Quake – 30th Anniversary Update
slayersclub.bethesda.netIt is nice to see Quake getting some love from the publisher, but I feel like it is not enough.
A bit controversial opinion maybe but I really like Quake Champions and I spent a good amount of time playing it. I even bought some battle passes and merch to support the development. I was really sad that they basically put the game to life support just 1.5 years after its release. The game improved so fast during those 1.5 years, we were getting significant improvements with every patch. I always wondered how much more it would improve if they put just 1 more year into its development.
With the failure of Quake champs, unreal tournament 4, and diabotical in the past decade, I don't think we can blame the developers for not trying hard enough. All three were great games (regardless of how nit-picky the players might be), and all three failed at attracting and maintaining new players.
Unreal Tournament 4 didn't get a chance to fail because it was never a real release. UT4 was a free tech demo for Unreal Engine 4 that never got completed because Fortnite started taking off at that time and developers were deallocated from it.
And UT3 was definitely not a great game by anyone's measure.
It was never officially released, but it was on the front page of epic launcher for years, even after fortnite took off. The online experience was fairly complete and enjoyable (for people with experience) for ctf, duel, tdm, and team arena master. But yeah, epic didn't support it as much as they could have.
IIRC, Epic had (still has?) the source for UT4 available as they were trying to push community contributions, mostly on the playable content side but I'm fairly sure they had the core game there, based off what is now a very old branch of UE4. The telling thing to me is if there was a huge demand for it there was no significant effort to pick up the torch, or even do yet another 'spiritual successor'.
The source code repo is still on Epic's Github, not sure if everything else is that easy to get currently. The problem about picking it up by a 3rd party is the fun of getting approval on basically anything.
Eh, "boomer shooters" died along side with Halo and LAN parties. Minecraft was the final nail in the coffin.
The knack and knowledge of hosting a dedicated server required skills. If you could one click button host a Quake 3 Arena server or UT, there would still be sort of a crowd.
But not only that, if you were new: servers got toxic with the same grumpy players knowing every single trick in the map to one-shot kill you with a rail gun. It got frustrating playing the same bloody map each map change. "Oh yay, it's cs_office again" /s
The whole genre got stale and never has been successfully reignited. As Discord to TeamSpeak; same misfortune.
Fortnite killed Team Fortress, Overwatch killed Halo and Minecraft was the new digital lego. None of them required such a skill to play or host the game. It was refreshing for it's time.
Not forgetting it was the upcoming of a new crowd of folk and as generations go, the old cards topple.
Who hosted an BBS when the internet came to be?
IRC today is pretty much stuck in dinosaur country and XMPP/Jabber never got a product which then was further nailed shut by Google & Co.
It was epic fun for the era but it had a death bed waiting.
Wut? We're in a Renaissance of boomer shooters right now. There's like hundreds of new ones and it's a popular category. Just check out civvie11's channel if you disbelieve.
They're just all single player focused.
Single player maybe, but that's nothing compared to the likes of UT or Quake.
I don't know about that. I've pretty continuously been playing games like UT99, UT2k4, Quake (specifically Quake Fortress), TFC, AvP2 since release. Even things like Space Station 13 and King Arthur's Gold.
It's not the only thing going anymore, but also people have orders of magnitude more choices. That's the thing that's missing today. Nothing is "dead", there's just too much competition now.
Honestly the aforementioned games have had much more staying power than more recent multiplayer games. And they're mostly played by old men like me.
The people behind UT were reallocated to make Battle Royale mode for Fortnite which is the reason of the take off, not vice versa.
I think games that are heavily reliant on online pvp are just always going to struggle with being more niche appeal. Matchmaking is hard to do well and consistently, and managing the skill/progression curve is hard— there's gotta be things in there to master, but also new players will never join if they're just getting stomped every game because they can never catch up.
This tension has arguably been a contributing factor in the collapse of the ARC Raiders playerbase, with a huge population who joined primarily to shoot and loot the robots eventually confronting the realities of a pvpve game, and peacing out for good after getting shot in the back or ambushed too many times.
Not just that but I believe that even those folk that have these huge hits don't really understand how they managed to do it. There just seems to be so much luck involved on top of a great product. You can have a brilliant game and still fail because it doesn't get picked up in just the right way.
Sort of like how Nintendo had the Wii, a huge hit but then almost immediately started to flounder for growth ideas as they didn't understand why it worked so well.
I was gung ho to play Quake Champions, then the monetized the shit out of it and I fucked off.
UT4 was a tech demo.
Twitch shooters are niche in the first place, and it has an even more niche player base that isn't majority American. I think it's a hard sell when 90% of the diehard community built their skill on Quake Live, which comparatively takes far less resources than Champions or UE4. Bethesda then switched the F2P status of Champs and Live, which was not a popular move.
