Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

152

ddsubburam about 2 hours ago 67 commentsRead Article on slayersclub.bethesda.net

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Discussion Sentiment

76% Positive

Analyzed from 1860 words in the discussion.

Discussion (67 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

karim79•6 minutes ago

Quake is 30 years old. I can't believe I'm still alive. I love this game so dearly. The mods were just incredible, KQP and Girobot in particular.

Those were the for real LAN party days which I'll never get back. As in I had friends bringing over their big ass CRT monitors and PCs for a single occasion and also had ludicrously long network cables. My parents didn't mind, they somehow understood, even with LAN wires running across the kitchen floor. Priceless.

Edit: typo: lab -> LAN

ZuLuuuuuu•about 1 hour ago

It is nice to see Quake getting some love from the publisher, but I feel like it is not enough.

A bit controversial opinion maybe but I really like Quake Champions and I spent a good amount of time playing it. I even bought some battle passes and merch to support the development. I was really sad that they basically put the game to life support just 1.5 years after its release. The game improved so fast during those 1.5 years, we were getting significant improvements with every patch. I always wondered how much more it would improve if they put just 1 more year into its development.

0x1ch•3 minutes ago

Well, this update doesn't mean much overall in the Quake scene, if you actually play it for the PvP. Quake Live has held it down since 2012-ish, and was always a free-to-play game.

Champions came out, most of the community from Quake Live stayed on live. Bethesda in all their wisdom made it cost $10, I assume to sway new gamers into downloading Champions (which they also made F2P shortly after release). So effectively, they swapped the F2P of both games, and the free one is the less preferred option in the scene.

madewithdrama•about 1 hour ago

With the failure of Quake champs, unreal tournament 4, and diabotical in the past decade, I don't think we can blame the developers for not trying hard enough. All three were great games (regardless of how nit-picky the players might be), and all three failed at attracting and maintaining new players.

mikepurvis•about 1 hour ago

I think games that are heavily reliant on online pvp are just always going to struggle with being more niche appeal. Matchmaking is hard to do well and consistently, and managing the skill/progression curve is hard— there's gotta be things in there to master, but also new players will never join if they're just getting stomped every game because they can never catch up.

This tension has arguably been a contributing factor in the collapse of the ARC Raiders playerbase, with a huge population who joined primarily to shoot and loot the robots eventually confronting the realities of a pvpve game, and peacing out for good after getting shot in the back or ambushed too many times.

ThrowawayR2•43 minutes ago

Unreal Tournament 4 didn't get a chance to fail because it was never a real release. UT4 was a free tech demo for Unreal Engine 4 that never got completed because Fortnite started taking off at that time and developers were deallocated from it.

And UT3 was definitely not a great game by anyone's measure.

baal80spam•about 1 hour ago

> all three failed at attracting and maintaining new players

This means that they not necessarily were all that great.

madewithdrama•about 1 hour ago

They were great examples of what an arena shooter should be. Smooth movement, balanced weapons, well designed maps. The people who had experience with arena shooters liked them. Most new players did not want to get rekt for months on end while they learned the basics, however.

moomin•about 1 hour ago

Only in the rather reductive sense of “the vast majority of gamers are into other genres now”.

acron0•about 1 hour ago

It can also mean the market has shifted which is more the case imo.

jervant•38 minutes ago

Nine Inch Nails also has some new merch and soundtrack album for the 30th anniversary:

https://shop.nin.com/

thecrumb•about 2 hours ago

I have no idea what any of these are LOL

Dawn of the Machine is available as a free update for Quake owners on XBOX Series X/S, XBOX One, Microsoft PC Store, Game Pass, PC Game Pass, Steam, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch 2 (via backwards compatibility), and Nintendo Switch versions of Quake.

I do still have my Quake CDs...

bsimpson•about 1 hour ago

Same.

Weird to see a DLC for a game that's older than Steam. Would have been more interesting if they released the WADs or whatever that you could play on the open source version of the game. (All of this is interesting in light of MS's recent hallowing of their game studios.)

When Quake was popular, CDs were far and away the most popular install method. They're locking a lot of OG owners out (unless they're hoping to drive a trickle of $4 Steam sales).

officeplant•about 1 hour ago

These are out for the enhanced release all owners of Quake on Steam/GoG got for free when Nightdive remastered Quake I/II.

Unfortunately they break the limits of the original game engine and usually require something like Darkplaces[0] to run. Although I highly recommend darkplaces for even players of the original Quake because the QoL improvements are nice.

