Reinstall
This text first appeared in PC Gamer journal difficulty 391 in December 2023, as a part of our Reinstall sequence. Each month we load up a beloved basic—and discover out whether or not it holds as much as our fashionable gaming sensibilities.
Quake 2 has an enchanting legacy. Launched solely 18 months after Quake in December 1997, it was rapidly celebrated as the very best recreation ever made. And I imply the very best. PC Gamer awarded it a rating of 96, solely the second recreation within the journal’s historical past to obtain such a dizzying quantity. A technological marvel, it provided a much more centered journey than the unique’s dimension-hopping escapades, with a particular setting and constant enemy design. It even had one thing id co-founder John Carmack had beforehand dismissed as superfluous to a great shooter: a plot.
Over time, nonetheless, Quake 2’s repute has diminished. The next 12 months, its narrative ambitions have been outdated by Half-Life, which informed a greater story in a extra attention-grabbing style. Extra just lately, critics have identified that its capturing expertise is flatter and extra sluggish than the 1996 unique, whereas its setting and stage design lack the identical weirdness and creativeness. David Szymanski, creator of the retro-shooter DUSK, has described Quake 2 as “the worst id recreation”.
Within the wake of Nightdive Studios’ latest remaster, which overhauls Quake 2 for contemporary machines, the controversy over the importance of id’s sequel has arisen as soon as extra. However the remaster additionally offers an opportunity to reappraise Quake 2. What’s attention-grabbing shouldn’t be which of those two viewpoints is appropriate, however how each are equally supported by the sport.
No matter Quake 2’s personal ambiguities, there is no questioning the brilliance of Nightdive’s work remastering it. Not solely has Nightdive up to date the sport to make the very best of recent PCs, supporting 4K resolutions, widescreens, enhanced multiplayer help and extra, it additionally helps your ideally suited model of Quake 2. The remaster helps an entire host of visible modernisations like bloom lighting, dynamic shadows, antialiasing, and enhanced character fashions. Alternatively, you may flip all this off, swap on CRT simulation and play prefer it’s Christmas Day 1997.
Versatile makeover
It is a great, versatile makeover, and its enhancements do assist talk a few of what made Quake 2 such a phenomenon on the time. Before everything are The Strogg, Quake 2’s twisted cyborg adversaries. Quake 2’s overarching operate of house marines preventing a race of alien cyborgs could really feel a little bit drained after twenty years of equally plotted video games, however the Strogg’s dilapidated, ad-hoc cybernetics that resemble the results of catapulting a physique right into a scrapheap, assist the sport preserve some flavour of its personal.
Certainly, one of many hardest challenges in FPS design is creating enemies which are each imaginative in presentation, but in addition satisfying to battle. With the Strogg, id struck an ideal steadiness, giving gamers recognisably humanoid enemies, however with numerous variations that every one behave in several methods. Taking up a melee-focussed Berserker presents a considerably totally different problem from dodging the shoulder-rockets of a closely armoured Tank. Some enemies I would fully forgotten about, just like the Mutant, one of many few opponents that is not a cyborg, and the Brains, a very unnerving cyborg that solutions the query “What if WALL-E received contaminated by John Carpenter’s The Factor?”
However the Strogg’s most notable attribute is how reactive they’re to break. Blast a guard onto the bottom together with your shotgun, and so they may take one final potshot at you as they expire. Shoot the pinnacle off one of many cumbersome enforcers, and so they spray the realm wildly with their chaingun arm earlier than collapsing. These detailed animations represented an enormous step ahead in 1997, and the function that struck me as probably the most noticeable step ahead once I first performed it round its unique launch. Even right this moment, few shooters afford their cannon fodder such bespoke, imaginative deaths.
These grisly ends do not exist in isolation, both. One of many extra placing issues about returning to Quake 2 is simply how horrible the Strogg world is. That is clear sufficient in its desolated, brown environments and the Strogg’s brutal method to creating new cyborgs, mercilessly chopping up people with sawblades and lasers. You’ll be able to think about the overwhelming odor of iron oxide as your press by means of rusting amenities smeared with the blood of your fellow marines. Nevertheless it is not the sights or scents of Stroggos that lingers in your thoughts, it is the sound. The compressed screams of Berserkers as they die, the shuddering moans of your imprisoned comrades turned mad by means of torture, the buzzing fl ies that encompass a Strogg corpse after it is laid for some time within the alien solar. Quake 2 is not a scary recreation, however its monstrously disagreeable world might be totally unsettling.
