A bit controversial opinion maybe but I really like Quake Champions and I spent a good amount of time playing it. I even bought some battle passes and merch to support the development. I was really sad that they basically put the game to life support just 1.5 years after its release. The game improved so fast during those 1.5 years, we were getting significant improvements with every patch. I always wondered how much more it would improve if they put just 1 more year into its development.

And UT3 was definitely not a great game by anyone's measure.

The knack and knowledge of hosting a dedicated server required skills. If you could one click button host a Quake 3 Arena server or UT, there would still be sort of a crowd.

But not only that, if you were new: servers got toxic with the same grumpy players knowing every single trick in the map to one-shot kill you with a rail gun. It got frustrating playing the same bloody map each map change. "Oh yay look, it's cs_office again" /s

The whole genre got stale and never has been successfully reignited. As Discord to TeamSpeak; same misfortune.

Fortnite killed Team Fortress, Overwatch killed Halo and Minecraft was the new digital lego. None of them required such a skill to play or host the game. It was refreshing for its time.

Not forgetting it was the upcoming of a new crowd of folk and as generations go, the old cards topple.

Who hosted an BBS when the internet came to be?

IRC today is pretty much stuck in dinosaur country and XMPP, Jabber never got a product and further nailed by Google & Co.

It was epic fun for the era but it had a death bed waiting.

They're just all single player focused.

It's not the only thing going anymore, but also people have orders of magnitude more choices. That's the thing that's missing today. Nothing is "dead", there's just too much competition now.

Honestly the aforementioned games have had much more staying power than more recent multiplayer games. And they're mostly played by old men like me.

also shout out to banana shooter or straftat if you want a quick fix in a f2p game. it’s not really afpsy but pretty fast movement and wacky guns in both

When I was a kid playing Quake 3 I had different servers bookmarked, knew the players that ran the servers and the general crowd that hung around. Had friendships and rivalries.

Modern multiplayer you may as well be playing bots. There's no community.

I'm sorry, what?

This tension has arguably been a contributing factor in the collapse of the ARC Raiders playerbase, with a huge population who joined primarily to shoot and loot the robots eventually confronting the realities of a pvpve game, and peacing out for good after getting shot in the back or ambushed too many times.

Sort of like how Nintendo had the Wii, a huge hit but then almost immediately started to flounder for growth ideas as they didn't understand why it worked so well.

This means that they not necessarily were all that great.

If that's the new player experience, you done fucked up. Making sure new players actually have fun is a critical part of the game's design. You can't just rely on "...and then new players will have to spend 50-60 hours getting demolished before they start having a good time."

Easing that transition could mean different things -- a campaign, skirmish mode vs bots, full-on PvE co-op mode, automatching that actually works, whatever -- but you do need something effective.

Bots can teach basics, but many of these games rely on abusing game mechanics in ways the developers didn't think of in development so it's impossible to teach. Or things are physically difficult to pull off.

Movement shooters especially have this problem because a core part of the game is abusing the movement system and abilities to out maneuver other players. You can explain the how, but executing it all automatically is a real skill that requires practice. I adore Titanfall 2. I sunk hundreds of hours into it. It's really something else when you get the movement down, it all happens so fast you can't think about it you just have to do it. There's no way to teach that with a tutorial, it's muscle memory and perseverance.

Titanfall 2 has all of these things, campaign, skirmish with bots and PvE, but the skill floor and ceiling is still brutal. Whether it failed or not is a question of how long you expected the game to last, but it still succumbed to the same fate. The more experienced players pulled the ladder up behind them and the matchmaker didn't have enough players to give everyone a fair match.

Now if you have fun playing the game while losing to others, don't have rewards (whatever they are) based on winning against others, well that's not a problem.

So now I play PvE and it is much more fun in a long term sense. There can still be stats about who the best player is, but everyone gets the rewards and has fun.

A person lower down the skill ranking has to put up with the flowing of higher skill people beating them as the higher skill person travels up the ladder to their skill point.

