|
Mordja posted:While I think Quake 1's got a cool aesthetic that holds up nowadays, Quake 2 just looks like an old video game. What were peoples' general reaction to the campaign at the time? I seem to recall Q2 single player getting a fairly meh reaction once the initial wow of a new id game passed. I think the actual reviews were super positive though. In that period of gaming absolutely anything with a tech bump got orgasmic reviews. I was a huge QuakeWorld player and everyone was super hyped for a game that was supposed to be as good as Doom in singleplayer but even more moddable than Q1/QW. This was the era of the .plan files so Q2 was hyped more than most games for people in internet communities. I don't think most thought Q2 held up to that and I can barely ever remember playing even many mods that used its assets. People had modding down so everyone moved on to total conversion mods pretty quickly in the Q2 era. Q2 became a front end for mods like QW. I think this was between the first Unreal screenshots and the release and so there were a lot of Unreal prophets talking of how much more glorious Unreal was going to be. That was a lot of flame wars back in the day. Once Unreal released (also to orgasmic reviews) I seem to recall people moving on from that super quickly too though I don't remember why. It was regarded as having a great singleplayer (dunno how it holds up) but maybe the multiplayer was wonky or something.
|
#
?
Dec 11, 2019 22:35
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 21, 2024 00:29 |
|
|
Casimir Radon posted:Let me tell you how much I loathe Race X. They're dogshit, OP4 kind of blows, and Gearbox sucks. And that's the T-pose.
|
|
#
?
Dec 11, 2019 22:49
|
|
|
The thing I remember the most about Quake 2 was, before it came out, seeing screenshots and thinking "Transparent water surfaces? How the gently caress did they pull that off?"
|
|
#
?
Dec 11, 2019 22:52
|
|
|
Thinking back on FPS bosses I think Nihilanth is one of the best. It's a combination arena fight, dodging projectile bullet hell, coping with Xen's gravity, and fighting your way through all the alien mooks if you get teleported. It's not terribly difficult, it was an amazing spectacle in 1998, and it serves as a thrilling climax to everything you've been through. You're still circle strafing around a giant spongey space baby but actual thought and care went into the execution which so few FPS bosses get.
|
|
#
?
Dec 11, 2019 22:57
|
|
|
The only good thing I remember about Quake 2 was Action Quake 2. I had mainly played Team Fortress and Future vs Fantasy mods for my multiplayer fix, so playing John Woo the game was pretty neat divergence.
|
|
#
?
Dec 11, 2019 22:59
|
|
|
I remember Quake 2 at launch, just not the one you expect. I don't think we had a computer at the time, so it was the PS1 port I knew, of which, most reaction was overwhelmingly positive, and I remember it featuring in a lot of "best game" lists when the system was winding down. Looking back, I probably wouldn't go that far, but it's still a phenomenally impressive port considering the PS1's limitations. Also, on Half Life, was there ever a port of the PS2's co-op campaign to the pc? Decay, I think it was called? I don't know if it's any good, but it could be a neat thing to try out next time I replay it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 11, 2019 23:13
|
|
|
Disproportionation posted:I remember Quake 2 at launch, just not the one you expect. I don't think we had a computer at the time, so it was the PS1 port I knew, of which, most reaction was overwhelmingly positive, and I remember it featuring in a lot of "best game" lists when the system was winding down. Looking back, I probably wouldn't go that far, but it's still a phenomenally impressive port considering the PS1's limitations. I also found a Steam guide for playing it here, IIRC I played it with the WON version because it was easier to get working. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=376774460 It works rather well, though I never was able to access the secret level. IIRC there's a secret switch that shows a picture of a PS2 controller, and you input the code on there. bbcisdabomb fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Dec 11, 2019 |
|
#
?