Don't forget Reflex Arena!
> all three failed at attracting and maintaining new players
This means that they not necessarily were all that great.
They were great examples of what an arena shooter should be. Smooth movement, balanced weapons, well designed maps. The people who had experience with arena shooters liked them. Most new players did not want to get rekt for months on end while they learned the basics, however.
> Most new players did not want to get rekt for months on end while they learned the basics, however.
If that's the new player experience, you done fucked up. Making sure new players actually have fun is a critical part of the game's design. You can't just rely on "...and then new players will have to spend 50-60 hours getting demolished before they start having a good time."
Easing that transition could mean different things -- a campaign, skirmish mode vs bots, full-on PvE co-op mode, automatching that actually works, whatever -- but you do need something effective.
Splitgate matched new players with bots for the first few hours. It meant I had fun (then eventually I levelled up enough, matched with players, got stomped, and never picked it up again…)
Marvel Rivals quietly matched your team up with bots if you lost twice in a row. I think that was a good system.
Overwatch too, but it got boring after a while and their matchmaking was atrocious.
Only in the rather reductive sense of “the vast majority of gamers are into other genres now”.
Popularity and quality are two very different things. There are many brilliant games that simply didn't get much attention simply because of luck or attention got dragged somewhere else.
It can also mean the market has shifted which is more the case imo.
Well, this update doesn't mean much overall in the Quake scene, if you actually play it for the PvP. Quake Live has held it down since 2012-ish, and was always a free-to-play game.
Champions came out, most of the community from Quake Live stayed on live. Bethesda in all their wisdom made it cost $10, I assume to sway new gamers into downloading Champions (which they also made F2P shortly after release). So effectively, they swapped the F2P of both games, and the free one is the less preferred option in the scene.
Quake Champions was the Mortal Kombat to Overwatch's Street Fighter. I've only ever seen gameplay vids of it, but it looked a trip.
Was fun, the never ending pursuit of balancing game balance with adding new stuff just watered it all down with the glaring obvious detail: stop all the hero bullshit and just make us all equal. At least a mode for that. Instead, speed, armour, health was all varied and unique "balanced" in their minds against active and passive perks per character.
A lot of potential, killed by committee
Quake is 30 years old. I can't believe I'm still alive. I love this game so dearly. The mods were just incredible, KQP and Girobot in particular.
Those were the for real LAN party days which I'll never get back. As in I had friends bringing over their big ass CRT monitors and PCs for a single occasion and also had ludicrously long network cables. My parents didn't mind, they somehow understood, even with LAN wires running across the kitchen floor. Priceless.
Edit: typo: lab -> LAN
3 weeks ago, John Romero did a play through while discussing the entire design and build process of the game.
It was actually pretty cool how they designed the first room to demonstrate almost every new feature of the engine and how the first level is made to walk you though most of the new gameplay features.
hell yeah, my first real LAN game experience on Windows was the Quake test/alpha that preceded the release of the game (IIRC?), when I was at a local tech school for a class. We weren't technically allowed to load the game on the uni PC's but like.. yeah... it happened. And we did zero work for that day (or days). (Prior LAN experience was Marathon and Bolo in the Mac lab which was insanely awesome too, and a year earlier lol)
You can go download it again here:
https://archive.org/details/q3DemoTEST
There were multiple test releases. You can find the older ones out on the web.
There was a way that you could trim the files just right that you could fit the Quake executable and a single multiplayer map onto a floppy disk. Those things were treasured as you could easily just hide them wherever.
Definitely made high school much more fun.
Honestly the best of times. I wouldn't be able to pay rent were it not for videogames which inspired me to work in the software industry.
I wish we could get those days back. Cars loaded with CRT monitors and big machines and bags of all sorts of stuff.
> lab -> LAN
Ah yes, those lab parties.
I to recall the days of all synthesising LSD and playing Quake too.
PROTIP: Install the Kex-engine remaster, but then actually play IronWail: https://github.com/andrei-drexler/ironwail
It's a real IdTech source port that will load the Remaster's PAKs and pretend to be the Remaster to Steam for achievement unlocks.
Dimension of the Machine was fantastic so I'm hyped to play Dawn of the Machine tonight :D
>PROTIP: Install the Kex-engine remaster, but then
You should rephrase this as just "Install Quake on Steam, but then" for newcomers who need this advice to be able to understand it.
Yeah I guess I should have added “(the Steam version)”, but that was an intentional context clue because I bet most people here who haven't been paying lots of attention to Quake would assume that the currently-sold version was based on the actual Quake engine, because why wouldn't it be when it's like the game engine that's most-famous for being portable?
