was always the most satisfying move for that by creating more frequent boss fights there's more incentive to use those powerups instead of saving them creating a further incentive to engage with secret hunting within the level to find more it's a more pleasing inventory Loop especially better than the approach the expansions took where they were often really miserly with the powerups and with ammunition to try to even out the difficulty and keep things tough call of the machine's generosity with powerups doesn't mitigate the difficulty so much as it just Smooths out the flow of the massively dense combat encounters one fun thing the campaign does is blend Arena boss fights with plain old horde Ambush encounters creating these absurdest massacres where you're just burning through ridiculous amounts of ammunition and creatures it's never one note though there's a genuine diversity of approaches to the boss fights this one at the end of the Wasteland unit ditches The Horde to pit you against a very difficult mix of about a dozen medium and heavy enemies there's a tank commander with a health bar but he isn't special in anyway this particular fight is just a very traditional but very difficult grouping of Quake 2 Enemies it wouldn't have been out of place in the original campaign during the palace unit anyway where the intensity is at a nice Peak without using a banked power up it would be possible to win this fight but exceptionally brutal with the players's damage quadrupled this tough grouping just melts away into a mess of metal and meat a lot of the success of the modern Dooms is that they're not about challenge exactly they're about player empowerment they're about ripping and tearing and being absolutely brutal more brutal even than the hordes of demons opposing you this feeling can be created in a very similar extremely satisfying way within the already existing game systems of Quake 2 it just takes a bit of a new approach to tease that out call of the machine also does a better job than Quake 4 of exploring the broader lore of the franchise and tying it together Quake four tidied things up Call of the machine keeps it cryptic and messy just like de mention the machine did cryptic and messy is the only way that any of it can fit together at all Call of the machine does one better than just being that way though by exploring parts of the setting that only ever existed in the margins before like how the Quake 2 man story starts in the ruins of Dallas one of the units of Call of the machine ruined Earth explicitly pivots away from strogo to go back to the collapsing brick tunnels of post Invasion Earth I'll admit that I kind of wanted a ruined cityscape so the fact that it is mostly a bunch of tunnels is kind of a let down what's cool about the unit though is that it's a slow burn payoff for the original campaign finally illustrating something from the actual paper manual and also it's a fantastic parallel to dimension of the machine here a strog ship drills directly down into the Earth stripping out precious metals consider though what they said in Realm of the astrologers about the enemy arriving on Black Ships or Realm of the blacksmiths and all that parasitic technology they had it's a very clever integration of both machine games campaigns through reference and illusion plus having Earth in the mix as well as troos makes it feel like an actual war of some sort there's even a moon mission where you can see our Good Old Blue Marble at the window call of the machine is constantly playful with the possibilities afforded by multiple dimensions and slip Gates it focuses on the interdimensional aspect much more than the original campaign did where the original Quake 2 tries to mostly tuck the slip Gates under the rug where they won't cause too much Havoc with a pivot from chaotic genre mashup to focus to military sci-fi call of the machine brings back a little of the chaos a little of the magic that was missing from Quake one of the units has you infiltrating a factory of some kind that's hauling out a gigantic dead God or something called Mega corpse 4 the exterior is a larger more impressive industrial structure than anything even Quake 4 ever tried to do visually speaking even though quak for's engine is obviously more advanced Call of the machine uses the kex engine and its Unshackled possibilities to create visuals that are consistently more impressive than what Quake 4 had to offer the art is Simply Better oddly it's one area where I think dimension of the machine is actually better the surrealism of Quake 1 the dimension of the machine intensified to such remarkable effect just isn't quite part of the Quake 2 aesthetic Quake 2 is more industrial representational Vibe carries over into call of the machine it's part of what makes it feel so faithful to the original Quake 2 campaign when call of the machine tries to do a maximized version of classic strog installations like here in the firewall unit it is amazing it's better than anything the expansions were able to accomplish and it even borrows some weapons enemies and textures from the expansions to make the new campaign feel like a truly comprehensive Quake 2 experience the way these units have a player start with just a pistol and a shotgun each time give each unit a better pacing than the expansions who use linear progression and so were much slower to allow a player access to the full arsenal and then much quicker to become stale once a player did get everything there is a self-contained Arc of player empowerment within each unit of Call of the machine six times in a row one notable episode makes the wild choice to give you a BFG to start with and barely anything else there is so much experimentation going on there's so much fun within the level design itself its brand new art made with a pallet from 1997 call of the machine is so conscious of how the fact that Quake has never had much of a plot or much consistency is actually a kind of artistic Freedom if you're willing to look at it that way it can be reshaped and newly molded into so many strange configurations and still remain faithful to the original campaign dimension of the machine might have looked more interesting overall but call of the machine improves on its source material in a far more comprehensive way the last