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So... Quake...

GarfunkeL

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Quake was fucking amazing back in the day and you losers need to learn to play it. The basic zombie guys can be taken down with the basic shotgun easily enough and the double-shotgun takes out the machinegunners in one shot too. Different enemies have different resistances to different weapons and you need to learn which weapon to use against which enemy which required more brainpower than Doom, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people whine about enemies being bullet sponges.
 
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I recently played through all of Quake I, right after playing through Doom, and at first I had the same problems: weapons felt too weak and the enemies had too much HP. I was playing it as if it were Doom, using Shotgun and Nailgun most of the time despite the former being much weaker than its Doom counterpart and the latter using too much ammo to be sustainable. However, once I started using the Grenade/Rocket Launcher as primary weapons, saving the Nails for Fiends and Shamblers, everything felt much smoother. The design makes this very easy to do, as the most common enemies, Ogres, drop Rockets, and the ability to jump and utilise the 3D level designs helps with avoiding splash damage despite the levels generally being more cramped and claustrophobic. I think the Rocket Launcher is to Quake as the (Super) Shotgun is to Doom, and once I realised that then the game became much more fun.

Exactly. Anyone who makes risible complaints about bullet sponges clearly failed to understand what the game was trying to communicate (it is more demanding that Doom:dance:). Besides, having enemies keel over after a few shotgun shots would do a great disservice to the great level and enemy design.

And any game that allows this



is a masterpiece.
 
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But Quake enemies ARE bullet spongy, by design - they simply could not fit as many models onscreen at the time as they could sprites in Doom, so they had to make individual enemies more resilient.

It is true that explosive weapons are more efficient, but that's self evident because they simply do a higher gross amount of damage. There's no such thing, at least not to my knowledge, of specific enemies being specifically resistant to certain weapon types in the base Quake.
 
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Divinity: Original Sin
I played original quake in early 2000's. It didn't get stuck on my mind. I only remember that I played and finished it. I thought shub-niggurath boss fight was very clever, and it's the only original level besides e1m1 that is stuck in my mind.

Recently, I've installed quakeinjector to try some fan missions, but it didn't really captured me like doom levels.

I feel the fan made levels are really top notch architecturally, but I feel it's kind of wasted enviroments just to kill some trolls. Those map jams are a great sight to behold, but once you play them, it's just kill, kill, kill.

I can't actually name what makes quake less attractive to me, because doom is just kill, kill, kill too. But i think monster design is more generic and there's not a lot variety. And the lack of explanation about setting and so on

Oh, and i hate those asymmetric guns. I actually found a mod that straights them up, makes it bearable. But it only makes vanilla guns right. Guns introduced in the official expansions are not fixed.

Another quake "mod" I played was that X-men one, but it is really boring after fighting wave after wave of fake 90's xmen.
 
In My Safe Space
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Quake was fucking amazing back in the day and you losers need to learn to play it. The basic zombie guys can be taken down with the basic shotgun easily enough and the double-shotgun takes out the machinegunners in one shot too. Different enemies have different resistances to different weapons and you need to learn which weapon to use against which enemy which required more brainpower than Doom, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people whine about enemies being bullet sponges.
No, you fucking cretin. Bullet-sponginess is lame in itself. Just as health regen grinding and other degenerate shit.
Seeing people eat a shotgun blast and live is fucking lame.

I bet you love League of Legends.
 

GarfunkeL

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I dunno, I haven't played it.

The basic zombie guys die off with 2 shots from the shotgun at close range. Double-shotgun one shots them if you actually hit 'em. The grenade/chainsaw-ogre things die with 2 or 3 double-shotgun spreads in the face - again if you're close enough. Because you constantly run around, it's very easy to miss enemies or only hit them partially. Yes, the Quake enemies in general take more punishment than Doom enemies but the difference isn't massive and Quake punishes the player for his mistakes more harshly than Doom. I've put enough hours in both of them.
 

Tehdagah

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I recently played through all of Quake I, right after playing through Doom, and at first I had the same problems: weapons felt too weak and the enemies had too much HP. I was playing it as if it were Doom, using Shotgun and Nailgun most of the time despite the former being much weaker than its Doom counterpart and the latter using too much ammo to be sustainable. However, once I started using the Grenade/Rocket Launcher as primary weapons, saving the Nails for Fiends and Shamblers, everything felt much smoother. The design makes this very easy to do, as the most common enemies, Ogres, drop Rockets, and the ability to jump and utilise the 3D level designs helps with avoiding splash damage despite the levels generally being more cramped and claustrophobic. I think the Rocket Launcher is to Quake as the (Super) Shotgun is to Doom, and once I realised that then the game became much more fun.
Having to use the same two weapons 90% of the time isn't exactly a very fun thing to do in a single-player campaign.

Was Quake the first dudebro shooter? It's even brown and grey :troll:
 

dunno lah

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2 SSG shots to down Ogre? No way, man. Average it takes 4. GL/RL downs Ogre in 2 hits.

I think q1's game balance is on par with the Dooms. Q1 may seem underwhelming because its so spartan in presentation. Personally, I love its purity as a shooter. Most of the time, I love Doom more. Other days, can't stop thinking of Q1.
 

Carrion

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Quake was one of the first shooters I played along with Spear of Destiny and the shareware versions of Duke 3D and Doom, so I've got a soft spot for it, and I still have the original boxed version somewhere. I don't rate the game quite as highly as Doom, because the gameplay and combat are not quite as flawless and satisfying, but it has different strengths. For me Quake was never a mass murder simulator but rather a game where you explore dark and atmospheric locations populated with nightmare creatures, and even though I can't stand bullet sponges, the fact that the enemies were more resilient and fewer in number compared to Doom and other games never bothered me one bit. They had obviously put a lot of thought into enemy placement instead of just randomly sprinkling them around, which lead to some very memorable encounters and made the levels feel thematically consistent.

