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>Things Quake did "wrong" mostly boil down to game design and level design problems. This was a reflection of the issues and internal squabbles ID Software ha

>Things Quake did "wrong" mostly boil down to game design and level design problems. This was a reflection of the issues and internal squabbles ID Software had at the time, especially between John Carmack, the (in)famous programmer, and John Romero, the (in)famous game designer. The story goes that John Carmack tore down walls at ID offices to keep an eye on everyone since John Romero was just coming at work to slack off and play games all day instead of working on Quake, and the other employees were burned out and irate by John Carmack's iron-fist leadership and working style. That's pretty much the epitome of toxic work environments. I'm surprised that Quake came out as good as it did, all things considered. >The Quake 2 engine fixed so many of the technical problems with the Quake engine, but the game is saddled with an awful story After John Romero left and they lost their top game designer, ID Software's released games were basically tech demos to showcase John Carmack's cutting edge 3D engine tech wrapped up in some improv story so they could be sold as games.

klodolph 5y ago
I think the interpersonal problems are overplayed and don’t really explain much. Quake was rushed. 3D level design was in its infancy.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Well that's more of a limitation of what PCs could do at the time. Large levels full of monsters like Doom had in 2D, could not be handled in 3D even by the high end PCs at the time so that's why the design direction was so different and did not age well.
  - Jach 5y ago
    Masters of Doom mentions how some of the early design was based around a D&D campaign Carmack made and they all played. The modern game Amid Evil really struck me as what Quake could have been without its design compromises due to technical limitations and "rush" (more like, they couldn't believe it was taking so long, it turned things toxic, they needed to get it out and be done). AE really nails the swords&sorcery-style fantasy elements whereas Quake only really hints at them (though the more contemporary Hexen series did them a lot better too).
    - bentcorner 5y ago
      I remember reading about Quake before it was released, and I recall that it was going for a much slower pace. Melee combat and 1v1 fights were the focus, and environments felt very dark and moody. Not sure if that was a piece of fan-fiction or whatever, this was ~30 years ago so my memory is very fuzzy. It was also passed around in the BBS days so who knows the veracity of what I read. I imagine this document has been lost to time. I was a little disappointed at the final release that I didn't get the above but it was nevertheless extremely cool.
      - bitwize 5y ago
        Yeah, Quake was supposed to be their RPG in development, The Fight for Justice. "You start off as Quake, the strongest, most dangerous person on the continent." Your character in The Fight for Justice was supposed to start off with a Thor-like hammer and a ring of protection. They tried to carry forth the combat with the hammer into the final Quake game, making it a more melee-focused thing albeit with the ability to shoot thunderbolts or other magic and cause shockwaves by striking the ground with the hammer, etc. They found it didn't work, and they all just wanted to play with more Doom-like guns anyway. The hammer may have become the Axe and Lightning Gun weapons in the final game.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    Large levels and good levels are different things. We know that the limitations of PCs are irrelevant here.
  - bennysomething 5y ago
