Even with heapsize set to 1.5gb it will not run

Hunk_Alloc: Failed on 176 Bytes

-heapsize 1536000 works for me

Does anyone actually like those blue assholes from Zerstorer?

@PJA Just keep trying different heapsize amounts until it loads, sometimes a lower heapsize might help.

@dwere The blue enforcers? I like em. Once you know their attacks and the shield goes down they are easy to take out. Double barrel shotgun does the trick.

Possibly the worst map set ever created for Quake. Unrelentingly terrible in almost every way, with a vague sense of impressiveness in just how much confidence it must have taken to complete and not realize it's inherent badness.

Each level learns nothing from the last, each one is a completely optimized mess of brushes that offends the eye as much as the gameplay offends the senses. It's hard to say just what is so poor about it, but I can say with certainty that I would rather play Anoxia a million times before "playing" these again.

Well, thanks for reminding me to finish typing up my scattered thoughts on this release.

All maps here are huge (at least in terms of scenery, though often in playable area as well), but there's a mix of very "sandboxy" levels and levels with a more conventional structure. The sandbox maps include a desert town (fifth level), some kind of post-apocalyptic Paris complete with Eiffel Tower and huge demonic corpses bursting out of the pavement(7), and a abandoned Roman coliseum and surrounding complex (8). These maps all have open layouts with multiple widely-spaced key items to track down. I think these are the most successful because their gameplay matches the maps' size and scale: there's a lot of ground to cover, a sense of open-ended exploration that's more familiar from other games than from Quake and which makes you feel small, but also you're surrounded by MORE space that's not accessible but makes you feel smaller still. I think this is why these maps work so well. The other levels feel more like large-scale versions of "normal" Quake levels that stand apart from each other in their distinctive themes and gimmicks. I've commented before on my love for Blasocuyst (2nd level) with it's huge puzzle room, as well as the fourth level's dizzying and surreal take on the wizard theme.

With maps this huge there's always a risk of having too much 'empty' space, and I feel most of the maps here fared pretty well. I would maybe cite the first level (the island resort) and the sixth (the snowy mountain/village) as possible exceptions. They are both pretty wide-open once you get past the initial location, but have large areas that are essentially skippable and kind of repetitive, not particularly interesting in gameplay terms.

Thematically, the maps are a weird mixture of realism and abstraction. There's nothing linking the maps thematically except how out of place in Quake's universe they are. I mean, "realism" is not alien to Quake, neither is unusually otherworldly approaches to standard Quake themes, but it's strange (in a good way, I think) to see them in a single release, sometimes even combined in one map (the wizard level looms over scenery that is essentially a collage of photos of war-torn cities; the huge corpses in otherwise realistic Paris). Taken as a whole it creates a kind of uncanny effect. I'm reminded vaguely of the Doom WADs produced by a Russian team called Clan B0S, which also combine realism and abstraction in their layouts and aesthetics, to different (but still uncanny) effects. They also, incidentally, have drawn a similar mixture of praise and condemnation from players...

Gameplay-wise the maps are generally pretty tough on skill 2. Maybe a bit excessive at times in its use of Drake entities but it's not the worst thing to be guilty of.

It's worth noting all these levels can be played from shotgun start. Cool feature, as the maps are time-consuming enough, so it's good to be able to just skip to my favorites and replay them as I wish.

That's quite a compliment fairweather, to have the absolute worst map set in the entirety of Quake's history, worse than anything ever released from 1996 all the way until 2020, and without even explaining as to why its the most unrelentingly terrible, god awful most egregiously offensive Quake maps that someone would ever dare consider sharing online. That's gotta be a record.

Nightmare, shotgun starts, any%, 4.5 rounded up to 5 stars.

This is wonderful stuff. Gorgeous maps, exciting combat, and Drake's cast of enemies. Special praise for the final map, With Deference in Eminence, but I enjoyed all of them greatly. There is no sense of wasted space, the backtracking isn't obnoxious, especially because the author will add extra enemy encounters along the way. Just to go on a little more about Eminence, that was some of the most fun I've had in a shooter. Lots of dying to be sure, but damn that was great. The enemy placement was really on its A-game.

4.5 because of Galiduse Point. I like the idea a lot: Scaling the outskirts and mountains of this sleepy winter village, coming across the village and exploring/killing its inhabitants. But that none of the buildings were able to be entered really stung for how long we spend fighting in the streets of this village. There's a large cathedral, and I was so sure a fight was going to happen there, but it never did. Noclipping inside of it finds it totally empty. And then there's this out of nowhere military bunker with a tank that fires but can't aim at you, the grappling hook lets you get in places with dead ends; there are two exits, and you can reach the first one without ever facing the map's boss, and as far as I can tell there's no bonus for this. It's very indicative of being rushed. I'd much rather the author ixnayed the military bunker and focused more on the village. There are these caves which tease a network of something more, and I thought I was going to get a lot more use out of the grappling hook, but it leads to nothing interesting. None of this is damning, as I enjoy the map. The bit in the bunker where some enemies leap onto a ledge was really good, getting ambushed by axemen while exploring bushes for items was fun, and just fighting in this village at night was enjoyable as hell. But definitely loss of half a point for the problems it has.

[This comment had to be restored. See this thread for context. This means that there might be problems with its formatting or content missing. The information if the user posted while being logged in was not restored. -Spirit]

You would find me crazy for giving a score greater than 1-2 stars, but bear with me a bit.

