Since id Software's smash hit Doom enthroned the Texas-based studio as the king of first-person shooters and secured DOS's standing as a respectable gaming platform, it was only natural that DOS and Windows users would flock to the next major title from the company, whom they served regally as the leader of PC gaming. Every major release by id Software would turn out exponentially more remarkable and seminal than the last, so everyone who paid attention knew that its next project would be the next great thing for PC gaming. Less did they realize that many of the greatest FPS games in the years since would be powered by modified engines directly taken from Quake, and in the decades since would be inspired by the game or take elements originating in it.
Believe it or not, Quake was not originally intended to be a first-person shooter, let alone one of the greatest first-person shooters of all time. It was conceived as an open-world fantasy role-playing game, but the project proved too ambitious, and internal strife didn't help the situation. Instead, it ended up being another simple Doom-clone, but instead of demons and Mars, it was set in the future in a mysterious landscape that consisted of medieval castles, wizard lairs, lava tombs, and eldritch labyrinths, with high-tech weapons and bad guys even more evil than the satanic fiends from Doom. They include zombified humans with guns, ogres who tote chainsaws in the style of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and fire grenades, knightly swordsmen, and monsters inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, and they are rather Gothically occult than blithely demonic. Regarding the plot, the player character is still a space marine, now named Ranger, who battles hordes of monsters from another dimension who sneak their way through the military base's teleporters as an unidentified being, codenamed Quake, plots Earth's destruction, but it was a unique concoction of dark fantasy and science-fiction thriller that, much like Super Mario 64, with fully 3D graphics was meant to showcase the very best of what games could and what they would be able to, all in an unorthodox genre for a game based heavily on European folklore, and it worked.
3D graphics was the first thing I said about why Quake succeeded, and it is the most obvious improvement over Doom. Everything is realized as being 3D. 2D sprites are replaced with models that, despite their age, hold a level of detail unachievable by sprites alone. Weapons and visual effects do not appear to be flat. The lighting is made greatly more flexible, and with added water to swim in come the effects of slightly bending light underwater. Most important of all is that the world is no longer confined to perpendiculars and single floors. The level architecture is more studious than ever, with slopes aplenty and what Doom's players had for years bemoaned the game's lack of: honest rooms over rooms. Though simple and not the first truly 3D FPS game according to Guinness World Records, Quake might be the first FPS where players could design levels in any way they wish, including those based on their favorite games, with only their systems' strength to worry about. As evidence in favor, level structures and enemies could be given scripted sequenced, many areas have booby traps that will cause significant harm, and, as a precursor to id Software habitually releasing the source codes of its old games only a few years later after their launch, practically anything about the game from variables to logic and rules could be modified either in-game via a console replacing traditional cheat codes - a first in gaming - or for precompilation, using John Carmack's C-based script language QuakeC. The company also popularized hardware-accelerated graphics with versions of the game supporting it released just a few months later - a legacy still felt to this day in computing. All of this mind-bogglingly could be performed on a Pentium processor clocked at only 75 MHz at minimum. My only disappointment is that the animations of enemies and some surfaces are a little rough, but the game in general runs more smoothly than Doom. The sound is similarly of CD quality. It is a tech demonstration of the most pleasing kind.
The monsters are tougher than ever, and so the weapon roster gets a makeover. The shotgun is now the number two weapon, and the pistol is retired for being no good against the baddies anymore. The in-game GUI is made more intuitive, actually grouping the weapons with the kind of ammo they use. The double-barreled shotgun reappears, and the nail gun (replacing the chaingun) now has a counterpart that fires nails twice as fast. The grenade launcher is a rocket-based weapon that fires bouncy grenades that explode on enemy contact or after three seconds, and the rocket launcher is moved to the number seven slot. My favorite of the weapons, the Thunderbolt, expends a lot of power, but electrocutes monsters almost instantaneously and can even penetrate walls, but with the disadvantage that it will kill the player if they foolishly fire it in water, discharging the weapon. Doom fans will probably be disappointed that the melee weapon is now an axe that should be used in combat only sparingly and skillfully to save ammo, and while the player does often deplete their ammo, it is easily replenished unless the player wastes large amounts. On the bright side, the game does introduce my favorite power-up: one that briefly multiplies the player's weapon damage fourfold. With that, even using the standard shotgun is impressive enough when they can turn monsters into bouncy, blood-trailed giblets. Other power-ups include armor, the biosuit from the last game, a ring from The Lord of the Rings that turns one invisible, and the Pentagram of Protection - what? Quake is a departure from id Software's other games in that it is dark, though not without ha-has. The music provided by Nine Inch Nails is not epic electronic metal, but rather sinister, occult-ish, and sectarian-sounding, the satanic themes are somehow even more tenacious, and the Pentagram of Protection is the epitome of that and the dark atmosphere. It is an average invulnerability power-up, and I sincerely like to hope that it is just high technology with simple unwholesome overtones such as health becoming 666 (or 999 rotated) when one picks it up. On the one hand, it is ironically funny how Ranger can use an abomination to whack abominations to death. On the other, it may be too transgressive for my personal tastes, although there is no shock content, the game falls short of occult propaganda, and in at least one section, it actually encourages the player to "defile" unholy alters to progress.
Quake is fast and frenzied like its predecessor, but is even more so in ways that it became the ideal breeding ground for speedrun culture. One has to look in all directions for danger, including straight up and down. If you thought the last game's monster AI was cheap, but in a charming sort of way, this game's monsters are faster and more formidable. They are not much more advanced, and they still hilariously maim each other, but it is the kind of formidable where even a few blocks of code is enough for a relatively experienced player to ponder how they are outsmarted. Scrags (replacing Cacodemons) are hard to dodge and shoot at simultaneously, and Fiends are clawed, tough creatures that quickly leap toward the player, gutting Ranger and making getting cornered a cutthroat nightmare, despite both being easily dodgeable sideways. Everything that made Doom great was carried over to Quake and made even better, including what might be the greatest networked multiplayer ever in the form of QuakeWorld. It allowed for fast play between players online via TCP/IP and even notoriously dreaded modems, made searching for servers far more convenient, and also boosted a then-niche form of competitive play known as esports. The game modes are still deathmatch and co-op, but the flexibility of the game meant that some of the greatest mods created for multiplayer provided game styles that were, for a time, unrivaled in networked gaming (think Team Fortress). Expansion packs further exploited that flexibility with better scripting, more weapons, more enemies, and new power-ups, and an all-original Capture The Flag mode, a variant of deathmatch where teams score points by carrying the flag to their own base. It is a little unfortunate that single-player mode, which is a tiny bit less than perfect, still suffers some of the same problems as other early shooters, them having a simple premise of shooting everything without any story development, but that is easily overlooked by its technical power and the mods that showcase it.
VERDICT:
id Software broke its own barriers again, as it had been for the decade, but Quake might be the ultimate first-person shooter that should fill every gamer's collection, with no excuses not to. It deposed Doom as the king of shooters, and as evidence that the latter had become passé, not one developer talked about using it as their inspiration since the newly crowned game's release. Every early successful FPS after Quake, including every early FPS you have ever played, was inspired by the game or directly took its engine, and every late descendent of the genre in the evolution of FPS games has a vestigial element derived from the game. I don't think I will ever come across a game like Quake in my lifetime, a game that is so beautiful, showed such optimism and forethought about desktop computers and gaming, and so profoundly altered the course of PC gaming. Yes, it is a rip-off of id's own Doom, but from a technical standpoint, who cares? It is perhaps both the greatest PC tech demo and the greatest online multiplayer game of all time, and the modding community it was built for keeps it alive and well.
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