    What I don't get is that Goldeneye came out the following year was way more impressive in everyway but it's quake and quake 2 that's remembered as ground breaking. I had an N64 and was convinced by hype to get a 3dfx card for my pc. To be honest it was a bit of a let down.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      Goldeneye may have been a very good game, but visually, what the Quake 2 engine was capable of on PC, was far ahead of what the games running on the N64 hardware could ever dream of as it was limited to only 4k texture cache vs PC GPUs back then had 4MB or more of VRAM for textures. This is why N64 textures were blurry. Maybe you weren't blown away because the games you tried were not great or your PC had bottlenecks, since if you do a side by side of PC games of the era that were also ported to the N64, they look obviously worse on the N64. Goldeneye engine was written bespoke for the N64 hardware and the devs were absolute wizards to make it look as good as it did on that limited hardware, but if you look without the rose tinted glasses, you can see the rough edges of the N64 HW limitations.
      - bennysomething 5y ago
        You make some fair points. Thing is I've been back to Goldeneye a lot, on original hardware, emulators and even the leaked Xbox 360 version. Gameplay wise it feels quite far a head of quake 1 and 2. I read that the half life team saw Goldeneye and went and made significant changes because of it. The fact that quake 2 and Goldeneye came out in the same year is strange, Goldeneye plays like it's a generation a head of, it's environments are way more interactive, it's level design is also something that still stands up (this might be something to do with designing the levels as real places and fitting the game around it). Bizarrely I don't think perfect dark was as good. Even worse, I kept waiting for an FPS that took Goldeneyes lessons onboard. Only thing that was timesplitters 1 and 2 (though that's because free radical were ex Goldeneye staff). If someone could recommend an FPS that plays as well as Goldeneye I'd really want to play it :)
    - klodolph 5y ago
      Goldeneye is remembered as groundbreaking everywhere I go, it seems. A lot of it comes down to split-screen multiplayer and its ability to run on a $200 console. It sold at least 10x as many units as Quake 2. People you meet by chance, in person, are more likely to remember Goldeneye. People you meet on HN or at FAANG companies had $2000 PCs back in 1998, hooked up to a LAN. You get a distorted perspective if you work in the tech world.
- RamRodification 5y ago
  > the interpersonal problems are overplayed Agreed. People just love to exaggerate the drama. It's clear that it was there but I think not at the level that people keep claiming it was.
kqr 5y ago
> John Romero, the (in)famous game designer. This is an unfair generalisation. In addition to being a great game designer, Romero was an extremely skilled programmer. He just didn't measure up to Carmack in terms of pure graphics--technical solutions. But since when is that a fair comparison for anyone? I think the primary reason the original Quake idea never bore out (not at id, and not at the studio Romero started after id) was that Romero had some misconceptions about how easy it would be to create a highly complex game by just throwing more manpower at it.
- redisman 5y ago
  Quake was a huge cultural hit and basically kickstarted the multiplayer shooter genre which has ever since been probably the most popular genre for decades. I’m not sure what these takes about it being a failure are
  - Fuzzwah 5y ago
    The previous comments were focused on the single player game. As someone who dedicated 4 (very formative) years to playing Quake / Quakeworld, I agree that the muliplayer game was excellent. Even without the endless extra content from the mod scene, the base vanilla muliplayer experience was just so utterly captivating.
    - redisman 5y ago
      Yeah I probably only played through the campaign twice and some thousands of hours in LAN and online and with various mods
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >This is an unfair generalisation. In addition to being a great game designer Him being a great designer is debatable. During his tenure at ID, Romero had acclaimed successes which lead him to think of himself as this indispensable god-like figure that everything he touched turned to gold and that his talent is wasted at the current ID at the time and became difficult to work with, which was pissing off John Carmack. So after he left ID to work on his own company, Ion Storm, most of his post-ID era games were massive flops that over promised and under delivered (ahem, Daikatana) both story and level wise and ruined the company and brought him back to reality that maybe he's not this god-like game designer after all, based on having a lucky streak early in his career.

