What irritates me is the willful ignorance around why arena shooters died. It's obvious that they stopped modding and local area multiplayer support, so no community, no players. The entire point of DLC was developers directly monetizing the idea of free game mods. Horse armor. So you either make s game so good it doesn't need mods, or nobody plays it because there's no community support.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq And also, Quake is the pioneer of full-3D action, is the pioneer of fast-paced PvP multiplayer, is the source of tons of goodies in the adjacent genres now, is the father of speedruns, bunny-hops anr rocket-jumps, and still the One and Only a 100% skill-based competitive discipline without a-n-y random to this time. * Unreal had every chance to develop up and take all the laurels due when in 2003 id software decided to ruin Quake with their own hands. Moreover, Epics simply abandoned this niche after id ruined own studio itself.
@@kolyaad quake 1-2 was some of the last co-op games on PC as well. There was basically a forced directive from Microsoft to block PC co-op. Halo didn't support it. Valve didn't support it either, bought out their game mods like Bethesda, TF and CS, paid mods. Then Valve invented steam to steal your personally owned games and lock them into an online account. Everything went downhill until basically dx12. Whoops PC isn't dead anymore. Didn't stop Microsoft. They deprecated direct input for xinput, ruined the start menu and control panel, and completely killed 3d audio while supporting it on Xbox. Valve solely saved PC gaming, invented Steam OS as a backup to Windows 8. But none of the big players are pro consumer anymore. There's no more classic games. They shut down GameSpy. Everything is centrally controlled over the Internet. But hey, Xbox game pass. Let's all be fanboys and defend abhorrent business practices. History of PC gaming.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq I don't get it: the last coop - of what period? Up to 2004 with the last big PC releases? So Blood, JediKnight1-2, HeXeN2, SystemShock2, SeriousSam, WillRock, Renegade, DeltaForce/RainbowSix/GhostRecon/SWAT/Flashpoint doesn't count or smth?? The period around 2004 and after? So Battlefield and CoD sh*tted down everything around back then - not only by the consolish cr*p solely. To "steal your personal games" - it's still better than the alternatives. And you can still save the installed games on a separate HDD by buying it with the money saved on steam_sales and without issues inherent in buying discs. Yes, Valve is very strong in marketing, but it was the Publishers who determined the elaboration of the industry (yes, yes, those who made console-first development and interaction with BlackRock a priority, etc). Yes, Microsoft is evil by default - what did you even expect (?) But it was the Developers who killed 3D-audio literally stopping working on it. IF 1 PERSON was able to create the DSOAL mod, it means that the problem was not unsolvable. "There's no more classic games" in MP if w/o GameSpy or what, I don't get it..
@@kolyaad Most of your listed co-op games were garbage or old. Will Rock? Lol. Serious Sam is the best one. Painkiller should have had co-op. I'm talking about AAA popular games not providing co-op, like HALO that specifically had it on console. There were plenty of garbage and indie games with it, but that's not the point. It seemed like the developers of big games had marching orders to REMOVE co-op from the console port to PC. Valve even released that PS2 version of half life. WTF? We completely lost AAA co-op until PC made a comeback. Where's the 360 ports with co-op? Didn't even get Halo 3 until MCC. As for your Valve fanboyism, gog is more convenient. It's also a complete distraction. "Oh this version of North Korea is better than that version". No. How about none of that. Stop worshipping the dictator of North Korea. You gave up your rights for convenience. It all goes away when Gabe quits. Benjamin Franklin has some good advice for you. "Those that give up liberty for security, deserve neither." So no, I categorically deny any fanboyism. There is no excuse. Valve kept PC gaming viable, but created a complete monopoly in doing so. It wasn't developers who killed 3d audio, it was 100% Microsoft, because they REMOVED hardware accelerated audio support and ENFORCED software mode. It's about API standards. Game developers use directX over openGL. There wasn't a better standard, developers use the standard. It also didn't help that review websites, Microsoft, and gamers ran a hate campaign against Creative Labs based on fake news. So they all celebrated 3d audio dying, and switched to motherboard audio and HDMI. Finally, GameSpy going away completely changed the landscape away from local support to central servers and steam. There's a lot of old games including NINTENDO that stopped working. GameSpy also ran the best website for news, game patches, and mods. It was the biggest and only competitor to Steam. Not as a store, but the services. Nobody else offered those services or were backwards compatible. Everyone switched to steam on PC. None of this stuff by itself seems to be game changing, but that's not the point. It's the total picture and history of how everything changed. Considering that I understand how things change while other people live in marketing bubble fantasy land, I can seriously predict Valve dropping Microsoft once they have a better OS for gaming, and Microsoft trying to lock into Xbox game pass. Of course, we'll have a bunch of fanboys who can't understand history and just defend game pass, because that's what people do. Tribalism over your rights being violated. Anyways, the history of PC co-op was hijacked by Microsoft trying to force people on Xbox. It was an innocent bystander in the way of "progress". We lost local network support and the feature altogether at the same time. This was the age of World of Warcraft, where you quit owning your games with local networking, for paid subscriptions, and centralized gaming services. It didn't happen in a vacuum, it was attacked from multiple fronts. Oh, whattaboutism game X? GTFO. CO-OP didn't completely go away, but it was ruined. Everything was ruined. It's not the same experience we used to have. We can't get classics anymore in this ecosystem.