Whereas the Strogg stays a compelling foe, Quake 2’s arsenal has aged much less effectively. Just a few of the weapons nonetheless maintain up. The tremendous shotgun rightly earns its title, packing a double-barrelled blast that may put a critical dent in most Strogg armour. Quake 2 additionally introduces the sequence’ defining weapon, the railgun. Quake 3’s railgun could also be extra well-known for enabling multiplayer frags, however the corkscrew trajectory of Quake 2’s slugs provides the older recreation’s iteration a extra distinctive look. Gibbing a number of guards with a single slug additionally by no means ceases to thrill.
Many of the different weapons, nonetheless, are both barely or significantly underpowered. The chaingun and hyperblaster are each efficient at shredding enemies into strogghetti, however they’d equally profit from additional kick. The machine gun remains to be limper than a three-legged possum, whereas the shotgun is so ephemeral that you just’re by no means inclined to make use of it when you purchase its sibling.
Quake 2’s biggest weak point, nonetheless, is its stage design. With the sequel, id Software program needed to create a extra plausible world than earlier id video games, with object oriented ranges that designed as recognisable, purposeful locations. In contrast to earlier id video games, many of those ranges are related collectively to type Items, with you typically travelling to and from a central hub stage to a number of side-maps the place secondary targets are accomplished. The Jail unit, for instance, features a Detention Centre the place prisoners are held, a Guard Home that serves because the Strogg barracks, and the Torture Chamber is self-explanatory.
It is fascinating simply how exactly Quake 2 straddles the road between the basic mazes of Quake and the extra ‘sensible’ method of Half-Life. You’ll be able to nearly see the transition occurring as you prowl the sport’s many gun-metal corridors. Sadly, id’s try and hammer the abstractions of basic FPS design into one thing extra grounded ends in lots of ranges wanting fairly samey. They’re nonetheless enjoyable areas to navigate, and there are just a few areas that stick within the thoughts, however for each there are ten brown warehouses crammed with brown crates.
Fundamentals
The restrictions of Quake 2’s maps turns into extra obvious once you boot up the remaster’s new episode, Name of the Machine. Developed by Wolfenstein: The New Order creators MachineGames, Name of the Machine takes Quake 2’s fundamentals and makes use of them to construct extra elaborate ranges filled with difficult set items. As an alternative of encountering one or two enemies in each hall, MachineGames construct roomier, extra arena-like environments the place you will battle dozens of foes, all rigorously chosen to press you in new and attention-grabbing methods.
Admittedly, MachineGames has a big benefit in right this moment’s extra permissive expertise. Among the ranges in Name of the Machine would have introduced the typical PC to its knees again in 1997. However Name of the Machine additionally a lot better understands learn how to construct encounters round particular weapons or enemy varieties. Particularly, Name of the Machine is a railgunner’s delight, often funnelling you thru tight corridors filled with weaker enemies simply determined to be gibbed, or putting Gunners on distant, elevated platforms that require a exactly planted slug to take down.
Name of the Machine is intense and frenetic in a method Quake 2’s marketing campaign not often is. But whereas not totally profitable, Quake 2’s Items are nonetheless an necessary landmark in FPS design. Half-Life is usually characterised as a revolutionary second within the historical past of the shooter, a very unanticipated occasion that shook the entire trade. However Quake 2 exhibits the concepts Half-Life executed so brilliantly have been very a lot within the water on the time. Quake 2 may not thread collectively its ranges in a contiguous method. Nevertheless it nonetheless succeeds in making Stroggos really feel like a particular and coherent place, one which has grimly logical reasoning behind its type and performance.
And whereas the sport’s premise is trite by right this moment’s requirements, the execution nonetheless holds up in a number of methods. The satellite-view briefing cutscenes that fill the hole between missions, presumably influenced by Westwood’s work on Command & Conquer, are an effective way of contextualising your development with out getting in the way in which of the motion. Equally, the framing of your journey round particular targets, somewhat than merely discovering your option to the tip of the maze, successfully communicates your position in undermining the Strogg struggle effort. Though you solely ever glimpse the broader struggle round you, you nonetheless really feel like a part of one thing higher than your self.
Slightly than being a singular occasion, Valve’s shooter was simply one other step down a path that video games like Quake 2 and Duke Nukem have been already traversing. In that context, it is a lot simpler to see the place Quake 2’s exuberant reception got here from. Its reactive enemies, its extra narrative pushed marketing campaign, its interconnected ranges designed to resemble a spot, all of those have been important developments in FPS design.
Quake 2 felt tangible, plausible in a method no shooter ever had earlier than. No one was to know that one thing much more sensible lurked beneath the deserts of New Mexico, able to be unleashed a 12 months later. In the present day, Quake 2 may characterize an intriguing evolutionary hyperlink between Quake and Half-Life. However for just a few months within the quickly altering improvement scene of the Nineteen Nineties, it was probably the most superior shooter anybody had ever made.