3 ms·
I don't remember much segmentation. The people who played Quake moved to Quake 2 and Quake 3 and Half-Life, for the most part. It's just that of the three Quak
by klodolph 5y ago
I don't remember much segmentation.
The people who played Quake moved to Quake 2 and Quake 3 and Half-Life, for the most part. It's just that of the three Quakes, Quake has the most long-lived single-player experience.
Half-Life was competing against Quake 2, which was a year old by the time Half-Life came out. I think the general consensus is that Half-Life is just a much better game than Quake 2. Quake 2 had a much better competitive multiplayer experience than Half-Life (my opinion), but Half-Life was much more fun for casual play. The players that moved from Quake to Quake 2 moved to Half-Life.
Steam wasn't a major factor early in Half-Life's release cycle. Half-Life was released in 1998, and Steam didn't come out until 2003. Before then, you'd update Quake, Quake 2, and Half-Life the same way... you'd see a news article on Planet Quake or Planet Half-Life about a new patch and download it, or you'd connect to a server and you'd get an error message. Quake did get updates for a fairly long time, considering... QuakeWorld 2.33 came out in December 1998, when Half-Life was already out. Quake 2 got updates for a while as well, but the online experience of Quake 3 was far superior, and Quake 2's single-player campaign just wasn't great, so not many people cared about Quake 2 updates late in the game's lifecycle.
> Back in the day Quake series was the big games, not Counterstrike. ID Softwares lack of investment opened up the door for Valve.
> It was theirs to loose and they lost it.
Half-Life was just a better game, overall, than Quake 2. It wasn't a lack of investment.
There are various theories revolving around the major "personalities" at ID Software, but I think it's enough to just say that Quake 2 was not as good as Half-Life.
- rob74 5y agoWell, what many other games (System Shock, Half-Life etc. etc.) had, and the id games definitely lacked, was simply a coherent story (other than "go in, shoot the monsters/bad guys and try not to get killed"), which (at least for some players) adds a whole layer of depth and motivation...
- ryandrake 5y agoFor what we'd today consider the "hardcore" players, the Dooms and Quakes were all about multiplayer deathmatch. Most of the players I knew didn't care at all about single player. LAN parties were big. In 1994, you couldn't find a campus computer lab not taken over by DOOM deathmatches. Remember SERSETUP and TCPSETUP? Online multiplayer matchmaking was in its early days, but that's already where the "scene" was. You had DWANGO for Doom. Then a guy called Scott Coleman and a few others hacked TCPSETUP to create iDoom, vastly improving network game initiation. This eventually turned into the Kali gaming service. Later, more advanced matchmaking services like Qspy (which later turned into the GameSpy business) made it even easier. I recall running what may possibly have been the first Doom 2 Internet tournament from my dorm room. When QTest came out in 1996, it was multiplayer only. No single player. We all played the shit out of those three preview levels, and I don't think when the full Quake was eventually released I even played the single player game. Multiplayer (Dooms/Quakes) and mods (mostly just Quakes, due to the difficulty of modding Doom), were the two huge drivers of those games' scenes.
- Lammy 5y ago> Half-Life was competing against Quake 2, which was a year old by the time Half-Life came out. Half-Life is even more impressive when you compare its state around the time of Quake2's launch to the final game that shipped a year later: https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Half-Life_Alpha https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Half-Life_Alpha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h7bTo5xLyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h7bTo5xLyQ