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The Art and Design of Quake 4
Gamespy has a feature discussing the upcoming first person shooter Quake 4. More details about the title are revealed in an interview and screenshots provided by some of the folks at Raven. From the article: "I think we have a lot of diversity throughout the entire game. We have some dark areas, and we have outdoor areas that are brighter. I think how diverse everything is will really go a long way. We didn't really set out saying, 'This game is going to be dark, this game is going to be light' -- we set out to make a cohesive environment where you go through different extremes and you'll see a bunch of different stuff."
One of my good (internet) friends is a programmer on Quake 4, and I know a few other guys on the Activision tech team and such. The story is a continuation of Quake 2, but you can expect Q3A style multiplayer awesomeness as well. It's going to be a great game.
Quake 1 had by far the most engrossing atmosphere I've ever experienced in a video game. Just that sense of hopelessness. The environment just felt dark, hostile and uninviting.
I think this game will be great, and the people saying it might be like doom3 are part of the problem with doom3. Doom3 wasn't bad, it was just overhyped as the game of the millenium
Hopefully this game won't be expected to entertain you, run your life, cook your meals and generally rule the universe like Doom3 was
Business Voyeur
I'm hoping to have my massive 32/64-player Quake 2 DM level, Aquaphobia, done before Quake 4 comes out. I only been working on it (on-and-off-but-mostly-off) for the last six years.
Aquaphobia Project Page
After I get done with Quake 4 single player, I'll start working on some new levels for that game.
Doom 3 was a poor game. It amounts to hours and hours of running down cramped hallways, encountering monsters that other than visually don't really differ much. It gets really boring really quick.
The game feels more like one long technology demo, than something built to provide compelling entertainment. And even being a technology demo, the results are less than impressive. The vast, lush environments in HL2 make the cramped environments in Doom 3 look quaint in comparison, even if the Doom 3 engine, with its real time lighting, is ultimately more advanced. I wonder if Doom 3 can even handle environments that have the same scope as HL2. The portions of Doom 3 that take place on the outside of Mars look really bad. Hell ends up being a bit more impressive, but it quickly reverts back to the familiar small enclosed envirnoment.
Hopefully the Quake 4 team will be able to make a more compelling game.
The Heart - blatently stolen from Natural Selection's hive.
If you want good co-op games you can play with your wife, you can't go wrong with Bioware. The Baldurs Gate series in particular is great for playing with chicks... the ability to pause the game at any time is great for those who don't have the highly developed fast-twitch mousing ability :P
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You might want to check in with Serious sam, just a funny game with a ridiculously insane (in a good way) engine. Wonder why that engine never kicked off...?
I liked Q1 most, myself. The weapons were nice, the patterns for killing enemies without receiving damage were pleasant, the physics had a nice "feeling," and the gothic setting felt much less like a bad SciFi movie. Playing it co-op was fun, too.
I never much liked the artwork for Q2, nor the weapons for the most part. The change in the game physics was also sort of disappointing.
If Q4 is all SciFi-ish like Q2, I'll only really be into it if it has had zero art contribution from id. Raven has good artists, but id has shown in Q2, Q3, and Doom 3 that it has a penchant for tacky models. Really pretty maps, with really, really bad models filling them.
Since Doom 3 had to be nuked, multiplayerwise, in limiting the players to 8 to don't strain people's systems too much, I heard rumours that Quake 4 would at least bring that ammount back to a sane 32 players. Rumours though.
While a game with 8 players can make great games, you are either limited to (imho, very boring) deathmatch, or something alot more complicated (think of the gametypes in Splinter Cell).
I hope that Quake 4 will bring some good multiplayer mode, and if the focus will be on single player content, it will need lots of improvement of how the current scripting/mapping is done : Doom 3 still had a very basic (as in, not too extensive)but also complicated process to create a singleplayer map.
In the end it were still the basics of the Q1 engine that were being used, allthough it rocks that you don't have to compile maps anymore.