It's true, this episode shares nothing in common with what people intimately associates with Quake and even maps like The Masque Of Red Death are midgets next to this one, questioning further if the giant aspect is actually a good thing. In those departments, it definitively lost lot of points and because the maps are so wide and large, functional elements like crushing rooms, torturous chambers etc are unheard of, further stripping away points. So why I give it a 3?

Surely, you can't help but laugh at how barren they are, but you cannot help but sit down and admit the external polishing (internal polishing is something else) is something to be recognized.

The best example I can come up with is Shib4, which is the Asian Temple. The details are absolutely gorgeous and it is little surprising my GTX 1660 Super somewhat loses some FPS when playing it. It does help the fact unlike other maps from this somewhat cursed episode, most combats takes place in tight indoor areas that arent much wider than what most levels would get accustomed to, making Shib4 much more playable. If you are insane enough to review every 1.5K+ maps Quaddicted has in store, you would definitively recognize some maps are absolute poorly aged monstrosities next to this episode. Yeah I am looking at you, 1916_v2.zip ...

So if it visually beautiful, why is it flat out trashed? I think if this episode was done for another franchise other than Quake (ideally something with a complete focus on IRL maps), it would have reached a much better score. But the creator of this episode has targeted the wrong audience and even me has a hard time to give a 4 stars. Speaking of " better belongs to another franchise ", you know when people says Doom 3 would have been better if it was a F.E.A.R gaming or something? They havent seen this one.

Deviation from the original is not a bad thing, as long as it all works well. Some people play Quake mods for a pure Quake experience, but in the end the authors will express themselves however the fuck they want, and will be right to do so.

That said, pretty much everything in Quake was made with close quarters in mind. That's why the engine struggles so bad, along with the player.

It is difficult to assess this episode unambiguously. One thing can be said - a lot doesn't always mean good. Such vast spaces should be teeming with secrets, branches and nooks. Otherwise, you get the impression that you are walking through a plywood film studio, where extras sometimes appear. There are no main characters. We all know perfectly well that an author can do quality things: the wonderful Conflagrant Rodent and the absolutely incredible Cataractnacon / Zeangala - a kind of techno abstractionism. My favorite here is shib2. I love puzzle style. And the huge centrifuge at the end is something special. I suppose the episode should be perceived as a demonstration of the capabilities of the Quake engine (to bring GeForces to its knees ;)

UPD: in my case I can run it with -heapsize 2048000

What are the differences between the Redux and regular versions of these maps? Is it worth it to play these if I have played the regular ones?

The Redux version updates maps 1 through 5 with not just Drake mod additions like monsters, weapons and items but also has bug fixes, visual improvements and in some cases design overhauls.

Cool, thanks. Too bad these don't work on my old computer, but I'll make sure to get back to them when I get (or if I ever get) a new one.

Hi,

could you make a version compatible with the Arcane Dimensions mod?

Thank you in advance. :)

Fairweather dropped the most scathing review anything's got on Quaddicted.

for people whose systems are choking on this:

The readme on the IronWail source port (Quakespasm fork) mentions this map pack as something a quake engine would coke on. So if you're dropping frames, try IronWail. https://github.com/andrei-drexler/ironwail

I sincerely love this set of maps for their audacity. They are uncompromising in scale and openly experimental. The sheer size of Ter Shibboleth's maps pushes hard against the limits of the Quake engine and until very recently with the release of the extremely optimised Ironwail and vkQuake source ports, it was only just on the borderline of playable. At its heart there's a sort of madness striking out against the conventional wisdom of what a Quake map should aim to do and years of best practices and honestly I can’t help but applaud the vision, even if the gameplay and visuals come across as unpolished and raw in places.

Yes, the bridge in shib1 is massive and hokey, the platforming and navigation in shib4 is awkward and you have to fight the physics engine to get up the towers. There are vast expanses of flat empty space in shib5 and there are some nasty difficulty spikes, but for me all of this is outweighed by the good: Each map has a unique theme, there are some genuinely lovely vistas, the little details are charming even when crude or garish, and all these awkward moments are offset by the joy in seeing a megastructure in the distance and actually being able to fight you way over to there in the Quake engine. Each map is a self-contained adventure, sometimes weird but always compelling. The journey in shib7 from the street to the end portal high above the city in particular is unforgettable.

The pairing with set of levels with Drake mod and its exhaustive bestiary and seemingly endless variety of weapons and powerups was also a good idea in my opinion. The maximalist approach of drake compliments the maps perfectly. Sticking to the vanilla bestiary with maps of this scale with the philosophy of building spaces and architecture as ends in themselves, rather than as a conduit for encounter design would make these maps dreadfully dull - mere curios to explore with noclip. Instead with Drake, you don't know what's going to be around every corner and the strange potential synergies with custom monsters generate their own interest. I have a decent level of familiarity with Drake and have read through most of the documentation multiple times but there are still frequent occasions where I come across a powerup or monster and can only ask "what the hell is that?" or had to rapidly adapt and improvise on the fly.

In many ways it shouldn't work, I can’t imagine having much patience for a set like this in any other game. But with Quake's movement physics and combat it somehow comes together and I think it’s a compelling experience. It's not a tightly wound, perfectly constructed episode where every individual element is designed to work in balanced harmony. Ter Shibboleth is sprawling and bursting with a hundred ideas. As a result, it's also messy and there are plenty of rough edges for a player to get snagged on, but that's not always bad thing. In any case, this sort of unique vision pursued without compromise is what makes modding for games like Quake so special. Kudos.