Besides the charging berserker, you’re mainly left with a variety of mooks, tanks, and hover bots and not much else. Now the parasite is a great enemy, the horrible tongue dog thing, but he’s not used as often as you’d expect. Even the big mob fights end up being fairly simple, most enemy types blending together, the most unique baddies not appearing too often. You can only hide a berserker behind a corner so many times before people get wise to it. It was designed in a way to let the player breeze through and enjoy it, with the few tricks present reused to the point of surprises no longer being surprises. The game is not particularly difficult compared to other id shooters, due mainly to a lack of big surprises to deal with. That said, level design overall is extremely forgettable. The sound effects and score fit the world perfectly, so kudos there, even if what the art team could do with the theme was limited. It’s one of the first tracks that plays in the game and will be stuck in your head forever. Enough praise cannot be thrown at the track “ Descent into Cerberon” in particular. He was replaced with the one person group Sonic Mayhem (who’d return for Quake III), whose hard rock and metal sound fits this particular game much better. It’s been said he thought the game had no atmosphere, though it’s more accurate to say it doesn’t have an atmosphere that fits Reznor’s style. This shift in atmosphere is also the main known reason Trent Reznor bowed out of the project. The industrial nature of the Strogg is captured, and very little else, kind of wasting the great body horror theme at the game’s center.
The map and art design suffered from the limited setting, meaning most of your time will be spent in warehouses and open dam/bridge areas that blend together very quickly. It’s a neat trick for this era that does add to the wartime atmosphere, though it comes at a cost.
What this means for the game is that you now have mini-hubs that divide up the levels, given main and secondary objectives to guide you along and make you feel like you’re constantly working towards a larger goal. Your character, Bitterman, is the only marine to make it in alive, and you have to destroy the “Big Gun” to allow the invasion to go ahead as planned. Said aliens are the Strogg, probably some of the most memorable villains in the id pantheon, a species that turns dead and living flesh of other races into cyborg abominations for their war machine. The horror tone of the last game has been tossed out for a sci-fi WWII shoot-em-up, with an army of space marines taking the fight to the planet of alien invaders who wrecked Earth. One cool thing is that we now have a proper narrative structure, even if the story told is still mainly a plot skeleton. What did change was how the game was designed, marking just how different this new era of id would be, but lacking the ability to execute on creative ambition the way later id games would. It also didn’t change much in mechanics, even with all its new features and structure. It wasn’t particularly important in gaming history, making fairly minor improvements to the Quake engine to become the proper id Tech 2, the most noticeable being colored lightning, making the game feel less brown. Problem is this quickly made sequel is probably the most forgettable game in the Quake franchise. Adrian Carmack considers Quake II one of his favorite projects, partly due to how well development went from start to finish, in contrast to the first game’s frazzled development. This was definitely the Carmack era, where tech and Carmack’s own design interests tended to shape each project, but this initially allowed projects to come together much quicker. Romero himself has said that with him gone, nobody was left to challenge Carmack on important decisions, and there seems to be some truth to that.
#QUAKE II N64 SOFTWARE#
Shortly after Quake was done, Romero left id Software to found Ion Storm, and this marked a major culture shift for the company. Screenshots taken were made with the source part Yamagi Quake II.
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