Dec 11, 2019 23:23
|
|
|
I've noticed that Rune hasn't been included in the last couple Gog sales. Is this some Epic Store shenanigans? Not that $10 is a ton of money.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 00:26
|
|
|
i'd be hard-pressed to say anything overtly bad about quake 2 and it honestly averages out to being solid at worst and pretty fun at best, as far as i'm concerned. a lot of this is because it was the competent, relatively well-crafted cousin to daikatana and doesn't need massive editing via mods to make it workable in terms of enjoyment. the guns feel nice and running around to shoot stuff in it is generally a blast, and that stuff alone counts for a lot.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 02:00
|
|
|
Solaris 2.0 posted:Speaking of, was the Dreamcast version [of Half-Life] ever leaked? I heard it was basically finished but the system died before Valve could release it? Yes; I’ve briefly played it. It was a few years ago and only for a few minutes so I don’t remember much about it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 03:27
|
|
|
Is Action Quake 2 still playable? It was my favorite mod years ago.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 04:04
|
|
|
Solaris 2.0 posted:Speaking of, was the Dreamcast version ever leaked? I heard it was basically finished but the system died before Valve could release it? Yeah it's been out there for a long rear end time now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rTeUTV-xD0 I think the Prima Guide for the DC version actually made it to print, hilariously
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 05:05
|
|
|
kirbysuperstar posted:Yeah it's been out there for a long rear end time now Can't take Digital Foundry seriously anymore because they're Star Citizen shills
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 05:17
|
|
|
As stupid and exploitative as the whole Star Citizen thing is, it's still something of a technical marvel so it's worth covering in that context.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 05:24
|
|
|
SCheeseman posted:As stupid and exploitative as the whole Star Citizen thing is, it's still something of a technical marvel so it's worth covering in that context. No it absolutely is not. Its Crytek. The whole thing is just Crytek + models + lies. There is nothing of a technical marvel in the giant heap of lies and tech debt they've made for themselves. To say "star citizen is a technical marvel" is to take part in the scam. No, no it really, really isn't. Have you played it? There is literally nothing that star citizen does that you couldn't do with the Crysis 3 engine out of the box, because that's exactly what it is.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 05:26
|
|
|
Zaphod42 posted:Can't take Digital Foundry seriously anymore because they're Star Citizen shills Thanks for your input
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 05:27
|
|
|
SCheeseman posted:As stupid and exploitative as the whole Star Citizen thing is, it's still something of a technical marvel so it's worth covering in that context. I ended up with a copy and it looks, runs and plays like poo poo. It's thoroughly unimpressive. Are you maybe talking about their revenue generation technology?
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 05:36
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/JamesPaddock/status/1204835165580746754
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 05:42
|
|
|
Mordja posted:Started on Quake 2 and it really is a weird middleground between something like, well, Quake 1 and Half Life with its not-quite-linear, contiguous maps and fairly basic scripted sequences. I'm glad to see it return to a more Doom-like style of gameplay in terms of enemy counts and lower health numbers, but they're also (so far) a little unmemorable. This in large part due to the game looking, frankly, ugly. While I think Quake 1's got a cool aesthetic that holds up nowadays, Quake 2 just looks like an old video game. What were peoples' general reaction to the campaign at the time? I loved the poo poo out of it. It was pretty mind blowing in the little stopgap era it came out in between Quake and Half-Life. The weapon variety and feel is pretty good, with a lot of useful weapons that don't stop being useful for the whole game. The enemy variety is great and they feel good to shoot and be shot it by. There's a lot of secret stuff to find and I liked that there's an inventory system so you can hold onto powerups until you actually want to use them. The art style probably isn't for everyone, but I like it a lot and it's pretty consistently applied to a whole bunch of different environments all the way through. The linked levels are pretty cool; the multi-map "units" let the individual mission areas be much bigger than the map size would normally allow. The transitions between levels and units all try to make sense so the world feels pretty cohesive. I like how the secret levels are worked into the world such that the access to them fits in and you even return to the mission area after completing them. The mission objectives and (brief) radio messages and little scripted bits do a good job of making the progression through the levels make sense. The sound design is pretty decent too. The sound track is excellent and instead of being per-level, there are triggers that change track or stop the music mid-level so it's more dynamic. But there's enough ambient sound in the environment that you can even just turn off the music and there's enough atmosphere going on. But the best part is the weapon and enemy sounds and how good it sounds to shoot them. Of course, it didn't take