I'm frightened by my own power sometimes. I think I've gotten good at Blood. Like not AMAZING at blood I cant like play it on extra crispy....well I did beat up to dark carnival on extra crispy but hitscanners in the water ended that thought real quick.
But now I'm playing through it on well done again and I'm just breezing through. I feel so powerful it's weird.
Extra Crispy is the co-op difficulty, so it's not surprising it wound up being too difficult.
I have to agree with Civvie that Well Done is, unfortunately, the only way to play Blood. If the cultists aren't lobbing full bundles of dynamite at you, it just doesn't feel right.
So a weird question… What the heck happened to player movement speed in Fps games?
I was trying a few other games around the period after quake after finishing it, and I think quake 2 and half life had relatively similar movement to quake 1, but everything single player after 2000 or so seems to put the mud boots on and they never really make it entirely back off, even with supposedly fast paced stuff like Doom 2016.
As with things like racing games, there's a place for realism, a place for arcadey/unrealistic action that's all about pure fun, and all manner of spots in-between.
So around 2000 someone just said “Hey you know whats awesome about real life? Its that feeling you get when it takes you 15 minutes to walk to the grocery store a block down the street! We need to put that in our games!” And it just stuck?
I got a few thoughts on this. One issue is that mouselook didn't start getting popularized until the middle of Quake's lifecycle, so people were still operating off of keyboard setups, which isn't necessarily condusive to the fast speed. I don't think that's it.
One major design conceit between Doom/Doom II and Quake is the increased processing power meant smaller levels and fewer, more damage spongy enemies. Downclocking the run speed means you can't speed through the levels quite as fast.
Keep increasing the complexity of these levels and you'll find the developers really don't want the player to fly by them like the friggen' road runner. Quake II is more mission and hub based, so slower speed yet. Half-Life is about soaking in the atmosphere and setting, so even slower yet.
Consoles becoming popular FPS hub probably finished the job game complexity started.
Yeah, unironically I blame Halo. A lot changed after that game in regards to shooter design and the realization that console FPSs were gonna be a whole money making thing.
+1
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
edited September 2021
Don't forget about Medal of Honour (1999) and Call of Duty (2003). They helped cement the realism trend in shooters to the genres detriment.
Suddenly, you could only carry 2 guns and moved like you were waist deep in honey.
Though, I will admit that grenades and melee were fixed by Halo. Shooters before then tended to have grenades and melee weapons as their own weapon that you scrolled to like any other gun, but unforunately were pretty niche and/or limited and so they didn't get used as much as guns.
Halo popularized having them on hot-use on their own buttons, and suddenly they became useful things to do.
90% of what you're pressing in Doom Eternal is thanks to Halo for trailblazing this.
I think Counter-Strike technically takes the crown on that one.
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-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
Pretty sure Counter Strike had knife and grenades as their own gun at least into Counter Strike Source in 2004, after Halo. I didn’t play after that but I recall them not being hot-use in Source.
Pretty sure Counter Strike had knife and grenades as their own gun at least into Counter Strike Source in 2004, after Halo. I didn’t play after that but I recall them not being hot-use in Source.
You're still limited to two firearms, unlike most other shooters at the time, where you're carrying a whole arsenal.
Yeah I think Counterstrike has to get the prize for popularizing limited guns. I'm pretty sure before that, the only games that did it were relatively realistic shooters like Rainbow 6 and Delta Force.
Was iffy on that game; I tried the demo and it was a little too melee and meandering for my tastes, but it sounds like that might not be indicative of the main game.
The good: the weaponset it very good, its clear that they are mostly a bunch of quake and unreal weapons that got startrekized, but nonetheless they are very fun to use and although I haven’t really messed around much with botmatches or multi you can see why people still occasionally play multiplayer on this game and why the newer quake 3 multiplayer engines bothered to support it.
The kinda not so good: the single player campaign reminds me a lot of Star Trek Voyager itself: I remembered it being better 20 years ago than trying it again today, it relies a bit too much on filler, and while it’s not particularly bad in any real sense it doesn’t really have many memorable high spots either…. Maybe the last couple of missions will get better. Borg are kind of cool but you get a weapon that will pierce their shields so they just become massed mooks (I feel like this could have been handled better, maybe they could only have been immune to one weapon at a time? So you use a weapon until they adapt then switch to another but have to keep constantly shifting weapons? ). A lot of the other enemies so far have either been melee critter swarms or just the trek equivalent of random machine gun guys…. There are a few random half lifey things like air duct environmental puzzles or overhearing enemies give exposition which are cool but nothing so far that stands out too much…
Edit: game does get significantly better as you go along. I would still put it solidly middle of the road, maybe 3.5/5. Not on the level of half life, which is probably the closest comparison, but not a terrible way to spend 8 or 10 hours either.
