Problems In QuakeLand

[Baker]

What do you think main things that are problems for the original Quake?

My short list:

1. Almost all the Quake sites are really, really boring. We are trying to be different and not be like that. We hope we can do well in that department and we are going to try really hard to do that if we can.

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Something I found in the PlanetQuake forums:

Gibaholic: C'mon people, how come people aren't making threads like "What's your favorite map?" "What's your favorite song from the soundtrack?" "What mp do you prefer NetQuake or QuakeWorld?". I realize there are other forums for these kind of things but this is planetquake and it's dedicated to all Quake's, not just 3 and 4.

Bilirubin: With respect Gibby, you are about 8-10 years too late for that sort of chatter with this game. Now its new engines and config tweek talk among boards catering to experienced gamers (qw.nu or qw.us for instance), and here we help folks get their games going. I hope we can keep introducing new players to this great game--for online multiplay, its really the tops.

Let me make this clear: I am not knocking Quakeworld.us or Quakeworld.nu, this applies to most Quake/Quakeworld sites. Both of those sites are fine sites with some people very dedicated Quake. We link to them, they are dedicated to the game and care about the game just like us.

I blame this in part on the lack of interesting Quake news. FuhQuake.net had a lot of colorful things go on there. Things were new. People made new cool stuff like every week.

Anymore when I read the pages of Quake news based sites, it seems like the original Quake is made of solid boron. There aren't the lively wonders every week like back in, say, 2002 when you were in total shock seeing FuhQuake's Quake 3 style coolness and Tenebrae screenshots or hearing about the mega ambitious Nehahra. I admit back in 2002 I tried NONE of those, but I damn well read news and saw pictures of all of them.

2. Quake: Too Complicated.

No one wants to go on a Diablo style Quest to get their Quake to work. No one wants to go on a Diablo style Quest to get the cool stuff, to make games work, etc.

We got 2 posts within an hour yesterday asking if there were any front-ends/launchers for Quake to manage maps, mods and graphics. Why aren't there? The one poster seemed shocked there weren't. Hopefully the JoeQuake launcher will be out soon, Allah willing.

There is a high quality install package out there that does an excellent job of packaging all the stuff you need, except for the big problem of not being legal. In all other ways, it is thorough as hell and quite impressive.

3. Single Player

I have played some great stuff. I hadn't played any of it until last year.

Do you know why? I was afraid of setting it up. I didn't want to mess with registering at FilePlanet. I didn't want the hassle. I thought it would be boxy style, yawn inducing tedium with ye old tired monsters. Why bother?

After I tried it, I was in shock. I just couldn't believe how incredibly great the awesome maps were. Many of them have custom monsters, but even the ones using standard monsters were incredible. They played like intensely difficult puzzles.

I think Quake installs and learning about where to put things is a major turn off to people. I've know players that wouldn't do upgrades that were essential just because they'd have to download a client and mess with their config.cfg. I know some people who have never made a "cool Quake name" because they are afraid of that.

Yeah, this is actually part of #2 in a way. But I still think it is a major reason why many players haven't tried any custom single player maps or episodes.

4. Community Disconnect

When the almighty Widomaker server had temporary downtime from time to time back in 2003-2004, those players didn't know where to go. All they knew was "connect quake.widomaker.com".

You'd see 6 or 7 of them go to Shmack. You'd see 4 or 5 go to Singed. But considering it seemed like there were always 30 players trying to connect to Widomaker, you knew 15-20 players had no idea. Chuck would often point out the problem. No one did anything about it. When Widomaker died, I know some players vanished.

And the Trinicom server, when it gradually faded and suddenly became a vacuum, it was like those guys didn't know of any other servers on the planet. Canadian Sniper did a post last week saying he didn't know about Max. Last year I remember showing CTF players about GameStatus.Net, they had absolutely no clue it existed.

Quakeworld doesn't have this particular problem, that is for sure. We don't really have this problem anymore either. But we once did.

But there are still community disconnects. The disconnects are different. Community X doesn't understand Community Y. Happens all the time. Regular Quake versus Quakeworld (why?). Multiplayer types not understanding how single player is used and vice versa. Engine community #1 doesn't understand why Engine community #2 uses Engine #1. Old skool vs. new skool.

[/rant]

[Monster]

Most people do not play quake because it isn't user-friendly. My friends say, "FUCK THIS, Its too hard to set up." Then I tell them to go to Quakeone.com and make a post about their problems. They just say, "nah.. I'd rather play diablo, this game sucks anyway"

[SantaClaws]

We are trying to be different and not be like that. We hope we can do well in that department and we are going to try really hard to do that if we can.

I think you're doing an excellent job with this. I noticed it in the first few minutes I was browsing the forums. I would love to see more threads like this.

2. Quake: Too Complicated.

This is very, very true. This is the biggest problem I see people having. It would be nice to have a standard packaging system that could install an up to date version of Quake from the original CD, as well as be used to manage and install mods and maps. It would require some repackaging efforts, but I think it would really pay off...