IronWail issue for Dawn of the Machine support: https://github.com/andrei-drexler/ironwail/issues/550
And the new update to the KEX Remaster would't even launch for me; just crashes immediately with a “see CRASHLOG.TXT” message. I had to add `+r_rhirenderfamily "d3d11" +d3d11_compileShaders 1` to my Steam launch options, and it plays but with lots of texture glitching. This is on Intel 11th-gen integrated (Framework Laptop 12).
Nine Inch Nails also has some new merch and soundtrack album for the 30th anniversary:
I hate the trend of selling vinyl but not selling Compact Disc.
Memories, many memories. I remember the endless nights playing Quake on dial-up, 190 ms ping, listening to Nirvana.
There are still people playing on some servers, and the challenge is higher than ever. Although I still have the reflexes, the tics, and I know the maps and respawn times, I had a very hard time fitting into the games. I imagine that for someone starting today, it must be impossible to face 30 years of muscle memory.
No Switch 2 mouse mode support?
I have no idea what any of these are LOL
Dawn of the Machine is available as a free update for Quake owners on XBOX Series X/S, XBOX One, Microsoft PC Store, Game Pass, PC Game Pass, Steam, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch 2 (via backwards compatibility), and Nintendo Switch versions of Quake.
I do still have my Quake CDs...
Same.
Weird to see a DLC for a game that's older than Steam. Would have been more interesting if they released the WADs or whatever that you could play on the open source version of the game. (All of this is interesting in light of MS's recent hallowing of their game studios.)
When Quake was popular, CDs were far and away the most popular install method. They're locking a lot of OG owners out (unless they're hoping to drive a trickle of $4 Steam sales).
These are out for the enhanced release all owners of Quake on Steam/GoG got for free when Nightdive remastered Quake I/II.
Unfortunately they break the limits of the original game engine and usually require something like Darkplaces[0] to run. Although I highly recommend darkplaces for even players of the original Quake because the QoL improvements are nice.
I figured as much. Some of the addons for the 'modern' Quake seem to really stretch it way beyond anything we saw out of the original engine.
Also love that there is a 50% chance that you can crash a Ps4/Switch just loading a level with the Slave Zero mod that they provide. They are pushing it fairly hard with that one.
They're called "pak"s for quake :)
It's been so long since I've put the CD in, I forgot.
Quake launched 2 full years after Playstation 1, so I find it somewhat unlikely you've never heard of a Playstation. And if you have it on CDs you must have played it on PC with Microsoft Windows, so I'd assume a Microsoft PC Store should at least let you guess what it is.
Quake was a DOS game.
It was actually both in one executable. Pretty neat. But I will agree that OP might have played it in Microsoft Dos on a PC, so the original point still applies.
Every emoji in this post seems bigger than the last.
Where did that trend start? Who writes like that, with emoji bullet points? I'm seeing it around, but surely nobody looks at that and says "yeah that's good"?
Around 2020, I think tools like Notion (notion.so) made it popular. Even the Huggingface itself is an emoji...
I remember when someone registered (poopemoji).la
It does show up as the poop emoji followed by .la in google search results, but not in a firefox address bar.
>but not in a firefox address bar.
That is by design (on Firefox's part) to avoid someone registering e.g. steаmpowered.com (notice а as U+0430 instead of a as U+61) and running a scam that looks valid on the address bar.
Yes absolutely to avoid phishing sites with idn homograph, homoglyph attacks. Personally I'd like to see the punycode first then the emoji
LLM-driven writing's been a big part of this trend, unfortunately.
But that means it had to be a trend already to be overrepresented in the training corpus, right? Or was it just something the RLHF evaluators got a kick out of...
It was common before but the LLMs took it to the extreme. They seemed to have mostly fine tuned it though. Page copy definitely smells like ai
I've really seen it a lot in Discord channels that have [emoji]channelname Occasionally in some channels lists may be bullets with emojis particularly the welcome/rules, usually to match reaction emojis, or to automate channel(s) selection (click on the youtube icon to get notified when a youtube vid is posted, etc.)
ChatGPT was the first place to really do it to this extent
Look inward at our infantile and excessively positive industry. We are just trying to have fun! Do you hate fun?
Did an LLM draft this garbage copy?
Yes.
Likely em units and missing closing tags.
Does the new episode work well in opensource ports? (don't feel like installing steam rn and don't care about nightdive port)
The modding changes mentioned at the bottom of TFA seem to imply that text strings won't render properly until the source ports are updated. You're going to have to install the NightDive port anyway to download the new episode. I don't think they have a separate download for it. I'd imagine everything else might work okay already or will be fixed alongside the string issues.
They need changes to support it, but I don't expect it to take long. Both vkQuake and IronWail work well with the previous new official episode (Dimension of the Machine) and the remastered models after they were updated for that.
Is this an update for the original quake or do you need one of the newer ones?
It's for people who own the original game on Steam or one of the other supported digital storefronts.