[0]https://github.com/darkplacesengine/darkplaces

ColdStream•43 minutes ago

I figured as much. Some of the addons for the 'modern' Quake seem to really stretch it way beyond anything we saw out of the original engine.

Also love that there is a 50% chance that you can crash a Ps4/Switch just loading a level with the Slave Zero mod that they provide. They are pushing it fairly hard with that one.

efficax•about 1 hour ago

They're called "pak"s for quake :)

bsimpson•43 minutes ago

It's been so long since I've put the CD in, I forgot.

gambiting•about 2 hours ago

Quake launched 2 full years after Playstation 1, so I find it somewhat unlikely you've never heard of a Playstation. And if you have it on CDs you must have played it on PC with Microsoft Windows, so I'd assume a Microsoft PC Store should at least let you guess what it is.

nizmow•about 1 hour ago

Quake was a DOS game.

gambiting•about 1 hour ago

It was actually both in one executable. Pretty neat. But I will agree that OP might have played it in Microsoft Dos on a PC, so the original point still applies.

Lammy•29 minutes ago

PROTIP: Install the Kex-engine remaster, but then actually play IronWail: https://github.com/andrei-drexler/ironwail

It's a real IdTech source port that will load the Remaster's PAKs and pretend to be the Remaster to Steam for achievement unlocks.

Dimension of the Machine was fantastic so I'm hyped to play Dawn of the Machine tonight :D

upmostly•6 minutes ago

Emoji are clear indicators an LLM wrote this post. Ugh.

parasti•about 2 hours ago

Every emoji in this post seems bigger than the last.

silversmith•about 2 hours ago

Where did that trend start? Who writes like that, with emoji bullet points? I'm seeing it around, but surely nobody looks at that and says "yeah that's good"?

pvtmert•about 2 hours ago

Around 2020, I think tools like Notion (notion.so) made it popular. Even the Huggingface itself is an emoji...

walrus01•about 1 hour ago

I remember when someone registered (poopemoji).la

https://xn--ls8h.la/

It does show up as the poop emoji followed by .la in google search results, but not in a firefox address bar.

_verandaguy•about 2 hours ago

LLM-driven writing's been a big part of this trend, unfortunately.

efskap•about 1 hour ago

But that means it had to be a trend already to be overrepresented in the training corpus, right? Or was it just something the RLHF evaluators got a kick out of...

markedathome•about 1 hour ago

I've really seen it a lot in Discord channels that have [emoji]channelname Occasionally in some channels lists may be bullets with emojis particularly the welcome/rules, usually to match reaction emojis, or to automate channel(s) selection (click on the youtube icon to get notified when a youtube vid is posted, etc.)

mgfist•about 2 hours ago

ChatGPT was the first place to really do it to this extent

2OEH8eoCRo0•about 2 hours ago

Look inward at our infantile and excessively positive industry. We are just trying to have fun! Do you hate fun?

grenoire•about 2 hours ago

Did an LLM draft this garbage copy?

Narishma•about 2 hours ago

Yes.

sph•about 1 hour ago

Likely em units and missing closing tags.

html5cat•about 1 hour ago

Surprised they didn't port these to Mac yet. Between M series and Game Porting Toolkit (4 now?) it seems like small effort can unlock huge wave of new players nostalgic for childhood game.

VCFundedGenYer•42 minutes ago

Nope. Unless Game Porting Toolkit is free and open like Proton, there is little to no prospect of the macOS gaming landscape to improve.

jiffygist•about 2 hours ago

Does the new episode work well in opensource ports? (don't feel like installing steam rn and don't care about nightdive port)

eseymour•about 2 hours ago

The modding changes mentioned at the bottom of TFA seem to imply that text strings won't render properly until the source ports are updated. You're going to have to install the NightDive port anyway to download the new episode. I don't think they have a separate download for it. I'd imagine everything else might work okay already or will be fixed alongside the string issues.

AgentME•about 1 hour ago

They need changes to support it, but I don't expect it to take long. Both vkQuake and IronWail work well with the previous new official episode (Dimension of the Machine) and the remastered models after they were updated for that.

joshmarinacci•about 2 hours ago

Is this an update for the original quake or do you need one of the newer ones?