I think this problem also applies to the development and modding community, though.

I would love to see people come up with a set of standards for organization and file formats that could move the development community ahead. While I think backwards compatibility is important, I think people worry about it so much that it hinders the progress of attracting new people to the Quake engine.

QuakeSrc tried this, but I don't think it was continued long enough to make a real impact. If the ideas that were created for extensions to QC were applied to improvements in other areas of modding, we would be far better off.

The standards are what are important with this, though. A lot of engines have added things that help do things like adding entities to a map outside of the BSP, or manipulating gameplay variables without editing QC. But how it's done varies from mod to mod, so no real progress is made, just like QC extensions were way back when.

But there are still community disconnects. The disconnects are different. Community X doesn't understand Community Y. Happens all the time. Regular Quake versus Quakeworld (why?). Multiplayer types not understanding how single player is used and vice versa. Engine community #1 doesn't understand why Engine community #2 uses Engine #1. Old skool vs. new skool.

I was talking to scar3crow about this recently. I think the main problem is that a lot of engines and such aren't presented well. People often look down on Darkplaces just because they haven't been shown something that shows off its abilities.

[Baker]

I think you're doing an excellent job with this. I noticed it in the first few minutes I was browsing the forums. I would love to see more threads like this.

Thanks, we hope to do more threads with a sense of humor. And we hope to go places angels fear to tread from time to time

I was talking to scar3crow about this recently. I think the main problem is that a lot of engines and such aren't presented well. People often look down on Darkplaces just because they haven't been shown something that shows off its abilities.

I agree with this. I have to say that from time to time in the past, I've felt some friction with the DarkPlaces community because I didn't feel like they understood the point of view from the community where I am from, which is more like the FuhQuake/EZQuake community than it is the single player community.

It is nice to have so many DarkPlaces supporters on this board and exchange thoughts, information and explore the differences.

[SantaClaws]

Yeah.

I think the problems you see with the reception of an engine like Darkplaces are mirrored across the Quake community in general. People like to talk down about Tenebrae, but it has attracted a huge following of people outside the Quake community.

There are reasons for that. Instead of talking down about engines and arguing about which is better, I'd love to see people look at things constructively and figure out how we can learn from each other... how we can apply the successes of other projects and endeavors to further the community as a whole.

[Marius]

Hi, new poster here. I was/am a reviewer from retroquake and I think I come to Quake with a different perspective. You see I am one of the few who doesn't really like quake multiplayer much at all. I play for the singleplayer experience.

My first love when it comes to FPS's is and allways will be Doom. It was the first FPS I played and it hooked me straight off. But I didn't have a computer. I was playing Doom on the 32X, a short-live 32-bit addon for the Sega Genesis. I couldn't play multiplayer if i wanted to. Hours of Doom singleplayer made me a fan of the singleplayer game style almost exclusively.

After getting Doom for my new laptop (about 3 years ago), I started to search out other iD shooters. I found Quake and was intrigued right off the bat. Quake was much less well known than doom, and maintained a much smaller internet presence (this was sort of a low point in Quake history I think. This was before Quaddicted, Quake Terminus, Quakeone and after planetquake had already mostly fallen apart). As I searched the web for an active Quake community like the doom one, I found mostly dead site after dead site. Pages of Quake links where every site was gone, review sites where every map download link was broken. While this would have discouraged many people, it motivated me to search harder.

While I eventually found living sites and level archives, I had to learn by myself how to get Quake running in 2001 form. I had to find a good engine by trying them all, learn the config parameters, learn the command line syntax, become familiar with the Quake file structure. Now i'm a big nerd, so this was huge geeky fun for me, but it represents too big of a learning curve for most.

Sites like this are Quake's main hope for reaching new people and keeping the game alive. Every effort really needs to be made to increase quake's profile and explain clearly how to run and configure it.

[=peg=]

Hi, i'd like to adress one more issue concerning atracting new q1 players to the multiplayer scene.. and that is not to scare them away in the first place! I mean, imagine being a noob again.. coming online for ur first time.. and getting totally smacked up flying all over the place being dead 99.9% of the time.. thats hardly any fun now is it?

I think there should be a server more or less dedicated to the novice q1 player so new people can actually frag once or twice.. maybe some more experienced players could join in every now and then just to teach them some of the tippical quake tricks like rocketjumping/bunnyhopping etc... or just be available for information on the most basic issues like the console/commands/configs/scripts etc..

i know all of that can be found on this site and many other quake resource sites but most people just want to play i guess.. not do a full time study on how to play beforhand..

anyway.. moral of the story.. go a little easy on the noobs

[Monster]

That is the same with all new players on any FPS. They just have to learn to deal with it, and if they can't, so be it, they are too weak to learn to handle any FPS.

[=peg=]

true.. i agree.. but u know.. Q1 has been around for like 10 years now.. and the few ppl still playing the game are the hardcore fanatics (including myself , plus quake is one of the (if not THE) fastest FPS's around in terms of gameplay which makes it all that much harder for the novice player..