long for a lot of the things I mentioned to be done better; nearly everything I mentioned above was done better by Half-Life within a year. But it did make it out first, at a time when FPS design was rapidly changing, and IMO did a good job of it - even though looking back with no prior exposure just makes it look old, because it was one of the first to try a lot of things that became standard. And I still really like the gross, grimy, bloody space marines versus low-tech Borg style of the game. Though as far as mods go, the main focus of Quake II modders was the multiplayer so there isn't much single-player content out there to play nowadays outside of the base game and the two expansions. There were some one-off custom maps but tracking them down may be hard with the poor state of archival of PlanetQuake and peoples' personal websites from that era. (I know because few years ago I was experimenting with a mecha-themed mod ala Shogo's mecha sequences and I had trouble tracking down archives of custom player models of mechs that I remembered from back in the day to use as enemies.) So without active multiplayer scenes and without much accessible single player mod content there isn't really much reason to go back to Quake II except to check out the official stuff, probably just once, and only if you can really stomach it anymore. I can, but I bet it's a hard sell for people who didn't play it back in the day at the right time.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 05:45
|
|
|
Zaphod42 posted:There is literally nothing that star citizen does that you couldn't do with the Crysis 3 engine out of the box, because that's exactly what it is. i just googled and it seems like there's actually a couple things the biggest seems to be that the world has more than one "physics grid" operating at once. the dumbest TL;DR i can give of what this means is, if you've ever played GTA and tried to car-surf and fell off like a dunce when the car moved, Star Citizen has fixed the physics problem that makes that a thing; in addition to every object having physics relative to the world, large vehicles and other moving environmental things have their own "physics grid" that means your physics lock relative to those things when you're standing on them. it's not a super, super huge deal but i'm not sure i've ever seen this before, it's kind of neat, and it probably took a shitload of work and skyrocketed the game's CPU requirements. the other big thing that seems cool is server meshing; essentially an online instance can split across more than one server to distribute the load and accommodate more players, with them all still being able to interact with each other and the servers not desyncing (and this is apparently a large chunk of why they switched to Lumberyard, because Amazon offered to help them achieve this) it seems like, at best, another Battlecruiser 3000AD where it'll take a billion years longer than it was supposed to and come out missing a whole bunch of features, but to say there's nothing technically interesting whatsoever about it seems like as much of a lie as their puffery in the other direction e: also, the fact that apparently even knowing too much about Star Citizen crack-pings your brain regardless of what you think of it makes me not really wanna dig any deeper, so maybe don't take this as license to start a massive derail WeedlordGoku69 fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Dec 12, 2019 |
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 05:47
|
|
|
LORD OF BOOTY posted:i just googled and it seems like there's actually a couple things They didn't "fix" that, that isn't new, having multiple physics grids is a known thing that has been done in many games before. That's not revolutionary in ANY way. That's something Crytek can do out of the box, you just have to take the time to script it up. Also, their physics grid "solution" is hilariously buggy and often drops players through the floor, or teleports them to a nearby planet on accident. People REGULARLY just get teleported to the middle of space and choke to death. Randomly. Physics grids! They haven't "fixed" anything. Server meshing is a thing they've spoken about doing and haven't remotely come close to. You're believing the lies. The most players that can be in a star citizen server is like 50 and that has been a fact for the last 6 years and they keep saying "as soon as we do X we'll have server meshing" and they keep pushing it back year by year by year. SSOCS is the next big "tech" thing they're working on that's supposed to fix it, but SSOCS is itself a made up buzzword lie attempt to excuse why its taking 6 years to code a basic MMO server, which any other game company could do. I'm legit depressed you think CIG has done some revolutionary server meshing. Because they absolutely, absolutely 100% have not. You cannot, CANNOT have more than a handful of players in each Star Citizen server. But this is Trump's America. Lies and half-truths rule the land. Fake news everywhere.  E: LordOfBooty, you don't have to explain what those things are to me. I've worked on an MMO. I'm a programmer. Please trust me that its all smoke and mirrors and bullshit. They have done literally nothing that another game studio hasn't done before. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Dec 12, 2019 |
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 05:56
|
|
|
Somehow I avoided get scammed on Kickstarter by sheer dumb luck. Because I totally would have thrown money at Star Citizen when it was announced, had I not already have tossed it at Broken Age, Wasteland 2, and Shadowrun Returns. I would also have given money to Clang and Confederate Express, HA!