Jealous Deva on
+1
AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
Was iffy on that game; I tried the demo and it was a little too melee and meandering for my tastes, but it sounds like that might not be indicative of the main game.
I enjoy it. It is more Quake inspired than Doom. Puzzles and exploration are a big part of it. Enemy encounters are obstacles to overcome as opposed to a constant.
They released the sequel as a free update. The sequel update (Bloodrite) is more Hexen inspired.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
Just finished Marathon Infinity, the last of the Marathon trilogy. I'm happy to be done with it, I didn't really like it. Most of the levels are just annoying, not intuitive, and you are constantly getting lost. One level you have to push (apparently) 30 switches in order to proceed to the end and after each switch is activated, it reverts to its unactivated state. By doing this, it's impossible to tell which switches you pushed already and which you haven't. This means you have to constantly run around pressing the use key on each switch to see if you missed one and of course there isn't any counter to see how many are left. Why the map maker thought this would be fun I'll never understand. The last few levels I had to watch walkthrough videos to see where I was supposed to go after running around aimlessly for a while. One thing was the same though, I hated all final levels for each game, haha (and the last level in Infinity is extremely large with tons of corridors).
It was interesting though to play through all of them and see what Macintoshes got and were a series of retro/vintage FPS games I never really played. For me, Marathon 2 was probably the best, followed by Marathon, and way at the bottom Marathon Infinity.
In the case of Quake 2, id was able to achieve things that few other games on the system would ever manage, including support for 1080p output - a hardware feature that would elude the console until September 2006, when support was added via a firmware update.
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It doesn't stop there - the game's core image quality is exceptionally impressive as well, thanks to full support for 4x multi-sampling anti-aliasing (MSAA). Depending on the set-up of the internal rendering, a full 1080p frame-buffer with 4x MSAA requires enough memory that the programmer would be required to use anything up to seven eDRAM tiles - an impressive feat considering its early release time frame.
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Beyond that, Quake 2 seemingly uses full 16x anisotropic filtering to further refine the clarity of its textures at oblique angles. Delivering such a clean image at a near perfect 60fps is a great achievement considering the fact that it was just a bonus disc with a low budget behind it. [...] Remarkably, Quake 2 delivers - quite possibly - the single cleanest image output we've seen on the Xbox 360.
Sadly it doesn't appear to be backwards compatible on One/Series machines. Just one more reason we could use a fresh port of it.
Also a good fresh port to PC. I kinda dont like screwing around with sourceports if I can help it but hoo boy does quake 2 currently need you to use one
I’m using yagami with very little problem. Also using some random hd texture pack but it honestly doesn’t seem to make too much of a noticeable difference.
I have learned over the past couple of weeks of running through old shooters that my opinions as a 20 year old were terrible. Some stuff I remember as being good were pretty solidly mediocre (elite force 1 particularly), stuff I remember being mediocre (quake 1 and 2 single player) is excellent.
Trying Elite Force 2 and so far it seems much better (in level design, graphics, enemy ai, and narrative) than EF1, which is also opposite of what I remember.
Also interesting is that as much as a lot of the narrative toward gaming is that strategy games are for older gamers and twitch is for teenagers I feel like I’m a lot better now at these games at 40 than I was back then.
Also a good fresh port to PC. I kinda dont like screwing around with sourceports if I can help it but hoo boy does quake 2 currently need you to use one
Yeah, something at least aling the lines of what Quake 1 got. They really did that so well.
Steam Next Fest 2021 has started with tons of minty fresh demos rolling out!
New Blood Interactive's new game Fallen Aces just dropped their demo which is, based on the limited footage I just saw on Twitter, all about beating noir guys to death with fisticuffs, random items, and a lead pipe. Also apparently listening to someone uncontrollably shit themselves to death for like ten minutes straight.
Sure, Boomer slasher. Idk, looks rad and the Project Warlock twitter account boosted it. Run around with swords and cut the heads off of things while saying Sally Forth and Huzzah and other ye ole timey stuff. I haven't tried it due to lolwork but it's got a demo!
So out of curiosity where would everyone draw the line on the endpoint of a what constitutes a boomer shooter (and I mean first wave rather than neo boomer shooter).
I think you’d have a hard time getting anyone to say quake 1 and 2 weren’t boomer shooters, nor probably would you get much argument on hexen 2, but beyond that it gets a bit blurry.