I got my first PC in January 1996 with Doom II. The following Christmas I got Quake, Duke Nukem 3D and Tomb Raider. I was hooked. I then learned about mapping in Duke 3D before moving over to Quake. The following Christmas, I got Quake II. Both Quake and Quake II lived on my hard drive for a good few years until I got Half-Life. This was the golden age of PC gaming 1995-2002. I never bothered with Quake III, missed the Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Quake IV era as was too broke to get a PC. Quake and Quake II have been installed, removed and re-installed more times then any other game over the last 28 years. I really do miss that care free era sometimes. The Internet was novel (I used it to download Worldcraft updates originally). I think its going to be very hard to make a new Quake game that was cutting-edge as the original. Everything has been done now, unless if was a full of holographic environment its hard to do anything new the way Quake did. It will get a lot of hate because of the nostalgia, to many people there will never be a replacement, no matter how good it actually is.
Some people may still fight over quake vs unreal, but for me, I have both perenially installed on my hard drive and still play them to this very day (Maybe not as frequently as i've did in my youth, but sure thing is one that never fails to deliver)
@@lechumqc7910 The map was Q3TOURNEY5, the fog and gibs were nothing like what was ever seen before. The leak had working FFA MP so it was actually alot to take in considering the hype.
while i love this a lot, i would SO LOVE to see you do Unreal 1 and UT99, i want to see you show people how characterized the Skaarj are and the coolness of the cyberpunk dystopia that is the Grand Tournament.
Unfortunately to me it seems that they will just try to rehash doom as quake given how the next one looks. Tho after how bad eternal and its DLC were compared to D2016 and earlier dooms i don't have any hope. We could compare the direction of the doom remakes to the wolfenstein ones but sadly we didn't get out old blood just eternal which is slightly less bad then NC was for wolfenstein.
By definition, it is subjective on what you think is good or bad, but you are in an extreme minority if you think Doom Eternal is bad. In terms of base game releases, Doom Eternal is, in many cases, the best Doom ever released. The combat loop, graphics, demons, and now the new mod portal and tools are next level. Sure, classic Doom will always have its place, but Eternal is basically everything special about Doom from the 30 years of its history wrapped into one game.
I don’t think it would be fair to call Eternal a bad game. I personally didn’t like it, but the game has some good combat mechanics, big weapons, and awesome enemies, which is the most important thing in that kind of game. I didn’t like the visuals or the story, wasn’t a fan at all of the one-after-the-other arena combat, felt they could have been a bit more generous with the ammunition, and I really didn’t like the parkour sections. But I’m glad they tried something new, and I can’t wait to see what Dark Ages brings us :)
People lost interest because Bethesda didnt release anything for years and Quake Champions is a far from what we had its almost like they tried to copy Overwach (which was popular at the time). I bet you all i have that if Bethesda made a Quake using the DOOM engine and added a great single player campaign like Doom, it will sell like hot bread.