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 05:56
|
|
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUPcngRGnu8
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 06:35
|
|
|
Zaphod42 posted:They didn't "fix" that, that isn't new, having multiple physics grids is a known thing that has been done in many games before. That's not revolutionary in ANY way. That's something Crytek can do out of the box, you just have to take the time to script it up. this is a wendys
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 06:38
|
|
|
Zaphod42 posted:No it absolutely is not. Its Crytek. The whole thing is just Crytek + models + lies. There is nothing of a technical marvel in the giant heap of lies and tech debt they've made for themselves. Touche. I haven't been following it particularly closely, I guess it figures that it's even more of a scam than I originally thought.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 06:38
|
|
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzD9ldLoc3c
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 06:42
|
|
|
fair enough, i'll trust you if you say that's all horseshit, you're a programmer and i'm not. i just googled around and saw a post on the subreddit for it asking that exact question ("wtf is SC doing that's technically interesting") and those were the things that stuck out to me; if one's normal and the other's a load of nonsense that at best they're nowhere near achieving, then yeah, that's not much. e: i will say that it strikes me as less of an outright deliberate scam, and more of a Barkley-2-on-a-large-scale "Icarus aimed straight for the core of the goddamn sun" situation, though. from what i'm aware they are genuinely, in good faith, trying to work on the game; they're just also a mismanaged clusterfuck that can't get very much done other than jpegs of spaceships, weighed down even more by some of the most absurd feature creep to ever be seen in a video game. i have zero faith in Star Citizen turning out to be good, but i can't find any hate in my heart for the poor non-Chris-Roberts motherfuckers who are having to try and make it exist at all. WeedlordGoku69 fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Dec 12, 2019 |
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 07:25
|
|
|
BattleMaster posted:I loved the poo poo out of it. It was pretty mind blowing in the little stopgap era it came out in between Quake and Half-Life. I agree with all of what you posted. It wasn't that Quake had a "cool aesthetic" and Quake II didn't, because it absolutely did; I remember wandering around the SP levels as a callow youth, wide-eyed and immersed in what struck me (and still does) as the remarkably coherent and cohesive universe that had emerged from the brains of id's artists and level designers. And I say this as someone who is definitely in the camp that prefers FPSes set in dimensional horror to ones set in comparatively prosaic sci-fi (even id-style chunky body horror sci-fi). It's just that, for whatever reason, Q1's aesthetic of Lovecraftian castles and metal hell dungeon dimensions has kept its fan club for a lot longer than Q2's setting. I think this might be another thing that we can chalk up to Half-Life and to other period FPSes in general. There were several years there where it seemed like if you wanted sci-fi/cyberpunk FPS, you had a number of other titles to move on to after you were done with Quake II, but if you wanted to step through a dimensional portal and fight demons, well, your options were pretty much to play Doom and Quake maps up until Doom 3 came out, and then to go back to playing Doom and Quake maps for several more years because lmao at waiting for anyone to release high-quality maps or mods for Doom 3. I'm not counting Painkiller because, even though it was notionally about demons and hell, it didn't have anywhere close to a coherent aesthetic to reflect that.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 07:26
|
|
|
Quake 2 looked pretty good until Unreal came out and made it look kind of poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 07:27
|
|
|
I saw this video a while ago and it's a pretty good insight into how weird of an idea Thief was. It's amazing that it came out as good as it is because the devs really had no idea what they were doing since it was basically uncharted territory. It's also kind of amazing how much like Doom, despite essentially creating the genre it did so many things so well that it still holds up pretty well against more modern games. Like Thief doesn't quite hold up as well as Doom does (the control scheme in particular takes some getting used to), but there are still things it does that are so much better than any other game that followed in its footsteps.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 07:29
|
|
|
LORD OF BOOTY posted:fair enough, i'll trust you if you say that's all horseshit, you're a programmer and i'm not. i just googled around and saw a post on the subreddit for it asking that exact question ("wtf is SC doing that's technically interesting") and those were the things that stuck out to me; if one's normal and the other's a load of nonsense that at best they're nowhere near achieving, then yeah, that's not much. I don't wanna derail this thread with it (oops), but no, I don't think you can even say that. Maybe when they first started Chris was intending to operate in good faith, but he very clearly isn't anymore. All their production is spent on making trailers for new spaceships to sell to make more income to keep the lights on. They're making very little game progress but continually make excuses and apologies but keep asking people to invest even though they don't have anything other than new microtransactions to show for their efforts. They're