These aren't static systems.

Have you really though?

I'd argue that what made arena shooters great was the steep learning curve and the grind to improve as a player.

The feeling of having practiced duels for months and finally being able to beat players that used to 50-0 you every game was better than any achievement in any modern FPS game I've ever experienced.

Gamers these days just doesn't really care about becoming better themselves. They want the instant gratification and that's why you have FPS games with super low TTK, perks, abilities, heroes etc. All to narrow down the skill gap between actual good players and completely new players.

Maybe it's just me but I find those games boring.

When the skill gaps are smaller it's not as big of a deal to play "stronger" players. But when the skill gaps are huge, it becomes a real problem.

Modern FPS games with SBMM creates this huge "blob" of low-to-average players that will rarely if ever even have the chance of playing against an actual good player and they have no clue of how huge the difference in skill gap it is.

UT4 was a tech demo.

A lot of potential, killed by committee

The thing is, Q3A was originally supposed to be a sort of primitive hero shooter, with the various characters falling into different classes: fast, lightly armored "light" characters, more robustly armored but slow "heavy" characters, and a class in the middle. This was scrapped before release.

Quake 3 was kind of like Latin of the PvP world (together with SC:BW, CS 1.6 and maybe Tribes 2), its great quality was that it was abandoned and frozen while also being extensible. This let the community decide what they like best (for example CPMA didn't take off despite being great on paper, because it was breaking a lot of VQ3 depth by being too fast for the maps it was played on), and let the players truly master the game over more than two decades. I recently played some VQ3 with agent and had zero hope of keeping up despite being in the top few dozen of players a bit over a decade ago. He's still playing and still keeps his chess-grandmaster sense of the game (and trash talk).

Champions came out, most of the community from Quake Live stayed on live. Bethesda in all their wisdom made it cost $10, I assume to sway new gamers into downloading Champions (which they also made F2P shortly after release). So effectively, they swapped the F2P of both games, and the free one is the less preferred option in the scene.

They had subscriptions for a while.

It's a real IdTech source port that will load the Remaster's PAKs and pretend to be the Remaster to Steam for achievement unlocks.

Dimension of the Machine was fantastic so I'm hyped to play Dawn of the Machine tonight :D

You should rephrase this as just "Install Quake on Steam, but then" for newcomers who need this advice to be able to understand it.

Ironwail issue for Dawn of the Machine support: https://github.com/andrei-drexler/ironwail/issues/550

And the new update to the KEX Remaster would't even launch for me; just crashes immediately with a “see CRASHLOG.TXT” message. I had to add `+r_rhirenderfamily "d3d11" +d3d11_compileShaders 1` to my Steam launch options, and it plays but with lots of texture glitching. This is on Intel 11th-gen integrated (Framework Laptop 12).

I remember Quake, WinQuake, then QuakeWorld for online play, then GLQuake and GLQuakeWorld. Squake on linux showed up in there at some point (non-X11 linux version). Sometime later IIRC there was dquake... which google tells me was a PSP version but I swear there was a sorta "improved GLQuake" engine called dquake at some point, with various other ‘enhanced’ engines trickling out in the early 00s…

And of course not forgetting novelty versions like 'ttyquake'.

But all these are ancient history now! I'm surprised and amazed at the continued evolution.

There are still people playing on some servers, and the challenge is higher than ever. Although I still have the reflexes, the tics, and I know the maps and respawn times, I had a very hard time fitting into the games. I imagine that for someone starting today, it must be impossible to face 30 years of muscle memory.

(hopefully you're familiar with Monty Python...)

Those were the for real LAN party days which I'll never get back. As in I had friends bringing over their big ass CRT monitors and PCs for a single occasion and also had ludicrously long network cables. My parents didn't mind, they somehow understood, even with LAN wires running across the kitchen floor. Priceless.

