Is there a reason why Quake 2's mapping community didn't take off quite like Quake or even Doom/Doom 2?

[Lizardcommando]

I am aware of mods like Action Quake 2, Air Quake and that Generations mod where you could play either as Bitterman, Quake Ranger, Doomguy and BJ Blazcowicz, but there doesn't seem to be as many notable mapsets for Quake 2, at least as far as I can tell. Is there a reason why the Q2 mapping community didn't take off compared to Quake and Doom/Doom 2's mapping community?

[Captain red pants]

Isn't the way Quake 2 handles textures a massive pain in the ass? At least that's what I vaguely remember from fiddling with it back in the day with WorldCraft back in the day.

[Edward850]

It's just textures inside of a pak file, nothing complicated at all.

[Biodegradable]

58 minutes ago, Lizardcommando said:

Is there a reason why the Q2 mapping community didn't take off compared to Quake and Doom/Doom 2's mapping community?

 

Theoretically, I imagine Quake 2 being a lot less popular than the first one, combined with Quake level editors being a fair bit more complicated, are probably contributing factors as to why.

[Captain red pants]

Thinking on it a bit more, it might be because Doom and Quake 1's are such a mish-mash of stuff that id software devs thought where cool that you can have almost any kind of theme you can imagine for a map and get away with it: Want a tech base? A hellish landscape? A spooky castle? A city? Ruins of a lost civilization? Something with cliffs and canyons? All quite doable with both games base assets! Throw in some texture packs and you can go even more crazy.

Quake 2 decided to focus on a theme and all it's assets reflect that. It's pretty much different flavors of tech base with some rocky canyons and warehouse. Now, I'm not say you can't get creative with those assets as anyone who's played "Call of the Machine" can attest, but if you just want to make something a bit weird with the setting, Doom and Quake 1 will give you a bit more to work with imo.

[Professor Hastig]

7 minutes ago, Captain red pants said:

Thinking on it a bit more, it might be because Doom and Quake 1's are such a mish-mash of stuff that id software devs thought where cool that you can have almost any kind of theme you can imagine for a map and get away with it: Want a tech base? A hellish landscape? A spooky castle? A city? Ruins of a lost civilization? Something with cliffs and canyons? All quite doable with both games base assets! Throw in some texture packs and you can go even more crazy.

Quake 2 decided to focus on a theme and all it's assets reflect that. It's pretty much different flavors of tech base with some rocky canyons and warehouse. Now, I'm not say you can't get creative with those assets as anyone who's played "Call of the Machine" can attest, but if you just want to make something a bit weird with the setting, Doom and Quake 1 will give you a bit more to work with imo.

 

I don't think it's the assets but the overall presentation of the game.

Doom and Quake's 'story' is rather abstract and that is mirrored in the user content. But even so the key to this question is already there: Just look at the text files and see how many 'stories' are about some new shenanigans from the UAC.

Now, if you take any more strongly themed game like Duke, Quake 2, Shadow Warrior or Redneck Rampage and then look at the custom content, it is again like mappers felt an obligation to recreate the original theme to somehow fit the narrative of their mod into the game's much more rigid world you and end up with content with little variation and that wears thin very quickly, making people jump to the next game. It doesn't help that abstract design does not work in such a context while it works fine for Doom and Quake.

[Firedust]

To quote everyone's favourite boomer shooter youtuber Civvie 11, "Quake 2 was just a tech demo". His TNT and Q2 memes never get old xD

[Nootrac4571]

I think part of it might also just be that Quake 1 already existed with an established modding community. Having already made the massive jump from Doom to Quake, I suspect a lot of modders felt less of a pull to move to learning yet another game, especially when the differences between Q1 and Q2 were less obviously massive than those between Doom and Quake.

 

Then Half-Life came out less than a year later - based on the Quake engine, but extended to have a much bigger feature set than either game. 

[Dynamo]

It did take off just like Doom and Quake 1. The fact that it didn't is a historical misconception. If you look at gamers.org (where it is not keenly organized as some q2 stuff is outside of the q2 section on idgames2), or certain other websites (see here, here or here, not to mention that on ModDB there's certain collections), you will not only see hundreds of levels created for Quake II, but also that some of them are very high quality and expertly crafted, as well as that some of them were also made by Doom community people (Roger Ritenour, George Fiffy) and also by Quake community people such as Neil Manke and many others. They created some exceptionally creative maps too, such as Dry Gulch, Castle of Stroggos 3, Saving Private Monkey and many others.

 

The problem is that Quake II, much like Doom and Quake I itself, suffered an extinction event of sorts in the late 90s/early 2000s as many modders and mappers moved on to other games or to professional careers. In Doom, despite what one might think, this also happened (anyone seen Anthony Czerwonka, Iikka Keränen or the Möller brothers lately?)