not making progress on the game's campaign, but they keep making progress on these advertisement commercials to pitch new spaceships. HMMM. I mean, just think about this. Its a game that sells microtransaction spaceships for literally thousands of dollars, for a game that isn't done yet. If any game did either of those things; thousand dollar microtransactions OR microtransactions for a beta that isn't done and has no release date, people would go nuts with how scummy it is. But SC does both and only manages to somehow get by because the only people who pay attention to it are people who are so massively sunk-cost-fallacy they can't recognize the emperor has no clothes. People have donated literally $5k-$15k and NEED this game to come out. That's really unhealthy and toxic. Then they take these people and ask them to get their friends to buy spaceships, and then offer them new spaceships, and well, you're already invested for $10k, if the game fails, you'll get nothing. But if you just invest another $2k, then we can finish the game! Its a videogame MLM scheme. Straight up. The Cheshire Cat posted:I saw this video a while ago and it's a pretty good insight into how weird of an idea Thief was. It's amazing that it came out as good as it is because the devs really had no idea what they were doing since it was basically uncharted territory. It's also kind of amazing how much like Doom, despite essentially creating the genre it did so many things so well that it still holds up pretty well against more modern games. Like Thief doesn't quite hold up as well as Doom does (the control scheme in particular takes some getting used to), but there are still things it does that are so much better than any other game that followed in its footsteps. That story he tells about accidentally sneaking into an off limits basement and hiding in the dark while the guard creeps by is so visceral  Yeah its incredible knowing they completely bet the farm on the game and were going to have to fire like half the staff, but they pulled the drat thing off. All on a wild concept that nobody'd really done much of before. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Dec 12, 2019 |
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 07:36
|
|
|
One thing about the Star Citizen scam is that it's made the whole Daikatana debacle seem fairly harmless and goofy. They actually were working on a game and didn't take money from fans. Romero was even sorta on the right side of history in his famous disagreements with Carmack he was just a bit early and also kind of bad at implementing them or running a studio. You could say the same thing about Monolith's buggy games that were the target of so much raging in the 90s.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 07:37
|
|
|
FuzzySlippers posted:One thing about the Star Citizen scam is that it's made the whole Daikatana debacle seem fairly harmless and goofy. They actually were working on a game and didn't take money from fans. Romero was even sorta on the right side of history in his famous disagreements with Carmack he was just a bit early and also kind of bad at implementing them or running a studio. You could say the same thing about Monolith's buggy games that were the target of so much raging in the 90s. Romero's also more on the right side of being a human being compared to Carmack and others of his former cohort. I'm sure the guy has his warts just like any of us, but at least his portfolio includes trans rights and, critically, does not include killing cats or buttfucking American McGee's girlfriend
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 07:52
|
|
|
JerryLee posted:Romero's also more on the right side of being a human being compared to Carmack and others of his former cohort. I'm sure the guy has his warts just like any of us, but at least his portfolio includes trans rights and, critically, does not include killing cats or buttfucking American McGee's girlfriend I’m sorry you’re gonna need to expand on those last two things.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 08:00
|
|
|
I don't know about the buttfucking, but the cat thing was about carmack having his cat (or the office cat, i cant remember) put down because he didn't want to take care of it anymore.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 08:03
|
|
|
JerryLee posted:buttfucking American McGee's girlfriend im sorry what
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 08:12
|
|
|
there is a Good John, and there is a Bad John.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 08:12
|
|
|
if you told me romero did something like that because 90's romero was a dirtbag rockstar, sure. but carmack seems like he would be repulsed by the idea of sex and even more repulsed by the idea of betrayal on that kind of level.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 08:15
|
|
|
chaosapiant posted:I’m sorry you’re gonna need to expand on those last two things. ETPC posted:im sorry what ShackNews's "Rocket Jump" article series. The whole thing is well worth reading (and now free), but the episode in question is mentioned in chapter 9. e: Here's the beginning of the series. https://www.shacknews.com/article/101156/rocket-jump-quake-and-the-golden-age-of-first-person-shooters?page=2#detail-view
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 08:16
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 21, 2024 00:29 |
|
|
im reading chapter ten right now and all im seeing is american mcgee was a dipshit 21 year old and dated some random photographer's gf and trent reznor calmly told him "what the gently caress is wrong with you" im not seeing anything about "john carmack hosed american mcgee's girlfriend"
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2019 08:23
|
|