• they/he

I play video games!


ETPC
@ETPC

i just threw my quake 1 box and disc in the GARBAGE because new games are always better then old games!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Snarboo
@Snarboo

You may not like it, but this is what peak lighting looks like!


On a serious note, while I know Quake 2 generally isn't anyone's favorite Quake, I always felt like it had the best raw architecture and map detailing of any FPS of the era. It still holds up even today!

Of course, the consequences of all that masterful brush detailing is that you end up with a bunch of maps that feel and look really same-y by the end of everything. Unlike its predecessor, it doesn't have the sheer weirdness and theme mishmashing that made Quake such a joy to play. And unlike its contemporaries, it doesn't have the raw wonder and dazzle a good Unreal map has, nor the verisimilitude and flow of a good Half-Life, Kingpin or SiN map. It's like some techno baroque masterpiece: your brain knows it's good, but it gets lost in all the details and you end up feeling confused by it. Also the enemies are huge ammo sponges and your massive arsenal isn't very good, so you end up chaingunning and hyperblasting everything into paste, but we won't go into that.

Quake 2's masterful design ethos has also bled into a lot of modern Doom maps, which may explain why I bounce off so many modern Doom mapsets. Sometimes you need jank and grit to break up the monotony of masterpiece brush detailing, who knew!


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in reply to @Snarboo's post:

That's the general story I hear from others that really got into Quake 2! I was too scared to try playing against other players, so I stuck to singleplayer games or modes for a long time. Quake 2's mod scene leaned more towards multiplayer, so a lot of that passed me by. It wasn't until the original Unreal and its bot mode that I became more interested in multiplayer modes.

I did manage to play some multiplayer Quake 2 matches sometime in the mid to late 2000s, and had an absolute blast, so I can see how and why that became the central pillar of the game for a lot of people.