 

However, with Doom, only a portion of people left, and many remained, helped by the establishment of sites like the Doomworld forums and later NewDoom and ZDoom, which helped the community to continue thriving and more established mappers to make a name for themselves. For Quake II, not enough people remained for the community to remain vibrant, and most importantly, there was never a Doomworld equivalent for the game the way you had for Doom or even Duke Nukem 3D, which inhibited community growth, and led to the fading away of the memory of well known mappers and community stewards as the sites that hosted the maps and reviews went down one after another.

 

For what it's worth, there have been some well known large mods for Q2 in recent memory: Slight Mechanical Destruction, Citadel and 225ACU come to mind. But they have admittedly been more beacons in the darkness than anything. Even back in its day, the Q2 community was not quite a huge as the Doom (or Q1) one, but that is partly down to the fact that Doom and Quake enjoyed very little initial competition in their heyday: the two most well known Doom competitors, Marathon and Duke Nukem 3D, were in the former case largely a Mac exclusive, and in the latter case a game that came out only in early 1996, many years after Doom had, and for Quake it was some time before another company could produce a 3D technological marvel that could compete with it. Quake 2 itself was a marvel, but it did not take long for it to have to contend with Unreal, and later for the classic FPS genre as we know it to be largely supplanted by Half Life, which came out the following year.

 

Now, I heard, the Q2 community is trying to learn from its mistakes and establish a kind of Q2 equivalent of Quaddicted. Time will tell if this will be able to at least reinvigorate the community and lead to a renaissance of sorts for the game, or at least present a better opportunity to document its modding history in a way that is more widely available and accessible to the public.

Edited August 25, 2023 by Dynamo

[Biodegradable]

9 minutes ago, Dynamo said:

Now, I heard, the Q2 community is trying to learn from its mistakes and establish a kind of Q2 equivalent of Quaddicted. Time will tell if this will be able to at least reinvigorate the community and lead to a renaissance of sorts for the game, or at least present a better opportunity to document its modding history in a way that is more widely available and accessible to the public.

 

Considering the new remaster, the timing couldn't more perfect on the reinvigorating effort, so best of luck to 'em.

[Arno]

17 minutes ago, Dynamo said:

However, with Doom, only a portion of people left, and many remained, helped by the establishment of sites like the Doomworld forums and later NeoDoom and ZDoom, which helped the community to continue thriving and more established mappers to make a name for themselves. For Quake II, not enough people remained for the community to remain vibrant, and most importantly, there was never a Doomworld equivalent for the game the way you had for Doom or even Duke Nukem 3D, which inhibited community growth, and led to the fading away of the memory of well known mappers and community stewards as the sites that hosted the maps and reviews went down one after another.

I remember PlanetQuake as a pretty active community hub around the year 2000 for everything related to Quake, Quake II and Quake III Arena. It had daily news updates, plenty of hosted sites and a forum. But unfortunately, unlike Doomworld, PlanetQuake was company property, so they pulled the plug once interest in Quake faded.

[Professor Hastig]

24 minutes ago, Dynamo said:

For what it's worth, there have been some well known large mods for Q2 in recent memory: ... Citadel and 225ACU come to mind.

 

And then you get clueless people like these who release their mods without the DLL's source, so we're deadlocked to ancient engines. I've moved to 64 bit ports where they cannot be used, and let's not even talk about Linux or Mac users. So, thanks for nothing, people!

This is precisely NOT how to invigorate the community if the mods come with a built-in countdown to destruction.

 

 

[RataUnderground]

Oh, but Quake 2 had a tremendous explosion of mods since 1999. I mean, in the form of Half Life mods.

[Knor964]

I am thinking about starting Quake 2 mapping but right now I am only familiar with Doom mapping. So I need to learn how to work with the tech.

[Azuris]

5 hours ago, Lizardcommando said:

I am aware of mods like Action Quake 2, Air Quake and that Generations mod where you could play either as Bitterman, Quake Ranger, Doomguy and BJ Blazcowicz, but there doesn't seem to be as many notable mapsets for Quake 2, at least as far as I can tell. Is there a reason why the Q2 mapping community didn't take off compared to Quake and Doom/Doom 2's mapping community?

 

There countless Skins, Models and Mods for the Quake Series, but also for the Unreal Tournament Series.

 

I remember how great it was to browse the Websites and download all kind of Skins.

Having Pikachu fight Ninja Turtles with an Rocket Launcher is just crazy Fun.

