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

[Lila Feuer]

27 minutes ago, ReaperAA said:

 

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.

Well if you'd showed them COTM in 1997 they would think it was Doom 3.

[Panzermann11]

On 8/25/2023 at 8:51 PM, 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...

Even more interesting when you consider the fact Call of Duty's engine is based on Quake's engine aswell. Quake 3, to be specific.

 

I noticed some quirks, for example, the single-player and multi-player portions of the games tend to be in seperate executables, and a similar file packing system. (they're essentially renamed .zip files, you can rename the extension and open them using an extractor such as Windows' internal extractor or WinRAR)

Edited April 24, 2024 by Panzermann11

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

Besides the fact that Quake 2 never took off full steam ahead, it just occupies a less interesting space when looking at it from a broader prespective. Quake 1 offered a unique setting separate from DOOM, Quake 2 goes back to the sci-fi shit. It just doesn't stand out, and I think it would be harder to create cool and unique maps with the base resources Quake 2 provides. Quake was cool because of it's mood and atmosphere, it's easy to look at the game and imagine all kinds of cool things you could make even using the vanilla textures. With Quake 2, I can't imagine anything other than generic industrial complexes and factories and all that, and it's just not as appealing as Quake 1. With Quake 1, I think it's easier to create maps that have your own personal stamp on them. With Quake 2, I imagine (I have no idea in reality) that it would be pretty hard to create something that feels really unique and personal. The game just doesn't have a personality that makes me crave user-made content, and I especially would never want to map for it, even though I like Quake 2. I'd rather map for the OG Quake, DOOM, Blood, Heretic, HeXen, Duke, etc. before I'd even think about Quake 2. I'd rather map for Shadow Warrior than Quake 2. I'd rather map for Quake 3 than Quake 2. The idea of creating content for the game is about as appealing to me as mapping for DOOM 3.

[lazygecko]

I think it's primarily the lack of that creative spark from the likes of Romero and Petersen impacting the overall game design of Quake 2 which made it far less enticing for mappers over the past 25 years. Apart from the texture assets just being 100% tech base, I think the main issue is the enemy roster not being as interesting as Quake 1. Unimaginative designs with way too many hitscanners making encounters mostly feel like an annoying slog to get through (doesn't help that infighting is much less prevalent as well). I think it says a lot that the most fun maps for me in the Machinegames campaign were the ones primarily utilizing the expansion enemies that were just dumb melee monsters charging at you.

 

Quake 1 on the other hand has a much more varied bestiary filling interesting niches which becomes a powerful toolkit to leverage for encounter design. I've casually followed the Q1 mapping community over the last decade or so and an interesting observation I made was that several of these high quality maps were made by people with senior design roles at major studios in the industry. There's something about Quake 1 level design that remains very enticing to them as a hobby.

[mhmh]

It's easy enough to tell when someone has never played through the full Quake 2 campaign, probably never played past the first unit or 2: they claim the textures or maps are 100% tech base. 

 

There's actually quite a bit more variety in Quake 2 than many people seem to assume based on limited experience of the first unit, including lots of brick work, natural, etc. You probably couldn't make The Pain Maze in Quake 2, but you couid make The Grisly Grotto. 

[Tetzlaff]

1 hour ago, mhmh said:

There's actually quite a bit more variety in Quake 2 than many people seem to assume based on limited experience of the first unit, including lots of brick work, natural, etc. 

Don‘t forget the Makron palace that even has some Art Deco influences mixed with Giger-esque decorations.

[Marmiteman02]

On 8/25/2023 at 9:35 PM, banjiepixel said:

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.

 

Mapping for Duke 3D can be a pain though. Every action depends on a sprite and giving that sprite a High or low tag.

[Master O]

What are the recommended Quake 2 mods to play?

[Lila Feuer]

7 hours ago, mhmh said:

It's easy enough to tell when someone has never played through the full Quake 2 campaign, probably never played past the first unit or 2: they claim the textures or maps are 100% tech base.

 

Doom 3 also receives this false notion as well, it's on par with the misconception that Quake 1 is all brown.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

11 hours ago, mhmh said:

It's easy enough to tell when someone has never played through the full Quake 2 campaign, probably never played past the first unit or 2: they claim the textures or maps are 100% tech base. 

 

There's actually quite a bit more variety in Quake 2 than many people seem to assume based on limited experience of the first unit, including lots of brick work, natural, etc. You probably couldn't make The Pain Maze in Quake 2, but you couid make The Grisly Grotto. 

