That was a fantastic episode, had a lot of fun. Great secrets and drooled at the beauty of some areas. Inspiring stuff!

Oh well. Now my fav secret is 'keep it safe keep it secret'. Really cool. I liked that. Not to mention that it was very pleasant to find o whole secret level! THANKS for the episode. It was great

Copper serves as - more or less - a refinement of vanilla game, and the new episode is a nostalgic trip through levels that feels not unlike classic episodes. Includes some wonderful combat situations, not to mention a new Chthon fight in the final map... and fully remade "end" map that caps Underdark Overbright AND original levels. The fight with Shub-Niggurath is fully redone and... won't spoil it, but it feels fresh and clever.

Incredible episode and a perfect introduction for the exemplary Copper modification. Easy 5/5 rating.

Awesome, played through on Remastered with no issues (copper mod worked great). Love the way secrets are telegraphed in this with cobwebs. 5/5 :)

This is an excellent episode that really lift the vanilla quake experience with careful refines and an modern level design. You have to play this!

Is it possible to access the "end" map without using console commands?

A great episode that showcases Copper's features nicely. Lots of creative and novel ideas in these maps; an easy 5/5 for sure!

Notes:

• Great item balance for a first time run on nightmare difficulty. Worked well for a careful player like me, who likes to spend a lot of time hunting for the remaining secrets before exiting (found all secrets in my run). I made sure to use rockets sparingly and the LG only for the most intense of scenes.

• I like the secret award in the start map, which helps with speedrunning in the episode proper (something that I didn't try out, though).

• I liked the novel usage of the drowning mechanic in udob2 and how even with the backtracking a twist was introduced every time, which spiced up the gameplay.

• I loved the introduction of the first arena in udob3 (my overall favourite map), allowing me to carefully inspect my surroundings before execution. I think I was a bit too hasty in killing the Vores instead of utilizing them for infighting, though. :D

• I'm a slow-paced exploration type player and some of the secrets in udob3 were simply amazing. My favourite secret, by far, was the gold key secret closest to the SNG. Secrets that involve puzzles like that are great, whereas I tended to miss secrets, where you have to hunt for some small obscure buttons in dark places. There was one such button in udob2 that I kept hunting for ages, which wasn't fun (even if the prize was good, a yellow armor). I ended up maxing out the game's brightness quite often during end-level secret hunting phase to make the chore of finding such buttons less tedious.

• I liked the big silver key fight in udob4. I like the moster balancing of Copper, such as making the enforcer fill a turret role and the "decheesing" of the Shambler, for example. The end twist was cool, too. I even accidentally ended up not wasting the quad damage that I had missed earlier in the level, because of the twist! I just unloaded my quad damage LG at the horde and they were soon deleted. xD

• I loved the dark cavern beginning of udob5, nice atmosphere. The visuals really reminded me of id maps. I also liked the platforming that rewarded people who like exploring. My favourite part of the map was probably the lava arena; great use of the new Copper features! I also liked the sky arena; the flying around the arena mechanic was creative and cool.

  I wasn't a very big fan of the pentagram arena. A good chunk of my deaths were suffered in that one. There was a good chance that when I'd teleport, a fiend would instantly pounce at me, and I'd be dead. The fight sure was chaotic and challenging, but I felt luck had too big of a role. Maybe it's exactly the teleport mechanic, because you cannot see what's on the other side, so you just have to hope you don't teleport next to a pack of fiends and ogres. Or maybe I just need to 'git gud'. ¯\ˍ(ツ)ˍ/¯

• The Chthon fight sure was greatly improved from vanilla Quake, even though Chthon still isn't that great of a boss to fight. Dodging his attacks is rather tedious, and I ended up dying a few times. I kinda wish id had made it possible to use your normal weapons against Chthon to stun him for a little bit, to make it safer for the player to reach the lighting buttons that do the actual damage.

• Loved the introduction to udob7; visually just amazing! However, the level itself turned out to look quite a bit different from what the visual setup made me expect, which threw me off a bit. I was expecting some sort of expansive cavern style map with blue rock walls, but instead it was a brown wizard style castle map. Besides this little nitpick the map itself was quite solid.

• I really liked how you provided some purpose and "personality" to the runes in the new end map. I loved how you made using the power of the runes mandatory (in the form of powerups) to be able to defeat Shub-Niggurath. Simply awesome!!

P.S. This was the first map pack I've played in a long time, so I had forgotten to record demos of the episode, like I had usually done in the past; sorry!

udob4 is a take on the Q3DM6 map and is fantastic. It's a classic layout that makes for a great map.

I just played through the campaign on co-op with my wife, who's never played Quake before, and it was great! The addition of more players was taken well into account in the level design, changing up the puzzles to accommodate the players and there may have been more monsters and resources, too.

Since my wife was new to Quake, we played on easy, but the game still felt challenging enough to keep us on our toes. We died only a few times: First on the Drowning, because the puzzle had changed, which resulted in us both drowning. My wife also died once in regular combat in the silver key room. (Really liking the respawn mechanic of Copper, btw.) Then a few lava deaths happened while fighting Chthon.