Do unreal and Sin count?
Do the narrative shooters that followed like half-life, jedi knight 2, star trek elite force 2, etc count?
Do id tech 4 games like doom3, quake 4, and prey(the fist one) count?
Because these were largely made by the same teams that made boomer shooters and share some common elements but there was definitely some evolution in gameplay trends and taken to the extreme I don’t think anyone would argue Call of Duty games were boomer shooters just because developers from Raven Software and Xatrix played a big role in making them.
Unreal is probably the end of pure boomer shooter age, as games like Half-Life and SiN still played fairly arcadey (half-life has platforming!) but with more emphasis on story and setpieces, so they were like the transitional fossils between the classic shooter and the modern slow paced "cinematic" shooters which I would say fully metastasized with Modern Warfare in 2007.
Yeah I guess you could say that. Maybe the transitional era would be Nov 1998 -2006. I feel like quake 4 and prey at least still have a lot of boomer shooter DNA but after 2006 even stuff from Raven like singularity and Wolfenstein started feeling a lot like call of duty.
Yeah I guess you could say that. Maybe the transitional era would be Nov 1998 -2006. I feel like quake 4 and prey at least still have a lot of boomer shooter DNA but after 2006 even stuff from Raven like singularity and Wolfenstein started feeling a lot like call of duty.
There’s also Duke Nukem Forever as a weird outlier from 2012. Given its… protracted development life, there’s a lot of elements in it that are classic Boomer Shooter moments, but with a lot of the evolutionary gameplay changes of the 2000s grafted on.
It ended up being this weird shooter missing link that really needed to either come out 5 years sooner to be relevant, or five years later to ride the start of the nostalgia wave.
Yeah I guess you could say that. Maybe the transitional era would be Nov 1998 -2006. I feel like quake 4 and prey at least still have a lot of boomer shooter DNA but after 2006 even stuff from Raven like singularity and Wolfenstein started feeling a lot like call of duty.
There’s also Duke Nukem Forever as a weird outlier from 2012. Given its… protracted development life, there’s a lot of elements in it that are classic Boomer Shooter moments, but with a lot of the evolutionary gameplay changes of the 2000s grafted on.
It ended up being this weird shooter missing link that really needed to either come out 5 years sooner to be relevant, or five years later to ride the start of the nostalgia wave.
Wasn't there someone on this board that had a pre-order dating back to 1999 and they got something special out of it?
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But now I'm playing through it on well done again and I'm just breezing through. I feel so powerful it's weird.
I have to agree with Civvie that Well Done is, unfortunately, the only way to play Blood. If the cultists aren't lobbing full bundles of dynamite at you, it just doesn't feel right.
Also, fuck, I'm nearing 40
I was trying a few other games around the period after quake after finishing it, and I think quake 2 and half life had relatively similar movement to quake 1, but everything single player after 2000 or so seems to put the mud boots on and they never really make it entirely back off, even with supposedly fast paced stuff like Doom 2016.
thankfully we're starting to get retro shooters that are really fast again.
Steam | XBL
One major design conceit between Doom/Doom II and Quake is the increased processing power meant smaller levels and fewer, more damage spongy enemies. Downclocking the run speed means you can't speed through the levels quite as fast.
Fake EDIT: Oh, I guess I was right: https://www.pcgamer.com/quakes-player-speed-was-slower-than-dooms-and-heres-why/
Keep increasing the complexity of these levels and you'll find the developers really don't want the player to fly by them like the friggen' road runner. Quake II is more mission and hub based, so slower speed yet. Half-Life is about soaking in the atmosphere and setting, so even slower yet.
Yeah, unironically I blame Halo. A lot changed after that game in regards to shooter design and the realization that console FPSs were gonna be a whole money making thing.
Suddenly, you could only carry 2 guns and moved like you were waist deep in honey.
Though, I will admit that grenades and melee were fixed by Halo. Shooters before then tended to have grenades and melee weapons as their own weapon that you scrolled to like any other gun, but unforunately were pretty niche and/or limited and so they didn't get used as much as guns.
Halo popularized having them on hot-use on their own buttons, and suddenly they became useful things to do.
90% of what you're pressing in Doom Eternal is thanks to Halo for trailblazing this.
You're still limited to two firearms, unlike most other shooters at the time, where you're carrying a whole arsenal.
The good: the weaponset it very good, its clear that they are mostly a bunch of quake and unreal weapons that got startrekized, but nonetheless they are very fun to use and although I haven’t really messed around much with botmatches or multi you can see why people still occasionally play multiplayer on this game and why the newer quake 3 multiplayer engines bothered to support it.
