Quake 1 is my favorite. Despite being a "mess".

[jleeto]

It seems when I read old game mags from when Quake 2 was released and new articles on the Quake titles,.. they always talk shit about Quake 1 and praise Quake 2.   They say that Quake 1 was just a mess of different stuff and it was unfocused and had no overall theme and blah blah blah.

  And I've always liked Quake 1 the most because of it's cool combination of high-tech and dark-ages horror sci-fi stuff.   The monsters are actually scary and freaky.  Tell me you don't get suprised or suddenly "aag!!" when one of those chainsaw/grenade launching ogres growls and jumps out at you at leats once everytime you play.    Those eyeless monsters with the huge teeth and claws,.. the shambler,.. the zombies that throw their guts at you and won't die unless you blow them up with grenades.  The demonic knights and pentagrams everywhere.  The creepy as hell ambient sound and even creepier soundtrack.    The levels are all foreboding and eerie.       

    Quake 1 is like playing through a totally fucked up nightmare.     It's all around more thrilling and effective than shooting alien cyborgs on another planet while listening to Rammstien power chords like in Quake 2.

     I use Quake 1 as a great example for why a story is really only secondary while making a FPS.  Who plays a FPS for a story?    I sure as hell don't.  I play for the experience of the game world and the actual shooting/ trying-not-to-die part.

  Also,...  I prefer the old FPS level design over the on-rails approach used these days.   I like my FPS levels to be like mazes that I have to find my way out of while fighting for my life and trying not to run out of ammo.   I honestly like hunting down keys and finding hidden rooms and then getting suprised by monster traps.


    Some people point to Painkiller or Serious Sam as having Doom/Quake 1 style gameplay.  Nope.   Both Painkiller and Serious Sam are just as on rails as Call of Duty.   They both just have you run from checkpoint to checkpoint while monsters are spawned out of thin air most of the time.      To truly capture the good old gameplay,. you have to have the levels be contained yet open. (meaning you can go anywhere in the level without being forced along a path),.. also most of the monsters are already physically IN the level (or at least are spawned in a way that you think they've been waiting for  you) as opposed to always just spawing all around all the damn time.   

  Remember in Doom or Quake 1 where you would shoot your gun and all the monsters around would hear you and growl and stuff?     Then you know they're coming after you and they hunt you down?
   That's the stuff.


     Somebody please bring back the old style level design and gameplay while utilizing modern graphics and physics technology.   

      Damn it!!!!

[Rizimar]

I sort of agree. Quake was an awesome game, and while it really did have a variety of enemies and levels, it didn't take away from the gameplay. The atmosphere was really creepy in a way that I've seen in no other game.

Quake II, though, was frightening to me in a whole 'nother way. While it didn't strike me as scary when I played through it the first half dozen times or so, I just kind of though about it one day: your enemies are mutilated comrades of yours. The survivors who you come across that haven't had their limbs and heads torn off and replaced with robotic machinery or have had their faces stretched onto mechanical dog creatures and the like are all insane from mental and physical torture, wanting nothing but death.

Either way, they're both good games. If I were to replay one of them now, I'd choose Quake, but only because I've beaten Quake II from beginning to end well over twenty times (I wish I was exaggerating).

[Bad Sector]

The awesomeness of Quake 1 over 2 can be seen on how many new levels are made for Quake 1 these days and how many are (not) made for Quake 2.

[gila]

quake 1 is awesome, i love it. i know it inside out.

quake 2 was shit.

serious sam is probably more influenced by duke nukem 3d.

painkiller is actually the last first person SHOOTER. meaning it was influenced by doom1/2 and quake1. it doesnt even have a crouch button!
the hordes of monsters, the style, painkiller was AWESOME. the addons for it sucked though.

now.

painkiller - on the rails? they just chose not to have buttons in their game and no keycards, so they tend to lock you up in a room with monsters more. in quake1 there are two ways max you can get to a keycard or a button to progress further, so there. not a huge difference. i mean yes the monsters respawn "from the air" in painkiller, but they did that even in quake 2 (and even in DOOM3), but just so player could'nt see that. painkiller was the last breath of "pure" or "classic" FPS. nowadays it's more common to add a huge story (so you listen/watch the 10 min intro sequence, then first couple of levels you wander takling to NPCs without any weapons, etc. i fuckin hate half-life.), objectives, blahblahblah. i like simpler stuff, even if the "door-keycard-door-button-door-keycard" is done to death and considered a big no-no today, i love it.

i also dont think quake1 is "a mess", i also like the blend of styles and the swampy/gritty feel of the monsters/levels. i just wish it had much more (well, you always do when you're a fan of a particular game, right?)

[Hugo]

Quake 2 is much better. At least from a single-player point of view. I mean, I will never forget the first time I shot down a guard, just to see how he took a shot at me with his very last breath. That was just amazing.

I liked the levels and weapons a lot more than Quake1. Quake1 is just way too brown for my taste.

However, I must admit that I do like to play Quake1 these days because of the ports. I can now play Quake1 on a high resolution, which makes everything much clearer than the old standard 320x240 resolution.

[Bad Sector]

Quake 1 never had a "standard" resolution.