Edit: typo: lab -> LAN

It was actually pretty cool how they designed the first room to demonstrate almost every new feature of the engine and how the first level is made to walk you though most of the new gameplay features.

https://youtu.be/PU7HkttPfAo?si=LnD4vJeCiUojhojt&t=728

And as I typed that I can still hear the noise all these years later.

Good old days of 7-15 FPS being better than nothing.

Every room with torches was max 9FPS on 320x200 on DX2 OCed to 3x50MHz, literally 50% performance over your PC. Turnig off all objects through console made torches vanished and FPS doubled.

They've literally reinvented "platformer speedrunning" to a whole different level.

https://jasemagee.com/post/2022-03-27-26-year-old-quake-ligh...

[1] https://mainstream404.wordpress.com/2018/01/03/how-super-mar...

I wish we could get those days back. Cars loaded with CRT monitors and big machines and bags of all sorts of stuff.

Definitely made high school much more fun.

https://archive.org/details/q3DemoTEST

There were multiple test releases. You can find the older ones out on the web.

Ah yes, those lab parties.

I to recall the days of all synthesising LSD and playing Quake too.

I still remember hours-long marathons of Doom2 deathmatch at my cousin's Novell cubicle farm after office hours, ca. 1994. Then Duke Nukem 3D (using Build to make custom maps [anybody here play NukeCity 1 and/or 2? That was me!]), then eventually Quake. Oh nostalgia, you rickety tower of mixed emotions.

my game was HL and CS (later days) which got me into modding so years after i looked at build engine.

i made for worldcraft a human launcher one day (ripped entities from some HLDM map by valve) and that got chucked into awp_1337_sk337 (by other guy, superjer).

miss those times :') still occasionally crack open the worldcraft to make a room with zombies and nades!

I never got paid for that work, but the campaign is out there: Twin Dragon[1]. I built Level 11: the Fortress.

[1] https://www.moddb.com/games/shadow-warrior/downloads/twin-dr...

I used to host LAN parties where all my friends from school would lug their PCs over, and we’d hook everything up over 10Base-T. One match, somebody was chasing me down and I’d completely run out of ammo. I fled down a corridor and jumped over a pit of lava - immediately spun around dropped the console and typed as fast as I could:

  sv_gravity 1600

https://shop.nin.com/

- normies (not derogatory) wouldn't know that.

- original Quake CDs are of limited supply since new ones aren't being pressed.

- your CD player has to be smart enough to recognize Track 1 as data and skip it or else it will blast your ears with two minutes of loud static before the music starts.

- the audio tracks on the Quake CD were mastered with pre-emphasis and your player has to support applying de-emphasis equalization or else it won't sound right. I did check my copy when writing this comment and the TOC does at least flag `PRE`, so supporting players should do it automatically, but still there are loads of ways this can go wrong because it's a relatively niche CD feature and because most modern software players won't handle it at all:

https://www.studio-nibble.com/cd/index.php?title=Pre-emphasi...

https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Pre-emphasis#...

Nicely done; Really appreciate the extra effort, little touch that means so much

Dawn of the Machine is available as a free update for Quake owners on XBOX Series X/S, XBOX One, Microsoft PC Store, Game Pass, PC Game Pass, Steam, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch 2 (via backwards compatibility), and Nintendo Switch versions of Quake.

I do still have my Quake CDs...

Weird to see a DLC for a game that's older than Steam. Would have been more interesting if they released the WADs or whatever that you could play on the open source version of the game. (All of this is interesting in light of MS's recent hallowing of their game studios.)

When Quake was popular, CDs were far and away the most popular install method. They're locking a lot of OG owners out (unless they're hoping to drive a trickle of $4 Steam sales).

Unfortunately they break the limits of the original game engine and usually require something like Darkplaces[0] to run. Although I highly recommend darkplaces for even players of the original Quake because the QoL improvements are nice.