There's more variety than you'd expect when you're actually looking at the individual textures, sure. But Quake 2, just like Doom 3 and Quake 1 (mentioned above), is a game that, for the most part, maintains a very consistent look from beginning to end from the prespective of a player. People who say "Quake is nothing but brown" are obviously wrong, but it's still pretty fucking brown. Just like Doom 3 is pretty fucking dark, and Quake 2 is pretty fucking rusty-ass-industrial (I wouldn't really call it techbase as that's a little too narrow of a descriptor for me). There's no getting around the fact that those three games have a pretty limited color palette compared to most other games. Sure, Quake 1 has some other cool colors that stand out, but they stand out mainly because everything else is fucking brown. Doom 3 has Hell, and some rooms look really cool mainly due to the use of color and lighting. But Hell in Doom 3 is criminally short, and the cool rooms with color stand out because everything else is fucking dark. Quake 2 is actually the most colorful, but its setting is still narrow enough that you could show screenshots from three random units to someone who has never played the game, and they'd all look like part of the same map. The variety is technically there in terms of the actual textures, but most of the environments in the game are of a pretty narrow visual theme, and it doesn't exactly inspire me to think of the game's modding/mapping potential.

 

I think that part of the problem is the fact that Quake 2 is a little less abstract than Quake/Doom. Doom's setting is vague enough that you can pretty much do whatever you want and it'll work, and while Quake definitely has a more defined aesthetic, it isn't as specific and on-the-nose as Quake 2. I can't really describe Doom or Quake's visual theme in short simple terms, but Quake 2 can easily be summed up as "brutal industrial" and it would fit no matter which map you're looking at. I think it's cool and cohesive, but playing through Quake 2, I never really said to myself "wow, just imagine all the cool maps you could make with this". That sucks though, because you can make cool Quake 2 maps. It's just not as enticing as other games (for me). I think that making a unique map from Quake 2's base resources requires more imagination in general because the game is less imaginative in its setting (even if it was executed well) compared to the "other games". And thus, an early psychological barrier to entry.

Edited August 28, 2023 by TheMagicMushroomMan

[Herr Dethnout]

On 8/25/2023 at 5:55 AM, RataUnderground said:

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

Quake 1*

heh

[Tetzlaff]

12 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Besides the fact that Quake 2 never took off full steam ahead

 

It did take off full speed when it was released. It was the most popular MP FPS at it's time and had heaps of SP custom content, like I mentioned above. Quake 1 only became more popular in the long run.

[ReaperAA]

13 hours ago, Master O said:

What are the recommended Quake 2 mods to play?

 

Castle of Stroggos is a 3 part series. The 1st part is okay, the 2nd is better and the 3rd part is really good. Definitely recommend to check them out.

 

There's also the recently released 25th Anniversary Unit (25ACU) that is worth checking out.

[Doom64guy]

A bit out of topic, but is there the true equivalent of Quake the way Doomworld is to Doom?

 

That is, a comprehensive archive of WADs, resources, etc.

[LadyMistDragon]

Not for Quake II so much. Quake 1 does have Quaddicted though.

[InfernalGrape]

On 9/16/2023 at 7:19 PM, LadyMistDragon said:

Quake 1 does have Quaddicted though.

 

While I prefer Quaddicted as main site, there is also a more recent Slipseer.

 

With Quake 2 I usually check out ModDB  and GameBanana (my habit since Half-Life/Half-Life 2 modding days), but also take a look at DondeQ2 and TastySpleen. I also see there are people who plan to do a new site, but I don't know how serious they are about that.

Edited September 17, 2023 by InfernalGrape

[Marmiteman02]

I only make maps for Q1. But I can tell you that it's such a time consuming process. 

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

I've always heard it said that the DLL system caused a lot of problems for Q2 when it came to things like changing the monsters/weapons compared to Q1's QuakeC model.  But I don't have much in the way of personal experience on that front, beyond to say that I've dabbled in QuakeC a little but found the DLL thing kind of daunting to even try, which... I guess backs that up in a way.

 

Speaking of DLLs, Quake 2 also had that OpenGL bug that crashed the game on newer systems, which might have harmed its popularity for a while before that got figured out?

[mhmh]

5 hours ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

I've always heard it said that the DLL system caused a lot of problems for Q2 when it came to things like changing the monsters/weapons compared to Q1's QuakeC model.  But I don't have much in the way of personal experience on that front, beyond to say that I've dabbled in QuakeC a little but found the DLL thing kind of daunting to even try, which... I guess backs that up in a way.

 

The big problem at the time was that a C compiler and linker was needed to mod the gamecode, which was a barrier back then, true.  Q1's QC had a very low bar to entry, by comparison: a text editor and a bunch of enthusiasm were often enough.  The disadvantage of the Q1 approach is of course that it's easier to create a glut of poor-quality mods (which did indeed happen).  I don't personally favour either, both have their pros and cons.

 

5 hours ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Speaking of DLLs, Quake 2 also had that OpenGL bug that crashed the game on newer systems, which might have harmed its popularity for a while before that got figured out?

 

Q1 and Q3A also had the same bug; the print buffer was too small for the GL extensions string as the latter grew over time.  Some drivers even went so far as to detect when a Quake game was running and truncate the extensions string.