The unbelievable entertainment that Quake 3 Arena brought was largely due to the fact that there were not many games to rival it. Every game that was or has become was a Quake 3 mod at one time. Before fps games had dancing, you had the flexing animations and the laugh animation gestures. Players made skins and mods and pushed to try to convince ID to expand it but when that fell through... CS and steam started to rise and heat and mplayer game servers became... vapor. Quake 3 Arena was so hard for me to put down. Everything else was just a snails pace to me. Credit to the UT players though. They played both games and always brought a good time. For some reason it brings me joy to see you mention ctf threewave. I swear I had some of the fastest caps lmao
Yes yes it was.. and don't you tell Tim Sweeny otherwise! He was up in the tree all last week and you know how he gets when people bring up the quake 2 engine! Okay so in all fairness, epic mega games is they used to be called, genuinely did build the unreal engine more or less from scratch and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of it had been inspired or directly lifted from quake engine, but that was the whole point of quake engine to teach and to have people learn. But some of the things about unreal are just bizarre, like when you're looking at like the magician doing things, and it could just be the translation layers of stories told over time but.. Even as a game it was special.. it's really hard not to get the impression that Quaker arena was just a rip off of unreal tournament, now I have the impression that it probably wasn't necessarily, but you could probably get the impression towards the later stretches that between those two projects, they were very much rivals. But unreal as a game for a single player game, was way above the curve at the time, now it wasn't above the curve for much longer as Jedi Knight had already released, sin was about to be crushed by half life and then cradled by Valve before smothered by Gabe and leaving a plastic bag out and convincing them episodic was going to be a good idea.. Honestly unreal is kind of like the far cry of 1998... It was arguably a better game in a lot of senses, and although the comparison isn't quite extreme, given that far cry was significantly ahead of its competitors in terms of the actual gameplay and design aspects.. But where it does fall into similarities as it was doing things in a world building sense and a narrative sense that again, genuinely just weren't how these types of games were created just the year before.. No they were starting to, and it was inevitable but.. there's a vibe. There's a vibe from the '90s, alien worlds alien colors like I don't want to say it's like one thing or another necessarily specifically, a lot of people had it just be Halo at one point.. Halo was going for that vibe.. unreal nailed that vibe. Unfortunately they couldn't give less of a crap about any of that in the future.. and I'm pretty sure the only reason they made that game was to sell their engine.. which they did.. and they did so very successfully. This was back when there was competition of course, but id was always at a disadvantage to a degree as there was always a give back mentality with carmack in particular, based on the established precedent from Doom, engine, product, sequel, open source. It's it's it is genuinely hard or at least harder to sell your license to something when in theory they could just grab it and copy it for the most part.. which is it which is something that was definitely brought up if my understanding is correct, but did it anyways. Course by the time unreal 3 came out, the choice was stripped from them, I guess they didn't have to sell but.. Bethesda was not having this lol. Just the fact that both are still companies these days in the landscape of how brutal everything is, it is impressive, now these were the best though.. at least as far as like being early enough and resilient enough to survive that tumultuous late '90s to mid-2000s era.. which the only reason it's stopped being tumultuous is because it just wasn't enough people left alive to stir up the phone of the sea, and most of those companies that survived that would die later and usually badly.. or worse get trapped in a puzzle basement like Raven did for 10 years. If you like quake, and if you like half-life, you will probably like unreal.. No I haven't seen a lot of people modding it, it did have very very good mod support initially cuz that was the buy-in process, get people using it do all the competitions and whatnot start signing the contracts and then you know. , I always was a little bitter against them because they just basically pretended like that community never existed as soon as they became properly commercially viable. And to this day are are quite problematic in that regard, but they're not unity so.. at least there's that lol cuz if you thought the bar was low.. unity and the developer culture it creates is a bar that's been pretty much fossilized it's been smashed into the mud so deep. And this is again where the importance of tools comes into play.. Id did not have great tools, Valve did not have great tools.. both were open with the community, and allowed things to be done and encouraged and fostered it.. I know I wouldn't say on real had the best tools but, their goal was to make tools in the end, they just also happen to occasionally make a game to sell the engine.. and if you weigh up the horrible stories from all three, with quake 3 being probably the most refined set and successful in that regard.. and yet the content coming out of unreal, despite the horror stories of how difficult it was with the engine being in progress and learning how to do so.. and with source engine lol just not getting your phone call returned.. But always having a pipeline shut down your throat lol.. there was a lot of games on source surprisingly enough, a lot of times you wouldn't notice, and eventually anything that was on it substantially had to fork the engine pretty significantly for tool sets alone. But especially that era after Portal 2, that that engine could have been but died pretty hard just by foul not wanting to play anymore for some reason. The inverse of that is that companies like torn banner could make something like chivalry without source code access with unreal 3, I wish the community was able to do things like that lol, cuz that's that's a pretty hefty level of interoperability without deeper access. But four on the other hand was designed in every way around the tool sets and removing barriers for entry. Sadly, this meant that you know the highly technical job of software engineers was yeah you know you do we really need that? We have to pay them lol.. what if we just did? And and now we don't have those in the industry, much less developers that can check a box that hasn't been defaulted. So.. we.. it's not a good industry anymore, But PC gaming was a hell of a thing back in in its brief a bright window, gaming wasn't just a product, it was a dialogue; between the people playing the games and developers and an industry growing up and growing into it.. and all that would go away around 2005 for some reason pretty permanently, to the point where pretty sure the last PC game to come out was Alyx.. and what a twist, that it was valve that did it, and I'll never.. I had a lot of thoughts on Valve, but show don't tell, that was a really good way to do so and gain back that faint glimmer the industry might actually be possible to try to do anything, despite how overspect every aspect of it is on the technical resource end outside of knowledge. and you know a community that even knows what an option's menu is much less understands the 20-year time warp the dual analog controller has been playing itself the whole time and they're not really helping. And it's getting worse.
