Episode Three: Stroggification
The Accidental Future of Quake
Welcome to Episode Three of “Quake’s Bizarre, Beautiful History!” Read the previous episodes here:
When Quake finally released, it made serious waves with its unique atmosphere and revolutionary multiplayer. As is often the case with messy developments, though, the people who made the game weren’t as excited about it. Folks like me love Quake now, but id could never detach it from all the crunch and struggle it brought them. “We weren’t happy with the Quake story. Romero was gone, so there was no one left to defend it” said Todd Hollenshead, then-CEO of id software, in a 2016 interview with Retro Gamer. With the challenges of designing a 3D game engine from scratch and implementing good online networking largely behind them, the road was clear for id to focus on a coherent, complete vision for their next title from start to finish. They were putting the chaos of Quake behind them and making something totally new.
There was just one problem, though. Nobody could figure out what to call the damn thing.
Of course id was making a shooter again (look what kind of struggle they had trying to do something else!), but this one was entirely sci-fi. No demons, no lovecraftian horrors, just these grotesque cyborg-aliens named the strogg. Development on the game was going smoothly, but marketing needed a name and a logo. The deadline was fast approaching - especially if the logo was going to be incorporated into the prerendered opening cinematic - and id was having a really hard time coming up with something cool to call the game that they could copyright. Strogg? Nobody’s going to know what that means. Lock and Load? Utterly generic. Just… Load? Are you serious? Eventually, they just about threw their hands in the air and said “Screw it. Let’s just call it Quake II.” It had nothing to do with Quake, but it was the same genre and an iteration of its game engine, at least. Let’s stick another nail through the logo and call it even.
Thus Quake stumbles into a new lease on life and a strange split identity. Is it an eldritch horror-themed shooter where you fight to survive against strange beasts in cruel, gothic worlds, or a sci-fi shooter where you're humanity’s best soldier in the war against techno-assimilation from an alien race? Quake’s answer is “yes,” and you will see how the franchise deals with that challenge in the future. For now, though, Quake II is hitting store shelves on December 9th, 1997, and gamers aren’t really being picky about how different it is.
Boots on the Ground
One of the goals of Quake II was to make it “story-driven,” according to the aforementioned interview from Todd Hollenshead. In a first for id, the game’s basic setup is laid out for you in an opening cinematic instead of relegating it to a couple paragraphs in the instruction booklet. A lightning-round of news reports recount the strogg’s invasion of Earth and her colonies as the Quake II logo moves into focus. A massive space battleship then moves in on the strogg homeworld, Stroggos, and the player character Bitterman gets launched towards the planet with a whole battalion of other marines. He’s knocked off-course, landing far enough away from the LZ to inadvertently save him from an EMP strike that leaves the rest of his squad as sitting ducks. Now it’s up to you to pick up the pieces and storm Stroggos yourself, because you’re just that badass.
The first thing that struck me about Quake II was just how busy it all felt. Once the cutscene ended, I was standing outside of my drop pod with a bunch of explosions going off around me and the heavy metal soundtrack blaring at its default volume of “way too goddamn loud.” A fuzzy radio call bursts in to bark orders at me, and there’s a blinking symbol telling me to hit F1 in case I need to read those orders again. “Subtlety” is not the name of this game. I guess having somebody tell me what I’m doing is supposed to count as making the game “story-driven?” There’s no more cutscenes until the end, mind you. The environments are definitely meant to constitute more of a believable world, though. We see the rampant industrialization of the strogg’s mechanical society throughout, witnessing factories, military prisons, and even the stages of mechanical processing that result in the creation of a strogg. As the ratio of organic to mechanical shifts more in the latter’s favor, enemies get tougher and tougher. It’s an oppressive world, but we do come to understand their culture in a way.
