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Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

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Re: Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

#81

Post by ColdStream »

mikepurvis wrote: post #47
madewithdrama wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 f…

Not just that but I believe that even those folk that have these huge hits don't really understand how they managed to do it. There just seems to be so much luck involved on top of a great product. You can have a brilliant game and still fail because it doesn't get picked up in just the right way.

Sort of like how Nintendo had the Wii, a huge hit but then almost immediately started to flounder for growth ideas as they didn't understand why it worked so well.

Re: Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

#82

Post by [deleted] »

ColdStream wrote: post #60
formerly_proven wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

[deleted]

Re: Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

#84

Post by bsimpson »

hamdingers wrote: post #76
nizmow wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 got more play in my car than they ever did in my Playstation.

HOLY SHIT THOSE SOUNDTRACKS WERE JUST CDS?!

THPS and Crazy Taxi had some of the best soundtracks ever compiled.

Re: Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

#85

Post by ColdStream »

baal80spam wrote: post #38
madewithdrama wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> all three failed at attracting and maintaining new players This means that they not necessarily were all that great.

Popularity and quality are two very different things. There are many brilliant games that simply didn't get much attention simply because of luck or attention got dragged somewhere else.

Re: Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

#86

Post by doublerabbit »

madewithdrama wrote: post #78
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was never officially released, but it was on the front page of epic launcher for years, even after fortnite took off. The online experience was fairly complete and enjoyable (for people with experience) for ctf, duel, tdm, and team arena master. But yeah, epic didn't support it as much as they could have.

Eh, "boomer shooters" died along side with Halo and LAN parties. Minecraft was the final nail in the coffin.

The knack and knowledge of hosting a dedicated server required skills. If you could one click button host a Quake 3 Arena server or UT, there would still be sort of a crowd.

But not only that, if you were new: servers got toxic with the same grumpy players knowing every single trick in the map to one-shot kill you with a rail gun. It got frustrating playing the same bloody map each map change. "Oh yay, it's cs_office again" /s

The whole genre got stale and never has been successfully reignited. As Discord to TeamSpeak; same misfortune.

Fortnite killed Team Fortress, Overwatch killed Halo and Minecraft was the new digital lego. None of them required such a skill to play or host the game. It was refreshing for it's time.

Not forgetting it was the upcoming of a new crowd of folk and as generations go, the old cards topple.

Who hosted an BBS when the internet came to be?

IRC today is pretty much stuck in dinosaur country and XMPP/Jabber never got a product which then was further nailed shut by Google & Co.

It was epic fun for the era but it had a death bed waiting.

Re: Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

#87

Post by karim79 »

amatecha wrote: post #73
karim79 wrote: post #68

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 ru…

hell yeah, my first real LAN game experience on Windows was the Quake test/alpha that preceded the release of the game (IIRC?), when I was at a local tech school for a class. We weren't technically allowed to load the game on the uni PC's but like.. yeah... it happened. And we did zero work for that day (or days). (Prior LAN experience was Marathon and Bolo in the Mac lab which was insanely awesome too, and a year ea…

Honestly the best of times. I wouldn't be able to pay rent were it not for videogames which inspired me to work in the software industry.

I wish we could get those days back. Cars loaded with CRT monitors and big machines and bags of all sorts of stuff.

Re: Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

#88

Post by busterarm »

doublerabbit wrote: post #86
madewithdrama wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was never officially released, but it was on the front page of epic launcher for years, even after fortnite took off. The online experience was fairly complete and enjoyable (for people with experience) for ctf, duel, tdm, and team arena master. But yeah, epic didn't support it as much as they could have.

Eh, "boomer shooters" died along side with Halo and LAN parties. Minecraft was the final nail in the coffin. The knack and knowledge of hosting a dedicated server required skills. If you could one click button host a Quake 3 Arena server or UT, there would still be sort of a crowd. But not only that, if you were new: servers got toxic with the same grumpy players knowing every single trick in the map to one-shot kill…

Wut? We're in a Renaissance of boomer shooters right now. There's like hundreds of new ones and it's a popular category. Just check out civvie11's channel if you disbelieve.

They're just all single player focused.

Re: Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

#89

Post by doublerabbit »

busterarm wrote: post #88
doublerabbit wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, "boomer shooters" died along side with Halo and LAN parties. Minecraft was the final nail in the coffin. The knack and knowledge of hosting a dedicated server required skills. If you could one click button host a Quake 3 Arena server or UT, there would still be sort of a crowd. But not only that, if you were new: servers got toxic with the same grumpy players knowing every single trick in the map to one-shot kill…

Wut? We're in a Renaissance of boomer shooters right now. There's like hundreds of new ones and it's a popular category. Just check out civvie11's channel if you disbelieve. They're just all single player focused.

Single player maybe, but that's nothing compared to the likes of UT or Quake.

Re: Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

#90

Post by zquzra »

Memories, many memories. I remember the endless nights playing Quake on dial-up, 190 ms ping, listening to Nirvana.

There are still people playing on some servers, and the challenge is higher than ever. Although I still have the reflexes, the tics, and I know the maps and respawn times, I had a very hard time fitting into the games. I imagine that for someone starting today, it must be impossible to face 30 years of muscle memory.

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