@@JackWse i dont remember playing jedi knight, sin and half life, far cry. if i played, maybe it didnt had an impact on me to remember, lol. but i did some ut and was not the best, but made me have a good time "gaming wasn't just a product, it was a dialogue; between the people playing the games and developers and an industry growing up" well said here
What irritates me is the willful ignorance around why arena shooters died. It's obvious that they stopped modding and local area multiplayer support, so no community, no players. The entire point of DLC was developers directly monetizing the idea of free game mods. Horse armor. So you either make s game so good it doesn't need mods, or nobody plays it because there's no community support.
God, that '96 TV segment in the beginning sent me into the deepest nostalgia. I miss the 90's so much, man 😥
1995-2002 was the Golden era of PC gaming.
thanks for creating this - it's a pleasure to see part of my map making efforts in this video :) quake is forever, all hail the shambler!
Quake 3 was on every PC I've ever owned. It's still there and I still play it from time to time. Unreached
Have you considered covering the Unreal Tournament lore?
Unreal 1, Unreal II, UT99, UT2k3, Ut2k4, UT3.
Are all in the same universe.
And epic pulled all the unreal games off stores, essentially killing it. Not to mention the joke of ut4.
Chum is droppin' another one of those gems for us.
Quake got me into gaming and its got the best FPS action
Quake is an eternal essence of videogame industry.
Quake Forever.
It's only eternal because it's open source and supported mods. You can't shut it down, unlike unreal.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq
And also,
Quake is the pioneer of full-3D action,
is the pioneer of fast-paced PvP multiplayer,
is the source of tons of goodies in the adjacent genres now,
is the father of speedruns, bunny-hops anr rocket-jumps,
and still the One and Only a 100% skill-based competitive discipline without a-n-y random to this time.
* Unreal had every chance to develop up and take all the laurels due when in 2003 id software decided to ruin Quake with their own hands. Moreover, Epics simply abandoned this niche after id ruined own studio itself.
@@kolyaad quake 1-2 was some of the last co-op games on PC as well. There was basically a forced directive from Microsoft to block PC co-op. Halo didn't support it. Valve didn't support it either, bought out their game mods like Bethesda, TF and CS, paid mods. Then Valve invented steam to steal your personally owned games and lock them into an online account. Everything went downhill until basically dx12. Whoops PC isn't dead anymore. Didn't stop Microsoft. They deprecated direct input for xinput, ruined the start menu and control panel, and completely killed 3d audio while supporting it on Xbox. Valve solely saved PC gaming, invented Steam OS as a backup to Windows 8. But none of the big players are pro consumer anymore. There's no more classic games. They shut down GameSpy. Everything is centrally controlled over the Internet. But hey, Xbox game pass. Let's all be fanboys and defend abhorrent business practices. History of PC gaming.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq
I don't get it: the last coop - of what period? Up to 2004 with the last big PC releases? So Blood, JediKnight1-2, HeXeN2, SystemShock2, SeriousSam, WillRock, Renegade, DeltaForce/RainbowSix/GhostRecon/SWAT/Flashpoint doesn't count or smth??
The period around 2004 and after? So Battlefield and CoD sh*tted down everything around back then - not only by the consolish cr*p solely.
To "steal your personal games" - it's still better than the alternatives. And you can still save the installed games on a separate HDD by buying it with the money saved on steam_sales and without issues inherent in buying discs.