The worldbuilding is just one part of Quake II’s wider scope. With more guns, more enemies, and far larger levels than any of their other games, it was definitely trying to be their biggest and best title yet. Maps are now grouped into interconnected stages, scaling id’s backtracking-heavy labyrinths up to their largest scope yet. Your inventory not only stores your weapons, but also a bunch of usable items and power-ups like the classic Quad Damage that you can now use whenever you want. All kinds of enemies populate the bases and skies of Stroggos, leaving no niche unfilled. If you read “Expansion Pack One,” though, you might see where this is going. Quake II is the type of game that asked whether it could before it asked whether it should.
I’m going to start with the arsenal because it’s easily one of my biggest sticking points with this game. Generally speaking, gunplay goes as one expects from an id game. No reloading, aiming down sights, or accuracy penalties while moving; you just point and shoot. The problem is that the guns largely feel clunkier or just plain limp compared to Quake. The shotguns are a noticeable improvement, handling more like their classic Doom II counterparts, but it’s mostly downhill from there. The worst examples are the automatic weapons: the machine gun is inaccurate with recoil that feels terrible, the chaingun’s spin-up forces you to spend tons of ammo to use it at all, and the hyperblaster has a tremendously long delay after releasing the trigger where it can’t fire again. These guns all take some control away from you without any good balance reason, making them a pain to use. Of course, the Thunderbolt doesn’t even return, and its replacement in the Ground Zero mission pack, the Plasma Beam, is a pale imitation.
The other weapons are disappointing in smaller ways. The classic rocket launcher remains strong, but the rockets fly pretty slowly now. You can now throw grenades by hand, but apparently your buff space marine somehow can’t throw more than a few feet. The grenade launcher hardly fares better, with grenades falling flat after just a short distance. Credit where it’s due, though; the new railgun quickly became a Quake staple. It fires perfectly accurate slugs which instantly pierce through enemies, leaving an iconic corkscrew trail in its wake. With a long delay after firing, though, it’s harder to use up-close. It’s satisfying to line up shots on multiple enemies, and it doesn’t force you to stay still for accuracy like many modern snipers. Doom’s devastating BFG9000 also returns here as the all-new BFG10000, packing a satisfying punch. All in all, though, the arsenal just ends up feeling a little worse than it has to. The new inventory system, which includes every gun, also makes navigating the arsenal unnecessarily hard. Saving power-ups for when you need them can be cool, but it makes using them much less streamlined, and you end up saving them to trivialize big moments instead of fighting through areas designed to be faced with one.
I also find many of this game’s enemies frustrating. In shooters, there’s generally two types of shots: hitscan and projectiles. Hitscan means that when you or an enemy fire, a line is drawn instantly from one point to another and the first thing that line hits takes damage. Projectiles instead actually travel within the world and damage the first thing they collide with. Both types of shots are fine in a player’s hands since humans can miss with either kind, but when enemies have hitscan attacks, things quickly become frustrating. From basic foot soldiers with shotguns and machine guns to the gladiators who carry railguns, Quake II is filled with hitscan enemies that make you quite vulnerable no matter how well you can move.
With hardly any melee-focused enemies and other deadly attacks like rockets and grenade launchers to worry about out in the open, the game frequently devolves into hugging cover and peeking with powerful single-shot weapons like the railgun over weaving your way through enemies. Movement is still fast and fluid like in Quake, but the threats you’re up against give you hardly any room to appreciate that fact. Some slower, cover-based shooters can be fun, such as MachineGames’ modern Wolfenstein games, but that’s because those games are built around interesting shooting from cover. This game is a movement shooter that frequently punishes you for playing it like one.
Even outside of the enemies you fight within, the maps have some problems, too. Quake’s maps were quite streamlined, and one hardly gets lost in that game. Quake II rolls all of that back and constructs such sprawling and confusing stages that getting lost becomes a core part of the experience. Sure, your orders may tell you to go to the warehouse or some other named location, but they aren’t always well-labeled and are never visually distinct from one another. Infinite metallic hallways with crates or computers blend together, and backtracking to whatever you needed that red key for may mean crossing most of the entire map. I don’t consider this a worthwhile price to pay for a more believable setting.