It's true that the levels were kind of small, but on the other hand they did make great use of verticality and had some very memorable architecture in places.
 
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Another practical reason for the Quake levels being less sprawling than Doom levels was the fact that there was no ingame automap. I love the vertical space, though.
 
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Never really liked Quake particularly much. I played it a ton of course, when you are young and your parents buy 1 game every other month if you're lucky, you play what you get a lot. But I've never felt the urge in later years to load it up again and run through the campaign or download some new levels, which is something I regularly feel like doing for a game like DOOM, Duke Nukem, Jedi Knight, etc.

It's not just that early 3D is ugly, 3D is also really bad at communicating the state of the enemy (moving, attacking, hit-stunned). It's not specifically a Quake issue, I don't think there's a single 3D FPS that utilizes hit stuns as well as Doom. Because of this its simply not as enjoyable to shoot enemies and you have to evade attacks preemptively because you can't see shit coming rather then casually sidestepping fireballs like a cool guy.

Small areas also really work against the gameplay. Not levels specifically, but rooms and corridors are undersized such that you simply can't strafe effectively and end up needing to just back up while shooting.
 

Sam Ecorners

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Quake was my first MP game. I played it over LAN at a university in the old country, where I was taking afterschool programming classes. It was great. DM on the level select map, when 8 times out of 10 you didn't even have a chance to make a single move. Just spawn right in front of a rocket.

Good times.
 
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But enemies stagger when you hit them hard enough.

It just doesn't work effectively in practice.

In Doom you can be almost point blank with a Mancubus or Baron and completely shut down their attacks by interrupting their attack animation. Against Shamblers or Ogres that's suicidal.

Also not being able to interrupt the jump of Fiends with a good double shotgun blast like you could lost souls is pure fucking bullshit.
 
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What about the mission packs? I actually owned both of them back in the day but I remember not liking them very much. I haven't had the patience to replay either... what do you guys think of them? I remember one of them had the actual Quake hammer that was planned for the base game and the boss was a dragon or something, right? Was that the Rogue one or the other one?
 

octavius

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What about the mission packs? I actually owned both of them back in the day but I remember not liking them very much. I haven't had the patience to replay either... what do you guys think of them?

I thought the first one was better than the core game, while I got tired of the second one.
 

dunno lah

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Average Manatee You're already so fucking fast in Quake that you should have no problem circlestrafing Fiends and Ogres. E4 mazes are a little frustrating and the ones I'd really call cramped. Most of the time they trap you in a room just big enough for you to move around and all you need to do is kill as quickly as you can.

Speaking of cramped, Doom too had many narrow corrridors stuffed with Pinkies. Play them on Pistol start and tell me you don't have to do the occasional backpedaling and clever "dribbling" past them.
 

Lyric Suite

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Is there anything inherently bad about bullet sponginess in and of itself? Or is it just a matter of context? It kinda bothers me how Codexers think a particular design technique is bad in itself without considering implementation. I mean, even cover mechanics could be good if done well, and i don't see the issue in using a popemole tactic to take down something like a Shambler. What else can you do anyway, short of dodging their melee attacks, which is quite tricky to do? Let's not even talk about the Vores.

To me, one of the hallmarks of Quake is the constant dancing you have to do. In this sense, the bullet sponginess of the enemies actually sort of plays into that style. The use of explosives can mitigate on the sponginess but you then have to deal with the blast range not to mention ammo conservation. I'm not going to say that the game is perfect and that hardware limitation didn't have an effect on their design, but personally what they did works well enough and Quake remains a great FPS despite its shortcomings. The gameplay is also relatively challenging which is a plus. Quake is certainly one of those games where you have to be on your best at all times if you don't want to get on a constant save and reload loop.

If there is one thing they should have done better is the last boss. Not that it matters since the overall game was quite good but it always gives me a foul taste when a game has such a weak final encounter.
 
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95% of Quake maps are cramped enough such that if the enemy is in the exact center of the room you can barely make a circle and if they are at all off to a side you have to make a semi circle. That's just criminal for a game that is about circle strafing.

Circle strafing at the speed of mach 1 is also simply boring to do the entire game for every enemy. Doom was much more engaging and games like Serious Sam which are about circle strafing handle the whole gameplay concept much better (note that SS also has huge open levels as well).

If there is one thing they should have done better is the last boss. Not that it matters since the overall game was quite good but it always gives me a foul taste when a game has such a weak final encounter.

Heh, the last boss, the first boss, and all of the missing bosses really show how incomplete the game is. Along with the paltry weapon selection, half the weapons being just boosted versions of the previous, and a weak enemy selection. Really Quake needed a Quake 2 that expanded upon the game in the way Doom 2 did.
 

Carrion

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circle strafing
The default controls are designed for keyboard only, and while strafing is certainly useful, it's really not a Serious Sam type game where you want to do it all the time in huge circles or something. Neither is Doom for that matter, but Quake even less. Like you said yourself, the levels are really not designed for it, as most of the time you'll just fall off a ledge or something.
 
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The alternate strategy for Quake is backing up and popamoling, which is worse (and required by hitscan enemies like Shamblers). I don't think anyone here is going to defend popamole, yes?
 

Carrion

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Grunts are the only true hitscan enemies in Quake. Also, false dichotomy is false, and taking cover in order to not get shot doesn't in itself equal popamole anyway.
 

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