This might only be a temporary thing, but… by tinkafoo
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Saturday September 26, 1998 |
I’m pretty much done with Quake. I haven’t played it in a couple months. Even though I did play about 20 minutes last night, I didn’t really enjoy it — I was too busy thinking of other stuff I could have been doing. It’s not the same, and I’m not sure what caused it to change..
I used to love going out, hopping onto a full server, and playing it silly! But over the past six months, all the good servers practically died. (The “Cunning TW” server comes to mind..) The ones that didn’t die turned “HPB only” and filtered my low-ping-ass out. The ones that appeared to die did so because because either people weren’t playing on them, or because the server ops turned them into dreaded Q2 servers.
Remember, Q2 drove a big spike into the community between the die-hard Q1 players (which is where I was) and the cutting-edge “I’ll play anything as long as it’s the newest thing on the planet” players. I stuck with Q1 because I had a complaint about Q2 — it feels like you’re controlling a retarded robot through a vat of cold molasses. I did not want to follow everyone into Q2 until id “fixed it”. It further frustrated me when I heard that they’re never gonna fix it: “That’s the way it is. If you want to play a game like Quakeworld, play Quakeworld.” Shit.
I honestly tried to like Q2, hoping I could make the transition like I did from Doom to Quake (which was quite difficult), but my complaints weren’t being addressed:
- Zoid’s CTF: sucked. It overemphasized Q2’s slow-ass speed! Bullcrap, I ain’t playing this!
- LMCTF had the best planning, execution, and playability; but it was still flawed — see: “retarded robot in molasses”.
- Rocket Arena was a bloated, complicated, slow version of the old, original, superfast Q1 version.
- Q2TWCTF is still in beta, but it’ll be released too late for me to enjoy it (besides, I only got to play it a couple times — every server was EMPTY!!)
Over time I realized that as a society, the Quake community was grasping Q2 like a perv grabs his nuts in public. But as individuals, Quake players still wanted that “good ole Quake1 feel”.. See: Pro-Rocket and TW..
Why was no one listening to these pleas for Q1 (or even Doom!) physics and playability to return? Carmack himself answered it at Quakecon: “when we increase the player speed, we reduce the ability to predict movement in multiplayer. Quake Arena will be as slow as (if not slightly slower than) Quake2 because we’re shooting for realism and smooth gameplay over the net.” Shit again.
Ultimately, this “shooting for realism” thing is shying me away from games in general. Has anyone seen Lara Croft’s new “package”? SHIT! WTF’s up with that?!?
Concluding:
I even went so far as to telling everyone on the Thunderwalker Mailing List that I unsubscribed when in fact, I’m still lurking a little.. I see a little glimmer of hope floating around, so I’m not going to completely leave the mailing list quite yet, I won’t delete Quake from my computer, and I’m not going to delete all of my Quake bookmarks. I can’t just up and say, “welp, that’s the end of it. I better find a new hobby right quick.” It’s not that easy, let me tell you!
Donde Quake 2? 