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frag.machine Joined: 25 Nov 2006 Posts: 728 |

Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2007 1:05 am Post subject: |

FrikaC wrote:

frag.machine wrote:
IMHO there is another important factor: Quake was a rushed-thru-the-door game. Surely it was easier to just slap some textures to single polygons and call them "medikits" or "rocket boxes". Remember, Quake's game design and artwork is completely incoherent at best.

Says you.

Don't get me wrong, Quake stills the best 3D FPS ever to me. But it's little more than "let's just remake Doom" (if you read "Masters of Doom" you'll recognize the phrase), and far from the legendary game Romero once promised us (and never delivered).
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Sajt Joined: 16 Oct 2004 Posts: 1028 |

Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2007 1:31 am Post subject: |

The 'legendary' one was the incoherent one. Quake as it ended up is as coherent as you can get - an excellent example of artistic & thematic consistency. _________________ F. A. Špork, an enlightened nobleman and a great patron of art, had a stately Baroque spa complex built on the banks of the River Labe.

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Urre Joined: 05 Nov 2004 Posts: 1073 Location: Sweden |

Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2007 8:16 am Post subject: |

I'm sure Romeros version would have been just as coherent, only different, and not as cool. The point is that they were severely delayed, and masterfully managed to simplify the concept. gg id. _________________ Look out for Twigboy

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Spirit Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 476 |

Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2007 12:14 pm Post subject: |

I am pretty glad Romero didn't make Quake as crappy as Daikatana. Running around with a hammer? Ugh! _________________ Quake Maps

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frag.machine Joined: 25 Nov 2006 Posts: 728 |

Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 1:07 am Post subject: |

Sajt wrote:
The 'legendary' one was the incoherent one. Quake as it ended up is as coherent as you can get - an excellent example of artistic & thematic consistency.

Well, if you consider to fight zombies, armored knights and lovecraftian creatures using modern age weapons like rocket launchers and shotguns found deep inside medieval dungeons and other unlikely scenarios without any explanation about their origin "thematic consistency" ...
Again, I am not discussing if the game is cool or not (of course it is!). I am just pointing that the whole thing just not fit together if you stop to think about it. Most of time we don't realize this because, well, we are too used to the thing to care about this anymore. Besides, according to Carmack, games and porn movies don't need history to be fun, so it's not a surprise that Quake followed this line.
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frag.machine Joined: 25 Nov 2006 Posts: 728 |

Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 1:26 am Post subject: |

Spirit wrote:
I am pretty glad Romero didn't make Quake as crappy as Daikatana. Running around with a hammer? Ugh!

Yeah, so you think is a better idea to be teleported from a high tech militar facility to fight an unknown and powerful enemy in an alien dimension equiped only with a lame shotgun and a rusty axe, huh ?
BTW, I second you about Daikatana: I don't know what Romero smoked when he conceived it, but of course it was an announced disaster. BUT, this does not mean the original Quake concept was not a good idea.
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scar3crow Inside3D Staff Joined: 18 Jan 2005 Posts: 837 Location: Las Vegas, NV

Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 3:01 am Post subject: |

The weapons if you pay attention are barbarically crafted, they are crude and strange. Just look at basically everything but the shotguns and you can see that if they were ever made by humans, then they were crafted in makeshift blacksmithing sites at the mouth of a cave at best.
The fact of the matter is that any "unrealistic shooter" takes place in extraordinary circumstances and scenarios with unlikely pairings. One of these unlikely scenarios is slipgate technology, ancient elder god's using it against us, and one guy having the balls to run axe first into the source of all the destruction. The shotgun and axe are weak for a game progression sense, however from a logical perspective, if you see someone armed with a shotgun and an axe, doesn't it shout "That motherfucker is going to kill someone"? Of course it does - because those weapons are effective.
I know I am treading onto the grounds of imposing views on the game to support them (but hey, just look at Valve goes about storylines...) but is it so hard to believe that in stepping into the unknown, we face things that are tougher than usual creatures?
And by the way, though Daikatana is significantly flawed, dare and tell me the Shotcycle 6 is not one of the most badass feeling weapons in a first person shooter. It did get some things very right, but they were overshadowed by a mixture of reputation and a lot of awkward things left in.
If you want Quake as promised to you, go play something with a self-leveling Mjolnir, a Hellgate Soulcube thing-a-ma-bob and cinematic battles with dragons flying past castles and breathing flame into them. The upside of this is a alternate timeline where theoretically Tim Willits never rises to power, and Romero, Peterson and McGee stay with id...
Once again though, Quake is not so much incoherent as it is varied without "Oooh lets vary it!" being so obvious, and it is varied in that respect in contrast with typical (read: popular money driven drivel) shooters that are ultimately mundane in their settings and capacity for allowing the player to bring the world to life even more than the designers themselves did.