Yes, Valve is very strong in marketing, but it was the Publishers who determined the elaboration of the industry (yes, yes, those who made console-first development and interaction with BlackRock a priority, etc).
Yes, Microsoft is evil by default - what did you even expect (?)
But it was the Developers who killed 3D-audio literally stopping working on it. IF 1 PERSON was able to create the DSOAL mod, it means that the problem was not unsolvable.
"There's no more classic games" in MP if w/o GameSpy or what, I don't get it..
@@kolyaad Most of your listed co-op games were garbage or old. Will Rock? Lol. Serious Sam is the best one. Painkiller should have had co-op. I'm talking about AAA popular games not providing co-op, like HALO that specifically had it on console. There were plenty of garbage and indie games with it, but that's not the point. It seemed like the developers of big games had marching orders to REMOVE co-op from the console port to PC. Valve even released that PS2 version of half life. WTF? We completely lost AAA co-op until PC made a comeback. Where's the 360 ports with co-op? Didn't even get Halo 3 until MCC.
As for your Valve fanboyism, gog is more convenient. It's also a complete distraction. "Oh this version of North Korea is better than that version". No. How about none of that. Stop worshipping the dictator of North Korea. You gave up your rights for convenience. It all goes away when Gabe quits. Benjamin Franklin has some good advice for you. "Those that give up liberty for security, deserve neither." So no, I categorically deny any fanboyism. There is no excuse. Valve kept PC gaming viable, but created a complete monopoly in doing so.
It wasn't developers who killed 3d audio, it was 100% Microsoft, because they REMOVED hardware accelerated audio support and ENFORCED software mode. It's about API standards. Game developers use directX over openGL. There wasn't a better standard, developers use the standard. It also didn't help that review websites, Microsoft, and gamers ran a hate campaign against Creative Labs based on fake news. So they all celebrated 3d audio dying, and switched to motherboard audio and HDMI.
Finally, GameSpy going away completely changed the landscape away from local support to central servers and steam. There's a lot of old games including NINTENDO that stopped working. GameSpy also ran the best website for news, game patches, and mods. It was the biggest and only competitor to Steam. Not as a store, but the services. Nobody else offered those services or were backwards compatible. Everyone switched to steam on PC.
None of this stuff by itself seems to be game changing, but that's not the point. It's the total picture and history of how everything changed. Considering that I understand how things change while other people live in marketing bubble fantasy land, I can seriously predict Valve dropping Microsoft once they have a better OS for gaming, and Microsoft trying to lock into Xbox game pass. Of course, we'll have a bunch of fanboys who can't understand history and just defend game pass, because that's what people do. Tribalism over your rights being violated.
Anyways, the history of PC co-op was hijacked by Microsoft trying to force people on Xbox. It was an innocent bystander in the way of "progress". We lost local network support and the feature altogether at the same time. This was the age of World of Warcraft, where you quit owning your games with local networking, for paid subscriptions, and centralized gaming services. It didn't happen in a vacuum, it was attacked from multiple fronts. Oh, whattaboutism game X? GTFO. CO-OP didn't completely go away, but it was ruined. Everything was ruined. It's not the same experience we used to have. We can't get classics anymore in this ecosystem.
Long live Map Center, Nightdive and the great Quake 2 community.
I got my first PC in January 1996 with Doom II. The following Christmas I got Quake, Duke Nukem 3D and Tomb Raider. I was hooked. I then learned about mapping in Duke 3D before moving over to Quake. The following Christmas, I got Quake II. Both Quake and Quake II lived on my hard drive for a good few years until I got Half-Life. This was the golden age of PC gaming 1995-2002. I never bothered with Quake III, missed the Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Quake IV era as was too broke to get a PC. Quake and Quake II have been installed, removed and re-installed more times then any other game over the last 28 years. I really do miss that care free era sometimes. The Internet was novel (I used it to download Worldcraft updates originally).
I think its going to be very hard to make a new Quake game that was cutting-edge as the original. Everything has been done now, unless if was a full of holographic environment its hard to do anything new the way Quake did. It will get a lot of hate because of the nostalgia, to many people there will never be a replacement, no matter how good it actually is.
spent my whole childhood playing quake along with doom wolfenstein 3d duke nukem 3d and serious sam good times
Listening during a large drive
Some people may still fight over quake vs unreal, but for me, I have both perenially installed on my hard drive and still play them to this very day (Maybe not as frequently as i've did in my youth, but sure thing is one that never fails to deliver)
First time playing Quake 3 was the leak of q3test on irc.
