DraQ has written exhaustive essays on the subject as to why he hates Quake 2. I'm sure he'll point them out. I disagree with pretty much everything he says, though, as Quake 2 was one of the best co-op campaign experiences I had
And someone's best cRPG experience might have been Oblivion.
Odds are, something you like very much sucks.
Why? Because this is the RPGCodex.
You might have some grounds for disagreeing with me if I based my critique on subjective stuff like not liking weapons or themes.
The problem is that while I do consider Q2 vastly inferior in those aspects my critique isn't based on them.
It is based on objective factors:
- Q2 enemies are dumb, react slowly, can't aim, aren't too numerous and deal piss poor damage, which makes the game autofail in gameplay aspect.
- The game lacks diversity or other things of interest to carry it despite its gameplay failings - even if you fucking love identical metal boxes and grey corridors, they can only hold your attention for so long before you get bored.
It's as simple as that - whether someone likes Unreal is a matter of personal taste. SP Quake 2, OTOH is just objectively poor, because the best shooter having neither viable gameplay, nor interesting environs nor any other redeeming factors can hope for is utter mediocrity and SP Q2 hits that mark.
Perhaps, but in a game as narrative-lite as Unreal, it's not really needed at all, and most of these felt like wastes of time.
That's just bullshit. Even game as light on narrative as Doom acknowledged the importance of environmental progression (sky and level themes).
Unreal is actually meant to be cohesive and consistent, if still p. oldskool, so those links are crucial, not to mention that some of them are also some of the most memorable vistas in game.
You can accomplish these transitions using maps with actual, you know, decent gameplay, or better yet, forget them and just build short transitions sections into existing maps.
Being short doesn't deprive those levels of gameplay - for example Trench wasn't a very long or complex level, but it had a titan battle, gasbags and skaarj.
Besides, merging those maps into others might have been problematic - if we are speaking of short level using different themes and texture palette (those textures need to be allocated somewhere, you know) squeezed between two others pushing the PCs of that time to their limits, while developing them further might have been non-viable for a game that was already really large by genre's standard and stuck in development hell for 5 years.
To be honest, I like the expansion.
I dislike it. It lacks cohesion and atmosphere, has many indistinct locations, shitty new weapons and falls apart in terms of progression and internal logic after midpoint.
It has some genuine highlights but as a whole it's shit and a fitting prelude to atrocity known as Unreal 2, also developed by Legend.
To be honest, I like Quake a lot
Quake *1* is good, although it falls a tiny bit short of Unreal in terms of weaponry and enemy diversity, plus it lacks genuinely interesting environments.
Still, it's both atmospheric and plays really fucking well.
Quake *2* is just Carmack's "DURR I WANT TO SHOOT A CYBORG" with some interesting level layouts, but boring environs, enemies and kindergarten mode gameplay regardless of difficulty level.
I think the problem is that in Quake 2 the enemies take way too long to actually start shooting at them, so you can get away with just running past all of them. But you'd be surprised how many shooters you can beat without actually shooting anyone - Half-Life is an especially good example of being winnable just by running past everything.
Run past? You wish. You can pretty much fart everything to death in that game.
At least in HL running past stuff was somewhat justifiable, plus it just just blew Q2s ass off in terms of actual gameplay.
The counter-argument to the above, however, is that sometimes restricting the player is actually better than giving tons of options if your goal is not to facilitate player choice, but to facilitate diverse objectives and scenarios. Remember that we aren't talking role-playing games here, but pure shooters - while normally I would say meaningful player choice is at the forefront of good gameplay, it's also worth considering that in an arcade shooter, those choices usually boil down to micro-level decisions (movement, aiming, firing, weapon selection) rather than broader decisions of play-style (stealth vs. carnage), and I'm not sure it's fair to say that a shooter is inferior because it limits what the player does in a given scenario simply because other games with different intents feature those broader choices.
Interactivity is always a strength in an interactive medium.
For example Blood was a pretty simple game centered around killing a lot of shit in gruesome manner. It doesn't change the fact that it benefited a lot from being able to sequence break the levels and lob dynamite at cultists expecting you tome from completely different direction.
In a sense game focusing around player's choice of approach, like Deus Ex or Dishonored are natural extension of original FPS games.
I actually don't know this one. Do you recommend it?