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Orion Joined: 12 Jan 2007 Posts: 414 Location: Brazil |

Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 3:16 am Post subject: |

scar3crow wrote:
The weapons if you pay attention are barbarically crafted, they are crude and strange. Just look at basically everything but the shotguns and you can see that if they were ever made by humans, then they were crafted in makeshift blacksmithing sites at the mouth of a cave at best.

Yeah, pay attention at the rocket launcher. It looks like a locomotive chimney. I think it IS a locomotive chimney with 3 air intakes that launches rockets.
Normal RL:
Unmounted RL:
See with your own eyes.
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Sajt Joined: 16 Oct 2004 Posts: 1028 |

Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 3:39 am Post subject: |

I guess frag.machine just wants to play boring realism shooters like Battlefield or Call of Duty... _________________ F. A. Špork, an enlightened nobleman and a great patron of art, had a stately Baroque spa complex built on the banks of the River Labe.

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daemon Joined: 07 Nov 2007 Posts: 62 |

Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 7:51 pm Post subject: |

Urre wrote:
As far as I understand it, that only happens when mdl's animate. Tomaz made a pack which replaced the bsp ammoboxes with mdl equivalents, and they looked generally a lot better thanks to lighting stuff. Don't recall any vertex swimming

that is true... ammo boxes do not animate.
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frag.machine Joined: 25 Nov 2006 Posts: 728 |

Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 11:03 pm Post subject: |

scar3crow wrote:
The weapons if you pay attention are barbarically crafted, they are crude and strange. Just look at basically everything but the shotguns and you can see that if they were ever made by humans, then they were crafted in makeshift blacksmithing sites at the mouth of a cave at best.

Ok, let's say the game designer required weapons to look rustic, low tech. Then why the super shotgun or the perforator aren't this way ? Simple: because there was no game design at all. At some point, they just wanted to finish the game (it's not secret, in more than one occasion both Romero and Carmack said that) and simply used stuff that was not supposed to reach the game final version as is. The ogre's lack of a real grenade launcher has nothing to do with "game design orientation", it was just lack of time to polish things.

scar3crow wrote:
The fact of the matter is that any "unrealistic shooter" takes place in extraordinary circumstances and scenarios with unlikely pairings. One of these unlikely scenarios is slipgate technology, ancient elder god's using it against us, and one guy having the balls to run axe first into the source of all the destruction. The shotgun and axe are weak for a game progression sense, however from a logical perspective, if you see someone armed with a shotgun and an axe, doesn't it shout "That motherfucker is going to kill someone"? Of course it does - because those weapons are effective.
I know I am treading onto the grounds of imposing views on the game to support them (but hey, just look at Valve goes about storylines...) but is it so hard to believe that in stepping into the unknown, we face things that are tougher than usual creatures?

I am not trying to compare with other games. That's not the point.
All I was saying was that despite Quake being a great and successful game, it's filled with things that don't fit together, just because either they weren't supposed to be there at first, or because someone forgot to remove/replace/explain something. The rusty axe is a good example: it would be very, very simple to accept the existence of such weapon in the player's arsenal if added later in the game, as result of looting a monster. Instead, the guys at id preferred to simply not explain anything, and we just accepted as normal that an elite mariner is sent to another dimension armed with a rusty and blood tainted axe. And why things were in this way ? A cool and twisted idea from the evil mind of a game designer ? Of course not. It was simply because they were running out of time to put the game in the shelves, so they had to wrap what they had as is and just let it go.
You have lots of clear (and some more subtle) signs of rushed work along all the game: duplicated textures with different names, overlapping brushes in some maps, unpolished textures in some monsters, the deformed mesh in the death sequence of the rotfish alias model. And, IMO, the use of bsp models as ammo boxes and medikits (although I recognize that other technical factors had their weight in this option).

scar3crow wrote:
And by the way, though Daikatana is significantly flawed, dare and tell me the Shotcycle 6 is not one of the most badass feeling weapons in a first person shooter. It did get some things very right, but they were overshadowed by a mixture of reputation and a lot of awkward things left in.