[0]https://github.com/darkplacesengine/darkplaces

Also love that there is a 50% chance that you can crash a Ps4/Switch just loading a level with the Slave Zero mod that they provide. They are pushing it fairly hard with that one.

https://xn--ls8h.la/

It does show up as the poop emoji followed by .la in google search results, but not in a firefox address bar.

That is by design (on Firefox's part) to avoid someone registering e.g. steаmpowered.com (notice а as U+0430 instead of a as U+61) and running a scam that looks valid on the address bar.

The quality of life improvements are done very well and I would recommend. Heck even if just for the new lighting engine.

I have played with the modding surface available in the quakeC files tho!

I was experimenting with a game design element where firing a weapon didnt decrement the ammo, but auto fired.

In other words, you always fired whatever you had out, removing the ammo hoarder behavior, but also makes you very cognizant about explosive barrels and where you point that rocket.

They encoded the game as an audio CD, so you could toss the disc in a boombox and listen to the soundtrack when you weren't playing. Very cool!

THPS and Crazy Taxi had some of the best soundtracks ever compiled.

[0]: https://consolemods.org/wiki/PS1:List_of_Multi-Track_PS1_Gam...

If the game didn't require accessing data on the CD after installation, you could even swap the CD with a different album and listen to what you want.

Only later Pentium 233mmx could handle mp3 decode in background + game (UT or Q3 Arena lets say).

[1]. Yes it is possible to play mp3 at 386SX 33mhz using magic with mplayer or mpg123(?) or (forgot the name) but it needs to be downgraded to 11khz, mono and other tricks.

Either CD player would play audio itself (passed over analog audio connector), with the game occasionally changing track #. Zero CPU time.

Or a DMA controller would read digital audio from the CD, and CPU pass that on as-is to audio hardware. Lots of audio data streaming, but easy on the CPU.

Never knew about the 4 pin link.

To run that mod from a CLI with most source ports, you just need to make sure that you specify a path to your original Quake .PAK files and set the -gamedir to the path of your AD mod folder.

I downloaded the arcane dimensions mod from here: https://www.moddb.com/mods/arcane-dimensions/downloads/arcan...

I hope that helps!

https://www.quaddicted.com/tools/quake_injector

I also noticed IShowSpeed and Kai Cenat promoting a Minecraft playthrough, which I would assume is paid for by Microsoft given what they’ve been saying lately: https://youtu.be/IgJru9870_A

We will be inundated with low-effort fan service until morale improves.

I don't have a PC anymore so most of the top tier FPS games I can't play anyway since they require kernel level anti-cheat.

Haven't looked at it yet but I suspect these maps probably blow over many memory limits that most DOS machines would have had.

The Switch port has gyro aiming though.

insert: how do you do, fellow kinds meme jpg

Then the multiplayer - lived in the sticks had a 33.6k modem - ping times on a good day of 300ms. Even with all the limitations (and lack of any sort of predictive netcode) that was it, a very expensive (we paid by the minute for phone bills!), game!

Later teamfortress came out from the guys at RMIT in Melbourne who later went on to Valve (Robin Walker/John Cook from memory) and TF set the bar for so much to come.

I know a lot of folks recommend masters of doom for the atmosphere at ID during quake's difficult development, but actually Michael Abrash's graphics black book (free on github - https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book) is an even better companion, still a wonderfully readable book today, but captures the mindset of the development that we can take much from still. Indeed Abrash's anecdote about sliderule jockey's in the day of pocket calculators rings very true today as we grapple with the impact of AI on our work.

How many of us can thank our careers to id for hooking us on computers and things like quakec and even quake2's game dll source and later full engine sources.

Absolutely played the arse off Quake 2 multiplayer when I was a young'un too, weirdly made so many IRL friends from local Quake 2 servers, you don't really get that from modern multiplayer games...

It's worth to check them out if you want to enjoy a little quake renascence. For example the Quake Brutalist Jam packs and more. They can be found on your favorite quake distribution site like slipseer or quaddicted.

meanwhile, where is the new Elder Scrolls?