 

I guess as always it is a Combination of Things that let those other Games dry out

 

- Console Shooters that have Progress/Leaderboards

- Content brought out directly from the Developer, so no search needed by yourself

- Oversaturated Market of Shooters

- Change of Gameplay Style, from Focus of Gameplay and Exploration to Focus of cinematic Style and more linear / on Rail Levels. In some Cases open but many Stuff to Collect.

- More difficult to make your own Stuff, mapping for Doom is easier than doing 3D Levels.

Making own Sprites is easier than render a 3D Model.

- As Arno said, many Fan Sites just disappeared, it is really a shame.

 

Edit: Being able to make your own Stuff also leads to playing Stuff from others.

Things brings new Inspiration and this acts like an Drive that lets the Doom Machine roll on.

 

 

Edit2

I remember making a Multiplayer Map for Doom 3.

I had to copy Code and Stuff from a Magazine for an Jump Pad and Elevator.

Meanwhile in Doom you just choose it from a List

It is much more like Events in the RPG Maker.

 

Btw. i have to search the old HDD and Backup that Map.

Had a nice Idea that there is an Crossplattform above the Main Room that leads to the Berserk.

It was covered with Glas.

So if someone was aiming to the Berserk and the other one was shooting from down under at him, the Glas would break and give a cool Effect :P

Edited August 25, 2023 by Azuris

[Dynamo]

42 minutes ago, Knor964 said:

I am thinking about starting Quake 2 mapping but right now I am only familiar with Doom mapping. So I need to learn how to work with the tech.

Trenchbroom is the way to go, it is a powerful map editor that supports both Quake 1 and Quake 2. A great tool to be sure.

[mhmh]

2 hours ago, RataUnderground said:

Oh, but Quake 2 had a tremendous explosion of mods since 1999. I mean, in the form of Half Life mods.

 

Half Life was based on Quake 1, not Quake 2.

[RataUnderground]

17 minutes ago, mhmh said:

 

Half Life was based on Quake 1, not Quake 2.

Oh, Gold source is based on the engine of the first Quake? That explains why at the time of its release I was shocked that HalfLife had such mediocre graphics.

Edited August 25, 2023 by RataUnderground

[Kinsie]

1 hour ago, RataUnderground said:

Oh, Gold source is based on the engine of the first Quake? That explains why at the time of its release I was shocked that HalfLife had such mediocre graphics.

GoldSrc is a heavily modified Quake 1 with a lot of heavy rewriting, and one or two netcode fixes imported over from Quake 2 (which is moot since the netcode was basically rewritten in a post-release patch anyway).

 

Valve's subsequent engines have all built on top of each other, so there's still some tiny fractions of Quake 1 lurking within Dota 2 and the like! Sometimes, people even notice it...

[Lizardcommando]

8 hours ago, Dynamo said:

It did take off just like Doom and Quake 1. The fact that it didn't is a historical misconception. If you look at gamers.org (where it is not keenly organized as some q2 stuff is outside of the q2 section on idgames2), or certain other websites (see here, here or here, not to mention that on ModDB there's certain collections), you will not only see hundreds of levels created for Quake II, but also that some of them are very high quality and expertly crafted, as well as that some of them were also made by Doom community people (Roger Ritenour, George Fiffy) and also by Quake community people such as Neil Manke and many others. They created some exceptionally creative maps too, such as Dry Gulch, Castle of Stroggos 3, Saving Private Monkey and many others.

 

The problem is that Quake II, much like Doom and Quake I itself, suffered an extinction event of sorts in the late 90s/early 2000s as many modders and mappers moved on to other games or to professional careers. In Doom, despite what one might think, this also happened (anyone seen Anthony Czerwonka, Iikka Keränen or the Möller brothers lately?)

 

However, with Doom, only a portion of people left, and many remained, helped by the establishment of sites like the Doomworld forums and later NewDoom and ZDoom, which helped the community to continue thriving and more established mappers to make a name for themselves. For Quake II, not enough people remained for the community to remain vibrant, and most importantly, there was never a Doomworld equivalent for the game the way you had for Doom or even Duke Nukem 3D, which inhibited community growth, and led to the fading away of the memory of well known mappers and community stewards as the sites that hosted the maps and reviews went down one after another.

 

For what it's worth, there have been some well known large mods for Q2 in recent memory: Slight Mechanical Destruction, Citadel and 225ACU come to mind. But they have admittedly been more beacons in the darkness than anything. Even back in its day, the Q2 community was not quite a huge as the Doom (or Q1) one, but that is partly down to the fact that Doom and Quake enjoyed very little initial competition in their heyday: the two most well known Doom competitors, Marathon and Duke Nukem 3D, were in the former case largely a Mac exclusive, and in the latter case a game that came out only in early 1996, many years after Doom had, and for Quake it was some time before another company could produce a 3D technological marvel that could compete with it. Quake 2 itself was a marvel, but it did not take long for it to have to contend with Unreal, and later for the classic FPS genre as we know it to be largely supplanted by Half Life, which came out the following year.