klodolph 5y ago

I think the interpersonal problems are overplayed and don’t really explain much. Quake was rushed. 3D level design was in its infancy.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Well that's more of a limitation of what PCs could do at the time. Large levels full of monsters like Doom had in 2D, could not be handled in 3D even by the high end PCs at the time so that's why the design direction was so different and did not age well.
- Jach 5y ago
  Masters of Doom mentions how some of the early design was based around a D&D campaign Carmack made and they all played. The modern game Amid Evil really struck me as what Quake could have been without its design compromises due to technical limitations and "rush" (more like, they couldn't believe it was taking so long, it turned things toxic, they needed to get it out and be done). AE really nails the swords&sorcery-style fantasy elements whereas Quake only really hints at them (though the more contemporary Hexen series did them a lot better too).
  - bentcorner 5y ago
    I remember reading about Quake before it was released, and I recall that it was going for a much slower pace. Melee combat and 1v1 fights were the focus, and environments felt very dark and moody. Not sure if that was a piece of fan-fiction or whatever, this was ~30 years ago so my memory is very fuzzy. It was also passed around in the BBS days so who knows the veracity of what I read. I imagine this document has been lost to time. I was a little disappointed at the final release that I didn't get the above but it was nevertheless extremely cool.
    - bitwize 5y ago
      Yeah, Quake was supposed to be their RPG in development, The Fight for Justice. "You start off as Quake, the strongest, most dangerous person on the continent." Your character in The Fight for Justice was supposed to start off with a Thor-like hammer and a ring of protection. They tried to carry forth the combat with the hammer into the final Quake game, making it a more melee-focused thing albeit with the ability to shoot thunderbolts or other magic and cause shockwaves by striking the ground with the hammer, etc. They found it didn't work, and they all just wanted to play with more Doom-like guns anyway. The hammer may have become the Axe and Lightning Gun weapons in the final game.
- klodolph 5y ago
  Large levels and good levels are different things. We know that the limitations of PCs are irrelevant here.
- bennysomething 5y ago
  What I don't get is that Goldeneye came out the following year was way more impressive in everyway but it's quake and quake 2 that's remembered as ground breaking. I had an N64 and was convinced by hype to get a 3dfx card for my pc. To be honest it was a bit of a let down.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    Goldeneye may have been a very good game, but visually, what the Quake 2 engine was capable of on PC, was far ahead of what the games running on the N64 hardware could ever dream of as it was limited to only 4k texture cache vs PC GPUs back then had 4MB or more of VRAM for textures. This is why N64 textures were blurry. Maybe you weren't blown away because the games you tried were not great or your PC had bottlenecks, since if you do a side by side of PC games of the era that were also ported to the N64, they look obviously worse on the N64. Goldeneye engine was written bespoke for the N64 hardware and the devs were absolute wizards to make it look as good as it did on that limited hardware, but if you look without the rose tinted glasses, you can see the rough edges of the N64 HW limitations.
    - bennysomething 5y ago
      You make some fair points. Thing is I've been back to Goldeneye a lot, on original hardware, emulators and even the leaked Xbox 360 version. Gameplay wise it feels quite far a head of quake 1 and 2. I read that the half life team saw Goldeneye and went and made significant changes because of it. The fact that quake 2 and Goldeneye came out in the same year is strange, Goldeneye plays like it's a generation a head of, it's environments are way more interactive, it's level design is also something that still stands up (this might be something to do with designing the levels as real places and fitting the game around it). Bizarrely I don't think perfect dark was as good. Even worse, I kept waiting for an FPS that took Goldeneyes lessons onboard. Only thing that was timesplitters 1 and 2 (though that's because free radical were ex Goldeneye staff). If someone could recommend an FPS that plays as well as Goldeneye I'd really want to play it :)
  - klodolph 5y ago
    Goldeneye is remembered as groundbreaking everywhere I go, it seems. A lot of it comes down to split-screen multiplayer and its ability to run on a $200 console. It sold at least 10x as many units as Quake 2. People you meet by chance, in person, are more likely to remember Goldeneye. People you meet on HN or at FAANG companies had $2000 PCs back in 1998, hooked up to a LAN. You get a distorted perspective if you work in the tech world.
RamRodification 5y ago
> the interpersonal problems are overplayed Agreed. People just love to exaggerate the drama. It's clear that it was there but I think not at the level that people keep claiming it was.

kqr 5y ago

> John Romero, the (in)famous game designer. This is an unfair generalisation. In addition to being a great game designer, Romero was an extremely skilled programmer. He just didn't measure up to Carmack in terms of pure graphics--technical solutions. But since when is that a fair comparison for anyone? I think the primary reason the original Quake idea never bore out (not at id, and not at the studio Romero started after id) was that Romero had some misconceptions about how easy it would be to create a highly complex game by just throwing more manpower at it.

redisman 5y ago
Quake was a huge cultural hit and basically kickstarted the multiplayer shooter genre which has ever since been probably the most popular genre for decades. I’m not sure what these takes about it being a failure are
- Fuzzwah 5y ago
  The previous comments were focused on the single player game. As someone who dedicated 4 (very formative) years to playing Quake / Quakeworld, I agree that the muliplayer game was excellent. Even without the endless extra content from the mod scene, the base vanilla muliplayer experience was just so utterly captivating.
  - redisman 5y ago
    Yeah I probably only played through the campaign twice and some thousands of hours in LAN and online and with various mods
ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>This is an unfair generalisation. In addition to being a great game designer Him being a great designer is debatable. During his tenure at ID, Romero had acclaimed successes which lead him to think of himself as this indispensable god-like figure that everything he touched turned to gold and that his talent is wasted at the current ID at the time and became difficult to work with, which was pissing off John Carmack. So after he left ID to work on his own company, Ion Storm, most of his post-ID era games were massive flops that over promised and under delivered (ahem, Daikatana) both story and level wise and ruined the company and brought him back to reality that maybe he's not this god-like game designer after all, based on having a lucky streak early in his career.