Stuff about Quake

I’ve got back to Dawn of the Machine after getting stuck, and then deciding to play through every other official Quake 1 level set. This one was released recently by MachineGames for the 30th anniversary of the original game, and it’s very hard. You start the game with a reduced maximum health and ammunition for each of the weapons. There are pickups throughout the levels that will bump these up a little bit. Several of them are well hidden, I doubt I got half of them to be honest. Several of the levels took me around half an hour to beat, and had over 200 enemies in them. They will regularly spawn the hardest enemies in the game one after the other, often in places where it is extremely hard to dodge their attacks.

This is the second Quake expansion created by MachineGames, released in 2021. In this one there are five short episodes with a central hub that you keep returning to. Each episode is two levels long, and activates part of a giant machine in the hub level. After this there is a final boss level where you once again fight Chthon, the lava beast from the original game’s first episode.

Dissolution of Eternity is the second mission pack for the original Quake. This one has two episodes, and after the first episode, I thought it was pretty boring. The new weapons were just overpowered versions of the originals and the levels weren’t doing anything as interesting as mission pack 1.

Dimension of the Past is a short expansion to the original Quake. It was released in 2016 by MachineGames to celebrate the base game’s 20th birthday. They apparently have an internal group called Quake Club that get together to create free new levels using a level editor called TrenchBroom. This seems like such an unusual thing for a large games company to do, but it makes a lot of sense to me. Getting a chance to refresh your skills on the absolute basics of level design, or try out writing music or creating textures when that isn’t usually your role seems like it would have a lot of benefits. Especially when modern games development means you spend time hyperfocusing on one tiny detail in a giant project for years without much control. I suspect it’s a lot of fun as well.

Scourge of Armagon is the first mission pack for the original Quake. It features some new enemies and a few new weapons. Most are not particularly interesting, such as a laser gun or a ball that floats towards you and explodes. You do get Mjolnir though, a giant hammer that causes lightning to hit your enemies. That one can be a lot of fun. There is a gremlin enemy as well that can steal your active weapon, or spawn more of itself by eating the corpses which litter the level. That’s a very interesting idea for an enemy, but they’re so weak that I never really saw either happen.

It is the 30th anniversary of the release of Quake. To celebrate this, MachineGames released a new set of levels called Dawn of the Machine as a free update to the Nightdive remaster. I thought I’d give them a go and found them excellent but extremely hard. That seemed like a good reason to go back to the original levels and play a few to practice. Instead I ended up completing the entire game for the first time in probably decades.

I bought this at release in 1997, I even remember playing the beta versions that were published in the lead up, but never finished it. This time I played the remastered version that was released recently. This new version adds a feature which draws markers in the world to show you where you need to go next which is very helpful as I think I spent most of my time lost in the original. It’s a great feature that should get added as an option into lots of old maze shooters.