So true that it's strange that engine didn't take off : It wasn't too advanced, but with it, also came a lower licensing price.
The one thing that rocked was the ammount of enemies at the same time on-screen. :)
Heh, I'm getting flashbacks of millions of screaming headless-madmen running at me in a closed-off valley
Quake I with the Team Fortress or Navy Seals mods was really great. The Navy Seals mod had the best weapon feel of any FPS I've ever played. I liked the plain Quake I weapons a lot more than the Quake II ones as well. Especially the grenade launcher -- that one's always been my favorite :-)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is using the Doom 3 engine, correct? One of the problems with that engine is that it didn't support (or didn't use) any kind of indirect lighting (radiosity, etc.) in order to calculate all the lighting dynamically. That just doesn't work well in outdoor environments. Is Q4 going to support some kind of indirect lighting for those outdoor areas? A static/dynamic hybrid might be interesting -- precalculated radiosity with real-time dynamic lighting "layered" on top.
It's kind of weird, but -lots- of what the doom3 engine -can- do wasn't in the game. If you look through the SDK, there's plenty of stuff that seemingly didn't make it into the game (like support for vihicles, etc.) They could've made it FPS for part of the game, then have the player ride a tank like in UT2004, then fly around, etc. Dunno why they didn't do it.
Oh, and the engine can support huge open maps (just like Team Arena terrain maps).
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Now honestly if you're going to knock this title and every other FPS that came out in the last 2 years please save us your 'Wisdom' or go flame DNF for not being done yet ya unoriginal bastids!
Raven won't botch this one they reliably create great games, but they always seem to time their releases concurrently with something truely awesome that blows them out of the water. (For instance Heretic 2 and Half-Life came out roughly the same time)
Quaker IV?
Doom 3 aptly demonstrated that id offering no real multiplayer experience for a single player game is bound to spell disaster for the title, when it's nothing more than a simple FPS experience that requires a video card that costs at least $200 to play decently.
FPS games, as is demonstrated every day by the large swaths of people playing tactical shooters on PC and XBox, are doing quite fine. Half-Life 2 secured enormously high praise, and it was little more than a technology demo for the gravity gun.
So what you've done is demonstrate that you don't like these games, not that they are obsolete. And id showed that they cannot make particularly entertaining single-player games, which we all realized years ago. The number of people that play System Shock 2 these days probably doesn't even compete with various mods for Q3.
Quake 4 will probably be unimpressive. I bothered to RTFA after a while, and noticed that its screenshots look depressingly like Doom 3. Doom 3 had pretty uninspired artwork to go along with its boring gameplay, and the multiplayer architecture of the engine so far has left me unimpressed about the possibilities of quality mods.
What's sad, is that until Unreal 3 is released, the best mods available on linux outside of running wine will be for UT2k4, ET and Q3A. Lots of great mods will target Source because Doom 3 is a big disappointment, and we'll be left in the cold.
Look at the interior of most modern museums. For the most part their big rectangle rooms with chairs in the center with paintings on the wall. Sure its great when you have 500 different tourists trying to cram into a room designed for 300 people, but its god awful ugly for video games.
Same thing with modern day airports. Why build restaurants, newspaper stands or bookstores into the design? Isn't the goal supposed to be streamlining the process of getting people to and from their airplanes? That sure as hell doesn't happen with all those distractions. A couple vending machines and advertising reminders over time can replace this old design.
Modern day architecture is EXTREMELY overly glamorous. Take a look at medieval castles: tight hallways means easy to defend, towers on the corners means maximum line of sight in 360 degrees, a wall where troops can stand on to defend against attacks either inside or outside the castle. Ugly as hell but it gets the job done with minimal waste of material.
All I can say is Guild Wars.
The girlfriend enjoys the game as much as I do.
Can be played single player (with henchmen to bulk out a party) or co-op.
A great solution to Co-Op games. Have a peer, if you haven't already.