(If you’ve played Quake II and can’t remember some of these issues, that may be because the 2022 remaster changed a lot of them - I’ll be talking about that later in the series.)
Ultimately, it feels like Quake II’s campaign struggles between id’s classic adrenalized gameplay and a newfound desire for immersion and storytelling. The storytelling effort is muted by id’s action-first design philosophy, and the action takes a hit in pursuit of more believable environments and gunplay. It doesn’t altogether result in a bad game - in fact, it was received very well at the time - but the lack of focus means nothing in its campaign really fires on all cylinders. Though the strogg are an original foe, they don’t feel as unique as Quake’s creatures, and I end up preferring that game’s bizarre worlds in spite of the effort put into designing Stroggos. The new soundtrack by German artist Sonic Mayhem, with some contributions by Bill Brown and even Rob Zombie, is competent and exciting but contributes nothing altogether standout to the feeling of the game. id may have been in agreement about their vision for this game, but the result couldn’t match the distinctive energy that Quake’s difficult circumstances produced.
But of course, Quake II doesn’t begin and end with its single-player.
The Next Step of Networking
Much of what bothers me about Quake II’s campaign has to do with its structure. The winding levels and frustrating enemies force you to play the game in a more boring way. Aside from the guns, though, the basic feeling of Quake II’s gameplay is still great. It seems as though the player has been slowed down at first glance, but movement is changed more than it is nerfed. Airstrafing is gone, but in its place is strafe jumping. By holding forward and either left or right while aiming your mouse in that direction you could build up a lot of forward speed with a slight left or right lean. This is easier than airstrafing, but it’s no good for tight corners. This is how Quake’s movement would typically feel in future installments, and the need to stop strafe jumping briefly to take corners actually makes the movement a little more strategic.
More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that fighting against other players on multiplayer maps conveniently sweeps away the issues I have with the campaign. Players have hitscan weapons, too, but they have to find them first and hitting you with them actually takes some aiming skill. Moving quickly thus makes you harder to hit. Multiplayer maps are also smaller and more navigable than campaign maps on average. Fighting against other people finally feels like you’re getting the chance to enjoy Quake II at top speed without getting melted by strogg firing squads. Unfortunately, nothing can be done about the guns feeling worse, but that’s okay; you’re really just going to want to get your hands on a railgun, anyways.
Let’s talk about the railgun. This thing is a menace. Anyone with good aim can start terrorizing a lobby real quick with one of these, building up a lead as they get to collect more health and armor. Newly-spawned players only have 100 health and no armor, meaning they’ll die to just one railgun shot from anywhere until they can stack up. Since it’s a perfectly accurate hitscan shot with unlimited range, you’re hardly ever safe from it. In a game where every other weapon feels kind of clunky or just straight-up can’t compete in terms of damage, the railgun is king. Even though the BFG is intentionally a superweapon, the railgun comes across as Quake II’s iconic powerhouse much like the Thunderbolt of Quake. Snipers’ combination of high damage and unparalleled range has made them a balancing nightmare in shooters to this day, and Quake II is an excellent example of why. Still, the railgun is satisfying enough to use that it would never miss a Quake game again.
With so much changing about Quake in its accidental sequel, the one thing about the game that really felt like a straightforward iteration ended up being the multiplayer. With an improved engine and visuals, better networking, and an arena shooter format which strayed from the original far less than the campaign did, this is the area where Quake II most felt like a sequel. With the return of capture the flag and enhancements like additional player models to choose from, Quake multiplayer was only getting better and better. In the early days of the internet, Quake was leading the charge in online gaming culture. With few other consistent traits to latch onto, id would zero in on multiplayer as the future of Quake.
Thanks for reading Episode Three of “Quake’s Bizarre, Beautiful History!” Watch as Quake’s multiplayer comes into its own in “Episode Four: Arena Eternal,” coming soon!