What was your first impression of the game? :)
@@lechumqc7910 The map was Q3TOURNEY5, the fog and gibs were nothing like what was ever seen before. The leak had working FFA MP so it was actually alot to take in considering the hype.
When’s the release date of the finale of your F.E.A.R lore series?
In production :)
Amazing!
while i love this a lot, i would SO LOVE to see you do Unreal 1 and UT99, i want to see you show people how characterized the Skaarj are and the coolness of the cyberpunk dystopia that is the Grand Tournament.
What mods were shown at 8:32 and 8:56? The one with the Resident Evil style and the one with the black-shirted enemies?
"Malice for Quake" and "Alien Quake" :)
1:50...oh, baby, marry me...
Unfortunately to me it seems that they will just try to rehash doom as quake given how the next one looks. Tho after how bad eternal and its DLC were compared to D2016 and earlier dooms i don't have any hope. We could compare the direction of the doom remakes to the wolfenstein ones but sadly we didn't get out old blood just eternal which is slightly less bad then NC was for wolfenstein.
Mega doomer take
By definition, it is subjective on what you think is good or bad, but you are in an extreme minority if you think Doom Eternal is bad. In terms of base game releases, Doom Eternal is, in many cases, the best Doom ever released. The combat loop, graphics, demons, and now the new mod portal and tools are next level. Sure, classic Doom will always have its place, but Eternal is basically everything special about Doom from the 30 years of its history wrapped into one game.
I don’t think it would be fair to call Eternal a bad game. I personally didn’t like it, but the game has some good combat mechanics, big weapons, and awesome enemies, which is the most important thing in that kind of game. I didn’t like the visuals or the story, wasn’t a fan at all of the one-after-the-other arena combat, felt they could have been a bit more generous with the ammunition, and I really didn’t like the parkour sections. But I’m glad they tried something new, and I can’t wait to see what Dark Ages brings us :)
nice
People lost interest because Bethesda didnt release anything for years and Quake Champions is a far from what we had its almost like they tried to copy Overwach (which was popular at the time). I bet you all i have that if Bethesda made a Quake using the DOOM engine and added a great single player campaign like Doom, it will sell like hot bread.
Well they released the level editor, so will bring some life back into Doom Eternal. They should have done it 4 years ago.
The unbelievable entertainment that Quake 3 Arena brought was largely due to the fact that there were not many games to rival it. Every game that was or has become was a Quake 3 mod at one time. Before fps games had dancing, you had the flexing animations and the laugh animation gestures. Players made skins and mods and pushed to try to convince ID to expand it but when that fell through... CS and steam started to rise and heat and mplayer game servers became... vapor.
Quake 3 Arena was so hard for me to put down. Everything else was just a snails pace to me.
Credit to the UT players though. They played both games and always brought a good time.
For some reason it brings me joy to see you mention ctf threewave.
I swear I had some of the fastest caps lmao
@@ValenceFlux Man, Heat and Mplayer. Those are names I haven't heard in literal decades!
was quake made by same devs as doom and unreal?
Doom yes, Unreal no :)
Yes yes it was.. and don't you tell Tim Sweeny otherwise! He was up in the tree all last week and you know how he gets when people bring up the quake 2 engine!
Okay so in all fairness, epic mega games is they used to be called, genuinely did build the unreal engine more or less from scratch and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of it had been inspired or directly lifted from quake engine, but that was the whole point of quake engine to teach and to have people learn.
But some of the things about unreal are just bizarre, like when you're looking at like the magician doing things, and it could just be the translation layers of stories told over time but.. Even as a game it was special.. it's really hard not to get the impression that Quaker arena was just a rip off of unreal tournament, now I have the impression that it probably wasn't necessarily, but you could probably get the impression towards the later stretches that between those two projects, they were very much rivals.
But unreal as a game for a single player game, was way above the curve at the time, now it wasn't above the curve for much longer as Jedi Knight had already released, sin was about to be crushed by half life and then cradled by Valve before smothered by Gabe and leaving a plastic bag out and convincing them episodic was going to be a good idea..
Honestly unreal is kind of like the far cry of 1998... It was arguably a better game in a lot of senses, and although the comparison isn't quite extreme, given that far cry was significantly ahead of its competitors in terms of the actual gameplay and design aspects.. But where it does fall into similarities as it was doing things in a world building sense and a narrative sense that again, genuinely just weren't how these types of games were created just the year before.. No they were starting to, and it was inevitable but.. there's a vibe.