The kinda not so good: the single player campaign reminds me a lot of Star Trek Voyager itself: I remembered it being better 20 years ago than trying it again today, it relies a bit too much on filler, and while it’s not particularly bad in any real sense it doesn’t really have many memorable high spots either…. Maybe the last couple of missions will get better. Borg are kind of cool but you get a weapon that will pierce their shields so they just become massed mooks (I feel like this could have been handled better, maybe they could only have been immune to one weapon at a time? So you use a weapon until they adapt then switch to another but have to keep constantly shifting weapons? ). A lot of the other enemies so far have either been melee critter swarms or just the trek equivalent of random machine gun guys…. There are a few random half lifey things like air duct environmental puzzles or overhearing enemies give exposition which are cool but nothing so far that stands out too much…
Edit: game does get significantly better as you go along. I would still put it solidly middle of the road, maybe 3.5/5. Not on the level of half life, which is probably the closest comparison, but not a terrible way to spend 8 or 10 hours either.
I enjoy it. It is more Quake inspired than Doom. Puzzles and exploration are a big part of it. Enemy encounters are obstacles to overcome as opposed to a constant.
They released the sequel as a free update. The sequel update (Bloodrite) is more Hexen inspired.
Yeah I was actually hoping for a quake 2 console release
It was interesting though to play through all of them and see what Macintoshes got and were a series of retro/vintage FPS games I never really played. For me, Marathon 2 was probably the best, followed by Marathon, and way at the bottom Marathon Infinity.
The Xbox 360 port is rock-solid.
Hopefully the game will get fresh ports to current systems for its anniversary or something like Quake 1, though.
Steam | XBL
Yeah, came bundled in a second disc with the 360 version of Quake 4. Eurogamer/Digital Foundry called it the first 1080p/60fps console remaster.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-quake-2-on-xbox-360-the-first-console-hd-remaster
Sadly it doesn't appear to be backwards compatible on One/Series machines. Just one more reason we could use a fresh port of it.
Steam | XBL
I have learned over the past couple of weeks of running through old shooters that my opinions as a 20 year old were terrible. Some stuff I remember as being good were pretty solidly mediocre (elite force 1 particularly), stuff I remember being mediocre (quake 1 and 2 single player) is excellent.
Trying Elite Force 2 and so far it seems much better (in level design, graphics, enemy ai, and narrative) than EF1, which is also opposite of what I remember.
Also interesting is that as much as a lot of the narrative toward gaming is that strategy games are for older gamers and twitch is for teenagers I feel like I’m a lot better now at these games at 40 than I was back then.
Yeah, something at least aling the lines of what Quake 1 got. They really did that so well.
Steam | XBL
New Blood Interactive's new game Fallen Aces just dropped their demo which is, based on the limited footage I just saw on Twitter, all about beating noir guys to death with fisticuffs, random items, and a lead pipe. Also apparently listening to someone uncontrollably shit themselves to death for like ten minutes straight.
Sure, Boomer slasher. Idk, looks rad and the Project Warlock twitter account boosted it. Run around with swords and cut the heads off of things while saying Sally Forth and Huzzah and other ye ole timey stuff. I haven't tried it due to lolwork but it's got a demo!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/658890/Arthurian_Legends/
I think you’d have a hard time getting anyone to say quake 1 and 2 weren’t boomer shooters, nor probably would you get much argument on hexen 2, but beyond that it gets a bit blurry.
Do unreal and Sin count?
Do the narrative shooters that followed like half-life, jedi knight 2, star trek elite force 2, etc count?
Do id tech 4 games like doom3, quake 4, and prey(the fist one) count?
Because these were largely made by the same teams that made boomer shooters and share some common elements but there was definitely some evolution in gameplay trends and taken to the extreme I don’t think anyone would argue Call of Duty games were boomer shooters just because developers from Raven Software and Xatrix played a big role in making them.
There’s also Duke Nukem Forever as a weird outlier from 2012. Given its… protracted development life, there’s a lot of elements in it that are classic Boomer Shooter moments, but with a lot of the evolutionary gameplay changes of the 2000s grafted on.
It ended up being this weird shooter missing link that really needed to either come out 5 years sooner to be relevant, or five years later to ride the start of the nostalgia wave.
Contributing writer at Marooner's Rock
Twitch broadcasting! Currently playing through Wing Commander: Privateer
Pinny Lanyard
Or you could just pick the level from the mission select menu?
Wasn't there someone on this board that had a pre-order dating back to 1999 and they got something special out of it?