TBH, I don't remember. The first and only time I installed Daikatana was a long time ago, and the game was so buggy that I just played a couple of hours before giving up, uninstalling and never trying it again.

scar3crow wrote:
If you want Quake as promised to you, go play something with a self-leveling Mjolnir, a Hellgate Soulcube thing-a-ma-bob and cinematic battles with dragons flying past castles and breathing flame into them. The upside of this is a alternate timeline where theoretically Tim Willits never rises to power, and Romero, Peterson and McGee stay with id...

I tend to agree that a less action oriented game as I imagine it would be according Romero's vision also would not drag as much attention and even survive as long as it is now. Yet, I would like to see how this would be at the end.
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frag.machine Joined: 25 Nov 2006 Posts: 728 |

Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 11:10 pm Post subject: |

Sajt wrote:
I guess frag.machine just wants to play boring realism shooters like Battlefield or Call of Duty...

Wrong guess. I love Quake as much as anyone here, yet I can't help but see things as they actually are. Quake is great, but could be even better, with more polish time and more game design work.
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Nash Joined: 19 Oct 2007 Posts: 95 Location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia |

Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2007 1:25 am Post subject: |

While we're on the subject of inconsistencies, I find it odd how the Enforcer is the only enemy that speaks English (their see sounds, "you there", "stop", "halt" and "freeze"). :P

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Sajt Joined: 16 Oct 2004 Posts: 1028 |

Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2007 2:05 am Post subject: |

The super shotgun and perforator are low-tech looking Take a modern non-realistic game like Serious Sam and see how much fancy extra polygons and crap they add to their weapons. The Quake dbshotgun is just two tubes! Are you saying that they don't have enough dents in them?
It doesn't bother me that they weren't going for a Half-Life like story-driven game rather than a gameplay-driven game. Do you need explanations and backstory for everything? I personally prefer a game that stimulates the imagination. Do you wish the player was a modern real-world human with a Glock 4123XYZ 1922A pistol and a Winchester 12345 rifle?

frag.machine wrote:
Most of time we don't realize this because, well, we are too used to the thing to care about this anymore.

For most of us (I hope), Quake was the best when it was fresh, because it was strange and frightening. I can vaguely remember the first time I stepped into the outdoor portion of e1m1, and the first time I encountered a Shambler on e1m5 (no, I didn't play on hard the first time). Maybe it wouldn't have the same effect if you first played Quake in 2001 or whenever, when you're used to more polygons, but it sure captured my imagination back then... Ten years later, maybe I've played it a little too much for any wonder to be left, but it's still one of the best games in this regard ever.

frag.machine wrote:
Wrong guess. I love Quake as much as anyone here, yet I can't help but see things as they actually are. Quake is great, but could be even better, with more polish time and more game design work.

To me, Quake was pulled off to perfection as much as it could have been. If I think long and hard, maybe there are some small things I would change, but they made this game a long time ago and already got so many things right, it would be inhuman to have made the 'perfect' game (and I doubt such a thing could actually exist ). Sounds like you have a love-hate relationship, but as for me this is 'my' game... if I were to dream of the ultimate game it would be more similar to Quake than anything else, and this is why I'm in the Quake community (well... modding was partly the reason I came here, but I don't do much modding anymore).
Nash: I actually prefer it that dogs or shamblers don't speak human languages. (Grunts don't speak because they're 'grunt's! They have chips in their brains!)
And MDLs, animating or not (more visible when not) do jiggle when you rotate your view while looking at them (in software engines). But it's nothing compared to the texture warping things would get, especially large objects like exploboxes. I imagine texture warping (especially when clipped to the side of the screen) is the primary reason they chose BSP over MDL.
Note: I'm a single player Quaker by the way. There are a lot of dmers who hate Quake single player.
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Last edited by Sajt on Sun Nov 11, 2007 2:36 am; edited 3 times in total

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daemon Joined: 07 Nov 2007 Posts: 62 |

Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2007 2:09 am Post subject: |

I remember reading somewhere that the origional design for Quake was supposed to be an RPG based off Thor mythologies. I also remember dragons flying around in some of the earliest screenshots. A bit of the dragon code is also left in the ai_walk function.
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