parts of Call of the machine are the ones meant to tie Quake 1 to Quake 2 in an even more explicit way than they had been before it was the part that I was the most excited about and it was the only part that I felt kind of let down by the problem is that call of the machine has dual climaxes one of which is much better than the other the darkest depth unit is the most unusual usual visually distinct out of all of the units it uses an aesthetic that isn't found anywhere else in either Quake one or two mediating them it's an echo of the digsite level and Realm of the astrologers like ruined Earth is an echo of Realm of the blacksmiths here the strog have been Excavating some sort of Ancient Temple the design is classic Labyrinth extremely dense winding deeper and deeper and deeper it is so much better than the Mind sequence in ground zero I can't even express it where the expansions to Quake 2 tried to add complexity it often felt like complication for complication sake the complexity in the darkest depth unit is intriguing immersive it feels like an element of actual exploration and not just puzzle solving a maze the Deep Temple is especially fantastic it has completely departed from the science fiction Quake 2 was so invested in murals depict good old shvs and two shambler worshippers this is a temple to the ancient Pentacle witch Queen which is quite a way to finish off a story influenced more by World War II movies than by Cosmic horror at the bottom of the temple you awaken an ancient evil a shambler appears just for a moment released back into the world no longer bound by either spells or genre conventions once you advance into the Temple's dramatic final Chambers you find yourself in the middle of a one for one Recreation of the boss fight from the end of Quake one world one modar not cathon but otherwise identical mechanically and thematically we have looped back to the very very beginning once you've beaten him you jump down the exit hole but then there's a Twist driven mad by what you've witnessed you die lost to the dark magics that Space Marines were never meant to know this is the one Marine of the six that doesn't make it back with a data CD needed to unlock the boss the boss unlocks anyway though the thing is why this looping action with the temple to shs at the bottom of the world was all that was needed to tie Quake one to Quake 2 a cryptic reference a mashup of world and gameplay the whole frame of Call of the machine however is that all these data discs are meant to determine the location of the creature that made the strog in the first place it's a big promise and I was sure I knew the answer armagon right armagon is literally the Prototype and precedent for the strog within the franchise as it already exists I was certain but no the last mission is visually striking it does feel like an otherworldly interdimensional Temple but it's empty the boss fight are just double bosses of types you fought many times already the big reveal of the strog maker itself is two shamblers two shamblers yes indeed what's meant by this how does it work why wasn't darkest depths just the final unit unlocked by the other five especially because its climax reveal is so much better paced and more intriguing the Marines even share the same fate in vaol climaxes just like the Marines from Doom 64 and the original Quake expansions lost to the Cosmic void forever following their Victory it says that killing the two shamblers severs the strog connection to their maker so is the idea that these are the two shamblers in that mural who are shs chosen or whatever if so why did we not El get to fight chubs again or [ __ ] it how about the awkward time dragon from dissolution of Eternity it lacks drama the way they did it here at the end of Call of the machine which is so weird considering how both Dimension and call of the machine were so skilled in creating drama throughout all of their levels except this one oh well almost getting everything I want from a surprise Quake sequel is a lot more than I ever expected to get in 2023 anyway it's hardly enough to diminish the tremendous accomplishment the new campaign represents broadly even if the climax was a little more Awkward than it might have been call of the machine and dimension the machine do a more impressive job of binding the games together than anything else in the Quake franchise there is a clear series of Step step now narrative Steps From The Moody chaos of Quake 1 to the polished brutality of Quake 2 it's fitting that in a game series that started off playing with alternate timelines and Alternate Dimensions that the best version of these games came out a quarter Century after their release it's taken that long to understand their influence and appreciate their unique peculiarities the story of Quake is an especially strange and convoluted one whether fiction or non-fiction like its best levels it wraps right back in on itself it is one of the most wildly self-contradictory game franchises of all time what is Quake a land a god a tentacle queen single player multiplayer labyrinths death matches after 100 hours with all of these Quakes the only answer I can figure is yes it is all of these contradictions at once and this incoherence is what makes quick special no matter how much time passes we as players can always go back to that pivotal moment in 1996 when Quake stepped Across the Threshold into a new dimension for ID Gaines there is a tremendous weight and drama in these moments of extreme transition a thrill in reliving them so long after they made their impact there are Parts when the story of Quake is complicated and parts where it is dead simple the beginning of Any Given Quake is consistent at least they always begin in one place with one thing with a shotgun ready to rock and roll thanks for [Music] watching a a oh [Music] you dead St remaining fire teams engaged in primary and secondary objectives a yeah right

Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 409,075

Keywords: Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, Quake 4, Dimension of the Machine, Call of the Machine, Dimension of the Past, Quake 2 64, Retrospective, Analysis, Critique, Review, Lore, Plot

Id: lDBDI35NjQg

Length: 147min 28sec (8848 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 24 2023