Thoughts on Quake

I miss journalling and I'm going to try some writing again - we'll see how it goes.

All the way back in 1997 or so, we got a modem installed in my dad's Pentium and had a computer capable of accessing the Internet for the first time. I used this primarily to play Quake, fascinated that I could play against thousands of people from all around the world (none of whom were particularly pleasant or literate). It was incredible at the time, but in the wake of my recent re-obsession with Doom, I've been playing through it again (through the Darkplaces source port) to see how it holds up today.

There are a lot of things that I didn't appreciate at the time - it was known as a true-3D successor to Doom, after its predecessor had used genius-tier workarounds to construct a 3D environment without having to actually render it that way - so the sudden move to full polygonal monsters, weapons and a greater freedom in level design felt like a revelation. In Doom, you could never have any level space above or below any other (so no bridges, platforms within a larger room, or even simple things like a shelf against a wall), though it was smoothly designed enough that you would be hard pressed to notice unless you were really looking. Quake lifted this restriction, and you can feel that the level designers are very enthusiastic about their newfound abilities, with platforms circling rooms, multi-tiered constructions and extensive use of the new underwater environments. One example I saw cited at the time in some magazine or other was in the secrets - they're no longer about running along walls hammering the space bar. In fact, the complete removal of the Use button means that there's more emphasis on shootable targets than before, and you have to look for buttons and switches on ceilings, floors, little ledges that you can sneak around, and so on.

There's something I miss compared to Doom, though, and that's demonstrated in Quake's choice of colour scheme. Well... brown. Going through the episodes again, it's a little less drab than I remember it being, but it still seems like a nudge in the wrong direction and an ill omen of the coffee-filtered look of modern first person shooters. However, I could be just saying that coming from Doom, which was madly colourful and anything was thrown in as a texture up to and including a photo of a motherboard and somebody's skinned knee.

Something that I'm surprised I didn't notice before is that the approach to enemies is really different from Doom. They're made of a mix of earthbound and floating ones like before, but what's different is the relationship between the hordes' numbers and strength. Doom was about being handed a weapon, a roomful of enemies and being invited to go berserk - if you have a rocket launcher and some explosive barrels, things blow up very quickly. In stark contrast to that, Quake's encounters are usually in smaller spaces with five or six monsters in an attack group at maximum - and some of the more agile ones like the Fiend are threatening enough on their own. The monsters are much stronger than Doom's - the few low-level monsters are found only on the first couple of levels of each episode, and the Ogre (probably the most common enemy, and the next step up from the Grunts) pretty much shrugs off a direct hit with a rocket. In fact, explosives are a lot less dangerous than they were in Doom all round, where a rocket to the face meant understandably instant death - the Ogre's primary projectile weapon is the grenade, which shows off the 3D capabilities by bouncing around after it's thrown, but if it explodes nearby it's the equivalent of being slightly singed by a firework.

The distribution of enemy types throughout the levels is weird as well - Doom didn't have a ton of these, there were a few enemies in the shareware episode and a couple more that popped up in the registered version (and even more in the expansion-pack-with-a-number-on-the-end Doom 2). But the introduction of the hideously powerful monsters was treated as a real event, with entire levels devoted to them in the form of Tower of Babel for the Cyberdemon and Dis for the Spider Mastermind. In Quake, you've seen nearly all the monsters by the time you've finished the third level. And the biggest monster, the eyeless yeti Shambler who appears without much fanfare on level three, just doesn't have the charisma that the big enemies of Doom had - he stomps about a bit and has a completely silent laser beam attack, but that's about it.

This seems to have turned into an essay on why I think Doom is better than Quake, which I really didn't intend it to be as I'm sure I played more of the latter when I was younger. It's definitely not a bad game, and it shows id's trademark care for what they were doing - but there's something really captivating about Doom that I don't think has ever really been equalled.