AgentME•about 2 hours ago

It's for people who own the original game on Steam or one of the other supported digital storefronts.

testfrequency•about 2 hours ago

New. Modern platform versions from their respective stores.

johng•5 minutes ago

I had to stop playing online FPS's because the cheating got so bad. I really miss the days of COD/MW2, that was kind of peak for me. I had been playing since Doom on modems... but never saw the cheating so bad. Instant spawn, headshot, nuke.

I don't have a PC anymore so most of the top tier FPS games I can't play anyway since they require kernel level anti-cheat.

ZiiS•about 1 hour ago

Whilst they owe me nothing with the amount I played my CD, feels a bit harsh to trade on the 30th aniversary but only support much newer sales.

ColdStream•37 minutes ago

They have modified the engine heavily since and thus it doesnt really roll back to the older releases. Also, I think it is on discount currently and only costs a few dollars.

The quality of life improvements are done very well and I would recommend. Heck even if just for the new lighting engine.

RobRivera•about 2 hours ago

I have zero real excuse for never having built the game from source.

I have played with the modding surface available in the quakeC files tho!

I was experimenting with a game design element where firing a weapon didnt decrement the ammo, but auto fired.

In other words, you always fired whatever you had out, removing the ammo hoarder behavior, but also makes you very cognizant about explosive barrels and where you point that rocket.

bsimpson•about 1 hour ago

I had the Mac version of Quake II.

They encoded the game as an audio CD, so you could toss the disc in a boombox and listen to the soundtrack when you weren't playing. Very cool!

nizmow•about 1 hour ago

This was actually just how CDDA music tracks worked in almost all CD games in the late 90s. :)

cosmotic•about 1 hour ago

This was very common at the time. I suspect there was a technical reason, maybe freeing up the CPU and memory from dealing with music and offloading that to the CDROM drive.

formerly_proven•about 1 hour ago

There's a reason you used to have a separate four-pin cable going from the CD drive to the sound card ;)

ColdStream•39 minutes ago

Due to the way computers cost a fortune back then, you could skip huge parts of hardware changes in the space of a few years. I must have skipped over that part and jumped from no CD audio (or CD-ROM at all) to, everything over IDE.

Never knew about the 4 pin link.

ZiiS•about 1 hour ago

Strictly speeking the was a seperate track with the game, the music was just in the native Audio CD format.

rzzzt•about 1 hour ago

How many hours did you play when you found out you can dismiss the "computer updated" notification?

namdnay•about 1 hour ago

If you read this and you haven’t played arcane dimensions yet, drop everything and go and do that. It makes the quake the best single player FPS ever. The mechanics are even better than vanilla quake, the maps are gorgeous, the enemies diverse and fun. Absolute perfection

sph•about 1 hour ago

I adore Quake custom levels, but any time I want to play one, the half thousand source ports, the accessory tools to manage wads that work only on Windows (I'm on Linux), figuring out how to get a shady copy of the original .wad from shady sites, all send my brain into analysis paralysis and I just lose any interest. I must have tried half a dozen times over the years, and every time there's even more options and recommendations than last time.

fiatpandas•about 1 hour ago

Is there a technical reason why this update won’t land on GOG?

Uvix•about 1 hour ago

The FAQ reads as "not yet", not "won't". This is second-hand but my impression is that publishing patches through GOG is not as easy as through other platforms (possibly because of their need to build new installers?).

scoofy•about 1 hour ago

Reminder that the NIN Quake soundtrack rules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv5Jvr2Fp48&list=PLs7s7YCW40...

speak_plainly•about 1 hour ago

I bet this is an attempt by Microsoft at trying to win back fans.

I also noticed IShowSpeed and Kai Cenat promoting a Minecraft playthrough, which I would assume is paid for by Microsoft given what they’ve been saying lately: https://youtu.be/IgJru9870_A

We will be inundated with low-effort fan service until morale improves.

ColdStream•34 minutes ago

While that does seem intuitive, they have been doing this kind of stuff with Quake/Quake 2 for many years now. The nightdive refresh was offered for free to anyone who purchased the originals on steam for instance.

system2•about 1 hour ago

I have Quake on Steam. Just updated, but I do not see Dawn of the Machine.

markus_zhang•about 1 hour ago

I see it at the bottom once you select "NEW GAME".

nsxwolf•about 1 hour ago

Does it work with the MS-DOS version?

ColdStream•32 minutes ago

Not likely. The modern version of the quake engine is heavily modified to handle much larger work loads and flexibility.

Haven't looked at it yet but I suspect these maps probably blow over many memory limits that most DOS machines would have had.