Quake 3

Shiminay

Like nearly everyone else that regualarly posts to these boards, I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Quake 3. I was lucky enough to play the demo that was leaked out. I must say impressive isn't strong enough a word!

Anyway, it does raise some new design issues...

For the first time, designers will be able to have real curved surfaces (according to an article I read in PC Zone). We've all seen the screen shot of the "big mouth" type doorway complete with tongue sticking out. It rocks

Anyway, these kind of things are going to lead to some rather nice levels being designed.

I'm just wondering if anyone had anything to say about the whole thing???

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All the best,

Dav
@B^)

mewso

It is very interesting allright but the major issue for me is going to be that I'll need a heavy duty PC to play and design this game so until next year I don't know if I'll dabbling just yet.
By the way Kharn - what was that Worldcraft post all about?

M

Shiminay

Well, my brother's PIII 450 + TNT (+ lots more goodies) arrives next week, so I don't need to worry PP

The Worldcraft post was about WC being dead on my machine - none of the textures show up in the previews. I must get a newer version of it...that one was funked up

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All the best,

Dav
@B^)

Shinji

You were impressed by Q3? Well, each to their own...

Let's face it, id haven't been the same since Romero left. Quake3 will be alright, as a game, but it will be left to the third party developers to use the engine to make brilliant games.

However, I _do_ think that id may well be going the wrong way in some respects. For a start... Curved surfaces. We've all been going on about them, but ultimately, they require a really kickass PC in order to achieve a fairly mundane effect. Unreal Tournament uses curved surfaces on it's models but not on it's architecture, which makes for a much nicer effect. It's also got level designs that make anything id have ever done look tatty...

The volumetric fog is far more interesting. That will add a whole new elements to games, and I'm looking forward to seeing what developers do with it. But ultimately, it's the only really exciting never-been-done-before element of Quake3 - oh, and Unreal had localised fog as well, it just wasn't volumetric.

To be honest, I was really looking forward to seeing Quake3... but I think id have lost the edge. As an engine, Lithtech 2 looks far more interesting, and even the current iteration of Lithtech has some things that Quake3 is missing - like really neat explosions and smoke, proper moveable lightmapping and so on... Oh yeah, and a decent license fee (only $250,000 making it much more accessible to small developers).

And as a game? Sadly, it's destined to be minority interest for a number of reasons. The market isn't the same one that Quake and Quake2 were released into. id must now face up to incredible competition, not just from Quake clones, but from other online FPS-style games which are carving out their own fan bases and eroding the plain vanilla deathmatch fraternity. When Quake came out, the only competition was Duke Nukem. When Quake2 came out, the only competition was Hexen 2, and hey, Raven were in bed with id anyway. Quake3 must compete with Unreal Tournament (which looks to be a better game overall), Tribes, the various Lithtech games - not to mention being in compeition with it's own forebears, Quake and Quake2, because you can be damn sure that a lot of people will stick to those games, for reasons of machine spec if nothing else.

I'm not sounding a death-knell for id or anything... They'll survive off license fees from the engine (estimated to be seven million dollars a pop, thank you very much, that's another ferrari for Carmack then...). But I think this will be the year that the two 3D giants disappoint - 3DFX and id heralded a new age of 3D gaming together, and lo and behold, they're about to fall over together as well.

Mata ne!
Rob

Dupre

Some good points there Shinji.

I wouldn't expect anybody to be impressed with a leaked (not even a pre-test !)
version of anything to be quite honest.
When I saw the Quake 1 pre-test, I thought it sucked, and stuck to playing Doom 2. It was only when the full version came out
that I saw the true game. The only thing I could really see the leaked version as being good for is trying to determine the weapon
types, rocket jumping distances, damage, movement speed and stuff like that. And even then, all thats liable to change.

There may be better engines out there (let's remember that we haven't seen the finished Quake 3 engine yet), but a good engine
doesn't necessarily make a good game. And while lens-flares, environment mapping, cool explosion effects and other stuff provides
short-term icing-on-the-cake appeal, its the gameplay that'll ensure that people stay playing it. In terms of gameplay, I think iD hit the right spot with Quake 1. It's as if they stumbled on a secret formula for gameplay and have been trying to recreate it ever since. From what I can tell, they seem to be modelling Quake 3 to make it more like the Quake 1 experience, mixed with some of the better Quake 2 bits.

While it may not offer anything revolutionary in terms of technology, I think it has the potential to be a damned good game.

It's also worth pointing out that Quake 3 is multiplayer only. Single player stuff takes an awful lot of time to build in, so I
imagine spending lots of time tweaking the gameplay and testing the levels gained more priority this time around.

I think we'll also have to see what the final version of Quake 3 looks and plays like to see if Romero did have much of an effect on
the company. I always saw Romero as the guy who came up with the cool ideas game-wise and Carmack as the brains behind him that
came up with an engine that could allow the implementation of those ideas.

With regards to Unreal tournament, it looks good, but how does it play ? I tried Unreal once and didn't like it, but if Unreal tournament has special multiplayer orientated weapons, levels etc it might be interesting.

As for machine spec, market changes etc, I agree with all that.

All in all, I wouldn't be too quick to discount Quake 3. It certainly won't help iD if there's any of that patch fiasco that there was with Quake 2.

The competition for iD is definitely hotting up.

Shinji

About Unreal Tournament....

It's multiplayer only, all the levels are designed exclusively for multiplayer, they've changed the physics of the game, and the weapons have been completely rebalanced (they've introduced new ones too, like a combined hyperblaster/lightning gun thingymajig) for multiplayer. The network play seems to be solid and to cope well with latency.

It comes with 5 different mod sets built in, which is nice... And bots that are capable of playing all the mods, very intelligently.

In other words - THIS GAME ROCKS.

And it's far easier on the system than Quake3 as well...

Mata ne!
Rob

Shiminay

I guess I must be easily impressed
I s'pose when yer used to Quake crawling along on a 133, anything out of the ordinary will be cause for "ooooh's" and "aaaah's"

As for the fog... Should be rather fun. I can't wait to get my mits on it

Unreal: I can't comment on it - I've only ever played it twice so I have no idea what it's like / about. Having said that, I was impressed by the little bit of the game I saw (jesus, those monsters take a hell of a lot of bullets to kill!)

Oops, hit the Submit buttom by accident!

Anyway, getting back to the plot. I think you could be right Rob in what you said there about id's loosing John Romero and having seen some of Ion Storms new game (whose name escapes me right now), it'll most definately give Q3A a serious run for it's money in the real world (i.e. not us more hard-core types) when Joe Soap sees it.

All the best,
Dav

http://homepage.tinet.ie/~davitt

[This message has been edited by Kharn (edited 04-04-99).]

Kegser

Noone should listen to Shinji, he's biased

I'm looking forward to Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament. They both look damn nice, and once you don't have to worry about your hardware you can begin to worry about how well they'll play. Especially in comparison to the games we all play at the moment, i.e. Tribes, Quake, Quake 2 etc.

I'm leaving my judgement until I've had the game for at least a few hours.... until then I can only speculate that Unreal Tourney will be more widely played then Quake 3, although I bet I'll be hooked on Quake 3 like a ***** on drugs.

Kegs.
(Ahahahahaha)

Shiminay

I'm looking forward to Quake 2

erm.... what part of the world are you from Kegser?

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All the best,

Dav
@B^)

Kegser

I have no idea.

I *MEANT* Quake 3 of course.

Kegs.