 

Now, I heard, the Q2 community is trying to learn from its mistakes and establish a kind of Q2 equivalent of Quaddicted. Time will tell if this will be able to at least reinvigorate the community and lead to a renaissance of sorts for the game, or at least present a better opportunity to document its modding history in a way that is more widely available and accessible to the public.

 

 

Oh wow, that is quite an extensive history for Q2's modding scene. I was aware of some mods like the ones I mentioned in my opening post and the custom player skins that are out there like the Homer Simpson skins, Doomguy skins and the Quake Ranger skins, but I did not know there was such a rich mapping community for Q2. If I wanted to play these maps, would it be as simple as dropping the files in the baseq2 folder, opening Quake 2 and loading the map through the console commands?

[ReaperAA]

8 hours ago, Firedust said:

To quote everyone's favourite boomer shooter youtuber Civvie 11, "Quake 2 was just a tech demo". His TNT and Q2 memes never get old xD

 

They have gotten old. Also I think Civvie was unfair for using that quote, which was first rumored to be said by Trent (which I repeat was a rumor that was dismissed by Sonic Mayhem).

[Firedust]

6 minutes ago, ReaperAA said:

 

They have gotten old. Also I think Civvie was unfair for using that quote, which was first rumored to be said by Trent (which I repeat was a rumor that was dismissed by Sonic Mayhem).

I don't necessarily think that Civvie's opinion stems from a rumour. I mean, there's a reason why he hasn't reviewed it yet xD

 We'll see with the remaster ig.

[ReaperAA]

11 minutes ago, Firedust said:

I don't necessarily think that Civvie's opinion stems from a rumour. I mean, there's a reason why he hasn't reviewed it yet xD

 

He has reviewed Quake 2 though. He stated that Reznor quote in that video. And in the comment section, Sonic Mayhem corrected him that it was just a rumor and the reason why Trent didn't work on Quake 2 is because he was busy at other projects at that time. So id hired him (Sonic Mayhem) instead.

[MS-06FZ Zaku II Kai]

6 hours ago, Kinsie said:

GoldSrc is a heavily modified Quake 1 with a lot of heavy rewriting, and one or two netcode fixes imported over from Quake 2 (which is moot since the netcode was basically rewritten in a post-release patch anyway).

 

Valve's subsequent engines have all built on top of each other, so there's still some tiny fractions of Quake 1 lurking within Dota 2 and the like! Sometimes, people even notice it...

Damn, the similarity kinda looks eerie when you look at it.

[banjiepixel]

Doom and Build engine were much more simple and easier work with for hobbyists and it was simply easier to move developing stuff for newer games from Quake and especially from Quake 2. I mean Half-Life came out only year later and did very good job at making Quake 2 to seem outdated.

[Tetzlaff]

I remember Quake 2 having a very active community from the time of it‘s release to the early 2000s. Many great custom SP levels, many of them reviewed on 10four maps site (now vanished). Also some active MP communities like Threewave CTF, Loki‘s Minions CTF, Weapons Factory Arena, and more.

 

I think Quake 1 modding over time became more popular because of the greater variety of themes: lovecraftian, medieval, and scifi.

[Dynamo]

4 hours ago, Lizardcommando said:

If I wanted to play these maps, would it be as simple as dropping the files in the baseq2 folder, opening Quake 2 and loading the map through the console commands?

That depends on whether the maps in question have any .dll files with gameplay changes. If they do, then, provided the source is available, they need to be recompiled for 64-bit in order to be used by the remaster. If they don't, then you are out of luck, as short of a recreation or reverse-engineering, they will not work on the Quake 2 remaster, and you're going to have to use a source port like Yamagi - which still runs well and is fine to use, by the way.

[GooberMan]

Remember when id found the Quake 2 modding community so strong that they made a commercial release of it?

[Cutman 999]

15 hours ago, Firedust said:

To quote everyone's favourite boomer shooter youtuber Civvie 11, "Quake 2 was just a tech demo". His TNT and Q2 memes never get old xD

Literally could not have been said better...

[ReaperAA]

6 hours ago, Cutman 999 said:

Literally could not have been said better...

 

I literally can't believe how anyone can call Quake 2 a mere tech demo when the Call of the Machine expansion shows how fun Quake 2 can be made with just some quality mapping with thoughtful encounter design.

 

 

If anything, CotM shows how Quake2's real potential wasn't realised until now.