Also there are Quake 2 ports too. KMQuake2 is a nice port that adds a few extra visual effects without ruining the game's look.

[sathomaso]

From the whole Quake series, I also still like Quake 1 best!
Hell, i even have this Quake 1 wallpaper set since November:


Quake 2 was nice, but the medievil/tech-theme from Q1 was much better.
Dark, twisted and that rusty brown look everywhere --- love it!
I even occasionally listen to the Q1 NIN-soundtrack nowadays.

@ jleeto:
I don't know if you've heard of the "QRACK"? Just look for that plugin on google, using it the Q1 graphics get pimped and stuff. High-res and widescreen format. I think it kicks ass, played through easy, medium, and hard difficulty already. At the moment I am fighting through nightmare (using lots of savegames of course), and am close to Shubb Niggurath.

[Bad Sector]

QRack makes Quake all flashy removing the mood of Quake. For a nice-looking engine, i prefer DarkPlaces with Rygel's texture pack, highres models and the new .rtlights file. With a beefy PC you can get something like this.

Although its worth only for the standard maps. Most custom maps (which is what i usually play these days) come with custom textures and these effects/models do not blend well with them (well since most highres textures are at least 1024x1024 normal/specular/bump mapped and most custom are plain 64x64, putting one near the other is highly noticeable and breaks the illusion). For the custom maps i prefer the Fitzquake engine which is fast, stable and has much higher "engine limits" which is required by pretty much any modern custom Quake 1 map. Also it supports colored lightmaps which are used by some maps.

EDIT: beyond a beefy PC (think 1GB of texture memory, although you might be able to use it with less if you enable texture compression) you also need plenty of time. It takes ages to load the textures for each level...

[Hugo]

Quake 1 never had a "standard" resolution.

Also there are Quake 2 ports too. KMQuake2 is a nice port that adds a few extra visual effects without ruining the game's look.

It did. Sure you could pick any other resolution. But I didn’t know anybody who could run quake1 (especially the first version which was software rendering only)
in a higher resolution at that time. So everybody was bound to the default 320x200 mode. And because everybody used it, it became standard

This problem is even described in Masters of Doom I believe. Where (as I recall ,hopefully, correctly) people disliked the quake graphics (even though it was fully 3D).
Because Doom looked better (since you could run that in a higher res).

[jleeto]

QRack makes Quake all flashy removing the mood of Quake. For a nice-looking engine, i prefer DarkPlaces with Rygel's texture pack, highres models and the new .rtlights file. With a beefy PC you can get something like this.

I tried Darkplaces before,.. but when it comes down to it,.. I prefer Quake 1 in vanilla software mode.   I run Quake 95 (the full retail release of Quake) and just crank the resolution up to 1024 x 768.    Not too high or too low.

   I'm also playing the crap out of Hexen 2.  It uses the Quake 1 engine and it's way better than Hexen 1.    I

[Bad Sector]

@Hugo:
Your memory is somehow messed up. Doom never had any other mode than 320x200 whereas Quake 1 had a bunch of modes from day 0. Most people i know ran in something like 512x384, although that was in ~1998 when faster computers were available.

IIRC people disliked the slower play of the game, not its graphics.

@jleeto:
There was a "Doom 95" which had 640x480 (i think) video mode, but i don't remember any "Quake 95". I prefer modern engines mostly because newer maps require increased limits. The render is the same when using an engine such as Fitzquake - in fact, Fitzquake uses overbrighting for lightmaps to have lighting more similar to the software renderer which wasn't limited to 0..1 like the GLQuake (in GLQuake lightmapping appears more "dull" where in normal quake the lightmaps have a greater range).

Having the software rendering look is possible in GLQuake (and derivatives such as Fitzquake) by opening the console and typing

gl_texturemode GL_NEAREST
gl_texture_anisotropy 0

(the last one is for Fitzquake)

Do this and you'll get this look.

Sidenote: of course another reason i prefer to use a modified engine is that it has support for widescreen modes - and doesn't crash if your card has more than 30 modes, since the number is hardcoded in the original engine.

[Hugo]

@Hugo:
Your memory is somehow messed up. Doom never had any other mode than 320x200 whereas Quake 1 had a bunch of modes from day 0. Most people i know ran in something like 512x384, although that was in ~1998 when faster computers were available.

I think your memory is messed up. When Quake came out it was 1996.
By then doom95 was released which could run higher resolutions.

Like I said, Quake had a bunch of modes from day one. But the initial release
featured only software mode rendering, and basically nobody had a computer
that could run that in a resolution higher than 320x200.

[Bad Sector]

Doom95 was released after Quake.

As for 320x200, i'm sure there were people using it since i remember the review of a local magazine actually recommending people to upgrade because the graphics were improved a lot in higher resolutions.

[Hugo]

Doom95 was released after Quake.

As for 320x200, i'm sure there were people using it since i remember the review of a local magazine actually recommending people to upgrade because the graphics were improved a lot in higher resolutions.

Yes Doom95 was released a little 2 mothns after quake shareware hit the web.

[Bad Sector]

Well QTest was released before that and IIRC from the book, the not-so positive comments were mostly for that.