New. Modern platform versions from their respective stores.
Whilst they owe me nothing with the amount I played my CD, feels a bit harsh to trade on the 30th aniversary but only support much newer sales.
They have modified the engine heavily since and thus it doesnt really roll back to the older releases. Also, I think it is on discount currently and only costs a few dollars.
The quality of life improvements are done very well and I would recommend. Heck even if just for the new lighting engine.
I have zero real excuse for never having built the game from source.
I have played with the modding surface available in the quakeC files tho!
I was experimenting with a game design element where firing a weapon didnt decrement the ammo, but auto fired.
In other words, you always fired whatever you had out, removing the ammo hoarder behavior, but also makes you very cognizant about explosive barrels and where you point that rocket.
The Quake type of graphics but in HQ makes it look a WHOLE lot like Dusk the game.
Surprised they didn't port these to Mac yet. Between M series and Game Porting Toolkit (4 now?) it seems like small effort can unlock huge wave of new players nostalgic for childhood game.
Nope. Unless Game Porting Toolkit is free and open like Proton, there is little to no prospect of the macOS gaming landscape to improve.
I had the Mac version of Quake II.
They encoded the game as an audio CD, so you could toss the disc in a boombox and listen to the soundtrack when you weren't playing. Very cool!
This was actually just how CDDA music tracks worked in almost all CD games in the late 90s. :)
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 got more play in my car than they ever did in my Playstation.
HOLY SHIT THOSE SOUNDTRACKS WERE JUST CDS?!
THPS and Crazy Taxi had some of the best soundtracks ever compiled.
That was standard practice in the 90s. Track 1 on the CD is the data track, and subsequent tracks are standard CD audio tracks that happen to be played in the game.
If the game didn't require accessing data on the CD after installation, you could even swap the CD with a different album and listen to what you want.
This was very common at the time. I suspect there was a technical reason, maybe freeing up the CPU and memory from dealing with music and offloading that to the CDROM drive.
It was just a standard way to play CD-quality audio tracks (by actually playing CD audio tracks!).
There's a reason you used to have a separate four-pin cable going from the CD drive to the sound card ;)
Due to the way computers cost a fortune back then, you could skip huge parts of hardware changes in the space of a few years. I must have skipped over that part and jumped from no CD audio (or CD-ROM at all) to, everything over IDE.
Never knew about the 4 pin link.
Strictly speeking the was a seperate track with the game, the music was just in the native Audio CD format.
How many hours did you play when you found out you can dismiss the "computer updated" notification?
AKA redbook audio
If you read this and you haven’t played arcane dimensions yet, drop everything and go and do that. It makes the quake the best single player FPS ever. The mechanics are even better than vanilla quake, the maps are gorgeous, the enemies diverse and fun. Absolute perfection
I adore Quake custom levels, but any time I want to play one, the half thousand source ports, the accessory tools to manage wads that work only on Windows (I'm on Linux), figuring out how to get a shady copy of the original .wad from shady sites, all send my brain into analysis paralysis and I just lose any interest. I must have tried half a dozen times over the years, and every time there's even more options and recommendations than last time.
Reminder that the NIN Quake soundtrack rules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv5Jvr2Fp48&list=PLs7s7YCW40...
Seconded!
Is there a technical reason why this update won’t land on GOG?
The FAQ reads as "not yet", not "won't". This is second-hand but my impression is that publishing patches through GOG is not as easy as through other platforms (possibly because of their need to build new installers?).
Emoji are clear indicators an LLM wrote this post. Ugh.
I bet this is an attempt by Microsoft at trying to win back fans.
I also noticed IShowSpeed and Kai Cenat promoting a Minecraft playthrough, which I would assume is paid for by Microsoft given what they’ve been saying lately: https://youtu.be/IgJru9870_A
We will be inundated with low-effort fan service until morale improves.
Doesn't seem like it would be very effective. I assume the overlap of Quake fans and people who have sworn off Microsoft forever is large.
While that does seem intuitive, they have been doing this kind of stuff with Quake/Quake 2 for many years now. The nightdive refresh was offered for free to anyone who purchased the originals on steam for instance.
I had to stop playing online FPS's because the cheating got so bad. I really miss the days of COD/MW2, that was kind of peak for me. I had been playing since Doom on modems... but never saw the cheating so bad. Instant spawn, headshot, nuke.
I don't have a PC anymore so most of the top tier FPS games I can't play anyway since they require kernel level anti-cheat.
I have Quake on Steam. Just updated, but I do not see Dawn of the Machine.
I see it at the bottom once you select "NEW GAME".
Does it work with the MS-DOS version?
Not likely. The modern version of the quake engine is heavily modified to handle much larger work loads and flexibility.
Haven't looked at it yet but I suspect these maps probably blow over many memory limits that most DOS machines would have had.