I think my favourite thing about the co-op changes was the aforementioned changing of the puzzles, especially in the Drowning: Considering how the map was already so inventive in iterating the puzzle in the single player mode, I found it super cool how one more way of completing the puzzle was added in co-op play!

The other maps also featured puzzle changes, but they were usually of the type of having both players press buttons simultaneously before a door could be opened, so not as elaborate as in the Drowning, but still cool, regardless. In fact, I think my wife liked the puzzle elements of the campaign the most. (She plays MMORPGs, mostly, not classic shooters.)

The Copper mod's other co-op changes also helped elevate co-op into a fully realized game mode. In addition to the aformentioned respawn mechanic, I really loved the quality of life feature of having platforms wait for other players to hop on before moving. I also ended up liking how the coop weapon pickup mechanic was changed.

The only thing I wasn't really a fan of were the "resource negotiations" whenever we'd come across a health or ammo pickup. I'd have to ask how much X resource my wife had before deciding who should pick it up. Here are some ideas I think could help with the hassle:

• Add HUD elements to show the other players' health, armor, ammo and other resources (e.g. keys), so players could more easily determine who should pick a particular resource. In addition to the HUD additions, maybe each player could have their health and armor numbers/bars float above their heads.

• If a pickup fills up the player's health/inventory, leave whatever's left of the pickup on the ground for later collection.

• Make it possible to drop ammo backbaps in Copper to help balance out resources.

• (Debatable: Automatically distribute health/ammo pickups between all the players in the immediate vicinity. Here's an example:

  There are three players standing close to each other, one with 25 nails, and two with 0 nails each. There are two large (50) nail boxes on the ground. When any of the three players picks up a box, the game gives nails only to the players who have no nails, 25 nails to each and the third, who already had 25 nails, gets nothing.

  Then, when the second nail box is collected, all three players get an even amount of nails. In this case, two players get 17 nails and one gets 16 nails, which makes 50 in total.)

Regardless, it was a great co-op experience, that I can recommend to others, too. My wife liked it enough to the extent, that she'd be willing to play other co-op campaigns later. I'd definitely like to try Forever Lost.

I finally had time to play through this. Well, I hate these conflicting states, but there is just that. On one hand, this was great, on the other, it was rather annoying for me.

Those who already played this know what this is about and will likely not agree with me, but anyway.

Technically, great episode. I really have nothing against the level design, I mostly really liked it and others already commented in detail on this. And I agree in general regarding this area. Especially the fact, that while it's certainly much more detailed than original Quake, it also doesn't try to be something too different in style, yet it manages to be different enough to still be quite familiar. This is especially true for the start map, which I will mention later.

What I don't really like about the whole episode is the general flow. That is not like Quake, it has those necessary interruptions, sometimes longer ones. What makes this worse are actually secrets. In the 'intermission' time, one spots a secret area. Not only he tries to catch the progress line, now he also gets busy with that secret. Some of which were frankly annoying to get to, or to spot, as those dark buttons mentioned by one of the players.

The worst part for me though was the final level. Chthon. Alright. Well, Chthon is dead as disco, why bother still reviving him? :D But if he's already here though, why design the killing-him-formula the way it was designed? Those portals and rockets were progressively massaging my nerves. But wait, there is a nice secret with pentagram. But fsck no! Disco boy's ball got me into the lava anyway! Aaaand so....F10 it was.

So I would say, go and play it and decide for yourself, because it's a lot of effort and can be for you.

But here is the best part of UDOB and that's the start map. Some already wrote about it and yeah, it's for me the best map in this mod. It's so great, that while I'm not a big fan of the rest, this one is simply a new classic that deserves to be released separately with proper SP monsters etc.

Thinking about it, this map sort of belongs to DOPA as it's first base level :)

A fantastic map set, but I still don't think I'm sold on Copper. For every good change it makes there are several questionable ones.

The levels are atmospheric and fun, I especially loved the puzzles to grab the gold keys in "Pit of the Living Dead" (and the way you can crush the Vores at the start). The starting map being an overgrown and decaying version of Quake's first level was amazing, and it reminded me of Portal 2's intro section.

I was pleased to find the secret level, and it had a really neat Halloween atmosphere to it. The map was just fun in general and I loved it.

I didn't really like "A Saint Nobody Has Heard Of", because there doesn't appear to be enough ammo to deal with the insane number of enemies when you pick up the keys on hard (I could have been playing it wrong somehow I suppose). "A Drowning" was also a little obnoxious, since the timing needed to survive the drowning sections are a little too tight in places and it resulted in a couple of cheap deaths.

I also had techincal issues with the final two maps due to my crappy machine. Basically, the skybox surrounding the player might be atmospheric but my computer hated it and the levels were unplayable due to the single digit framerate. Fortunately, there is a fix if you also encounter this - use the console command r_fastsky 1 and the animation slowing everything to a crawl is turned off, allowing you to enjoy the final levels properly!