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
It was actually pretty cool how they designed the first room to demonstrate almost every new feature of the engine and how the first level is made to walk you though most of the new gameplay features.
And as I typed that I can still hear the noise all these years later.
Definitely made high school much more fun.
https://archive.org/details/q3DemoTEST
There were multiple test releases. You can find the older ones out on the web.
Ah yes, those lab parties.
I to recall the days of all synthesising LSD and playing Quake too.
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
You should rephrase this as just "Install Quake on Steam, but then" for newcomers who need this advice to be able to understand it.
Ironwail issue for Dawn of the Machine support: https://github.com/andrei-drexler/ironwail/issues/550
And the new update to the KEX Remaster would't even launch for me; just crashes immediately with a “see CRASHLOG.TXT” message. I had to add `+r_rhirenderfamily "d3d11" +d3d11_compileShaders 1` to my Steam launch options, and it plays but with lots of texture glitching. This is on Intel 11th-gen integrated (Framework Laptop 12).
I remember Quake, WinQuake, then QuakeWorld for online play, then GLQuake and GLQuakeWorld. Squake on linux showed up in there at some point (non-X11 linux version). Sometime later IIRC there was dquake... which google tells me was a PSP version but I swear there was a sorta "improved GLQuake" engine called dquake at some point, with various other ‘enhanced’ engines trickling out in the early 00s…
And of course not forgetting novelty versions like 'ttyquake'.
But all these are ancient history now! I'm surprised and amazed at the continued evolution.
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.
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...
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).
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.
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.
It does show up as the poop emoji followed by .la in google search results, but not in a firefox address bar.
The quality of life improvements are done very well and I would recommend. Heck even if just for the new lighting engine.
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.
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!
Never knew about the 4 pin link.
If the game didn't require accessing data on the CD after installation, you could even swap the CD with a different album and listen to what you want.
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.
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.
Haven't looked at it yet but I suspect these maps probably blow over many memory limits that most DOS machines would have had.
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.
And UT3 was definitely not a great game by anyone's measure.
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.
When I was a kid playing Quake 3 I had different servers bookmarked, knew the players that ran the servers and the general crowd that hung around. Had friendships and rivalries.
Modern multiplayer you may as well be playing bots. There's no community.
They're just all single player focused.
It's not the only thing going anymore, but also people have orders of magnitude more choices. That's the thing that's missing today. Nothing is "dead", there's just too much competition now.
Honestly the aforementioned games have had much more staying power than more recent multiplayer games. And they're mostly played by old men like me.
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.
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.
UT4 was a tech demo.
This means that they not necessarily were all that great.
If that's the new player experience, you done fucked up. Making sure new players actually have fun is a critical part of the game's design. You can't just rely on "...and then new players will have to spend 50-60 hours getting demolished before they start having a good time."
Easing that transition could mean different things -- a campaign, skirmish mode vs bots, full-on PvE co-op mode, automatching that actually works, whatever -- but you do need something effective.
Bots can teach basics, but many of these games rely on abusing game mechanics in ways the developers didn't think of in development so it's impossible to teach. Or things are physically difficult to pull off.
Movement shooters especially have this problem because a core part of the game is abusing the movement system and abilities to out maneuver other players. You can explain the how, but executing it all automatically is a real skill that requires practice. I adore Titanfall 2. I sunk hundreds of hours into it. It's really something else when you get the movement down, it all happens so fast you can't think about it you just have to do it. There's no way to teach that with a tutorial, it's muscle memory and perseverance.
Titanfall 2 has all of these things, campaign, skirmish with bots and PvE, but the skill floor and ceiling is still brutal. Whether it failed or not is a question of how long you expected the game to last, but it still succumbed to the same fate. The more experienced players pulled the ladder up behind them and the matchmaker didn't have enough players to give everyone a fair match.
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.
A lot of potential, killed by committee