There's a vibe from the '90s, alien worlds alien colors like I don't want to say it's like one thing or another necessarily specifically, a lot of people had it just be Halo at one point.. Halo was going for that vibe.. unreal nailed that vibe. Unfortunately they couldn't give less of a crap about any of that in the future.. and I'm pretty sure the only reason they made that game was to sell their engine.. which they did.. and they did so very successfully.
This was back when there was competition of course, but id was always at a disadvantage to a degree as there was always a give back mentality with carmack in particular, based on the established precedent from Doom, engine, product, sequel, open source. It's it's it is genuinely hard or at least harder to sell your license to something when in theory they could just grab it and copy it for the most part.. which is it which is something that was definitely brought up if my understanding is correct, but did it anyways.
Course by the time unreal 3 came out, the choice was stripped from them, I guess they didn't have to sell but.. Bethesda was not having this lol. Just the fact that both are still companies these days in the landscape of how brutal everything is, it is impressive, now these were the best though.. at least as far as like being early enough and resilient enough to survive that tumultuous late '90s to mid-2000s era.. which the only reason it's stopped being tumultuous is because it just wasn't enough people left alive to stir up the phone of the sea, and most of those companies that survived that would die later and usually badly.. or worse get trapped in a puzzle basement like Raven did for 10 years.
If you like quake, and if you like half-life, you will probably like unreal.. No I haven't seen a lot of people modding it, it did have very very good mod support initially cuz that was the buy-in process, get people using it do all the competitions and whatnot start signing the contracts and then you know.
, I always was a little bitter against them because they just basically pretended like that community never existed as soon as they became properly commercially viable. And to this day are are quite problematic in that regard, but they're not unity so.. at least there's that lol cuz if you thought the bar was low.. unity and the developer culture it creates is a bar that's been pretty much fossilized it's been smashed into the mud so deep.
And this is again where the importance of tools comes into play.. Id did not have great tools, Valve did not have great tools.. both were open with the community, and allowed things to be done and encouraged and fostered it.. I know I wouldn't say on real had the best tools but, their goal was to make tools in the end, they just also happen to occasionally make a game to sell the engine.. and if you weigh up the horrible stories from all three, with quake 3 being probably the most refined set and successful in that regard..
and yet the content coming out of unreal, despite the horror stories of how difficult it was with the engine being in progress and learning how to do so.. and with source engine lol just not getting your phone call returned.. But always having a pipeline shut down your throat lol.. there was a lot of games on source surprisingly enough, a lot of times you wouldn't notice, and eventually anything that was on it substantially had to fork the engine pretty significantly for tool sets alone. But especially that era after Portal 2, that that engine could have been but died pretty hard just by foul not wanting to play anymore for some reason.
The inverse of that is that companies like torn banner could make something like chivalry without source code access with unreal 3, I wish the community was able to do things like that lol, cuz that's that's a pretty hefty level of interoperability without deeper access. But four on the other hand was designed in every way around the tool sets and removing barriers for entry.
Sadly, this meant that you know the highly technical job of software engineers was yeah you know you do we really need that? We have to pay them lol.. what if we just did? And and now we don't have those in the industry, much less developers that can check a box that hasn't been defaulted. So.. we.. it's not a good industry anymore,
But PC gaming was a hell of a thing back in in its brief a bright window, gaming wasn't just a product, it was a dialogue; between the people playing the games and developers and an industry growing up and growing into it.. and all that would go away around 2005 for some reason pretty permanently, to the point where pretty sure the last PC game to come out was Alyx.. and what a twist, that it was valve that did it, and I'll never..
I had a lot of thoughts on Valve, but show don't tell, that was a really good way to do so and gain back that faint glimmer the industry might actually be possible to try to do anything, despite how overspect every aspect of it is on the technical resource end outside of knowledge. and you know a community that even knows what an option's menu is much less understands the 20-year time warp the dual analog controller has been playing itself the whole time and they're not really helping. And it's getting worse.
@@JackWse i dont remember playing jedi knight, sin and half life, far cry. if i played, maybe it didnt had an impact on me to remember, lol.
but i did some ut and was not the best, but made me have a good time
"gaming wasn't just a product, it was a dialogue; between the people playing the games and developers and an industry growing up"
well said here