Expansion Pack One: Thunderbolt in a Bottle
Other Studios' Attempts to Channel Quake
Welcome to Expansion Pack One of “Quake’s Bizarre, Beautiful History!” Read the previous episodes here:
So, against all odds, Quake was a massive hit. While plenty of fans used - and still use - its mapping tools to make and share their own missions, it’s no surprise that some smaller developers took their chance to cash in on Quake’s success. id licensed out two missions packs for Quake from two separate developers, released two weeks apart in March of 1997. Both contained new weapons, maps, and single-player missions designed to directly follow the events of Quake. However, Quake was a delicate balance composed of a distinctive atmosphere and a certain spark that wouldn’t be so easy for outsiders to match. The mission packs, put simply, just don’t quite get it.
Hell and Back Again?
Hipnotic came out of the gate first with Quake Mission Pack No. 1: Scourge of Armagon on March 5th, 1997. If you haven’t heard of Hipnotic, I don’t blame you; their short development history prior to their closure in 2007 consists of just a few licensed games, collaborations with other studios, and expansions like Armagon. Plus, they changed their name to Ritual Entertainment less than a year after Armagon. As you might expect from a studio with such a non-legacy, this expansion’s greatest claim to fame is that it’s more Quake, even if it’s not as good as Quake proper.
For Scourge of Armagon, the plot goes that “Quake’s” minions are at it again! It’s up to you to fight back through the slipgates and put a stop to Armagon, Quake’s general. Why are we back to referring to Shub-Niggurath only as Quake? Why does she have a “general?” I don’t know, and I guess I’m not supposed to care, either. Structurally, the pack’s 17 maps feel like one really long episode of Quake, despite themselves being broken up into three mini-episodes. Unfortunately, the text between episodes is a lot less stylish. No more mention of cursed knowledge or dark revelations; breaks between episodes now basically narrate whatever you just did.
All of the classic Quake guns, enemies, and power-ups appear again in Armagon alongside a helping of new ones. In the first of a small trend in Quake’s mission packs of resurrecting scrapped parts of the game’s original concept, a hammer dubbed Mjolnir appears in Armagon. Sharing ammo with the Thunderbolt, it strikes the ground to create a kind of awkwardly-shaped fan of lightning bolts in front of the player for heavy damage. Though it’s cool as a callback to the original hammer-wielding hero of The Fight for Justice, it’s kind of awkward in practice. The Laser Cannon is another new gun that spends your cells, trading the Thunderbolt’s instant beam for projectiles that can bounce around walls. This one’s fine, but I’m definitely still choosing the Thunderbolt over it. Last - and definitely least - of the new guns is the proximity mine launcher, a grenade launcher reskin that fires sticky grenades which explode whenever something gets close to them. Not only is Quake far too fast-paced of a game for a weapon like this to be frequently useful, the mines deal much less damage than a standard grenade for some reason. All this weapon does is screw with my muscle memory when I’m trying to scroll through it to different guns.
As for the new enemies, it’s a similarly “whatever” bunch. The Centroid is a giant scorpion that shoots nails and awkwardly sidesteps projectiles. It’s not particularly challenging and it just looks really weird next to every other enemy in the game, even in the context of Quake’s strange beasts. Gremlins fit in a lot better, and they have the unique gimmicks of being able to steal your weapons and eat monster corpses to make more of themselves. Unfortunately, they’re way too slow and fragile to ever accomplish either of these things in practice. The gimmicky spike mine flies towards you from obscure angles and explodes on contact. For some reason, they have a lot of health but “pop” to just one nail from either nailgun. The most interesting of the baddies to talk about is Armagon himself. He’s an actual boss fight, unlike either of Quake’s “bosses,” so credit where credit is due. What makes him really interesting, though, is that he’s some kind of cyborg monster with mechanized legs and rocket launchers for arms. He ends up predicting Quake II in that way, even if Hipnotic didn’t know it. I think the only one of these enemies that captures the eldritch weirdness of the original game is the gremlin.
Ultimately, Scourge of Armagon feels like it just doesn’t come together like Quake did. Most of the new stuff lands with no impact, and the way the game uses its foundation doesn’t match up to the source material either. The new maps are more confusing and have more unfair moments than Quake ever did. The challenge can feel really uneven. For example, the game loads you up with guns and ammo really fast and then somehow expects you to struggle with the basic human enemies throughout the whole first episode. In Quake proper, these enemies almost exclusively appeared in the first levels of episodes designed to be easier introductions where the player doesn’t have access to the big guns yet. They are not challenging in the long term, at least not without more of the tougher enemies around to help them out, but Hipnotic expects them to nearly carry an entire episode. Later in the game, though, they start putting spike mines around corners and putting you up against crowds of vores, one of the game’s toughest enemies, when you have hardly any guns or ammo. The last map of the second episode closes with an area that has five shamblers; the best solution ends up just being to run to the exit door so they don’t have time to kill you.
Worse still, the game struggles to match Quake’s characteristic atmosphere. The Nine Inch Nails soundtrack is replaced by a metal score which is… fine, but cruelly generic in comparison. I’m not surprised they couldn’t get NIN to make them some new music, but they could have at least tried to match the tone. The metal music tramples whatever unsettling ambience the mostly-reused Quake visuals could have evoked. The maps try to do a lot of fancy setpieces, like the portal I showed at the start of this section or the falling rocks in the mine level, but these scenes don’t compensate for the loss in tension the new music and inferior balance of the mission pack creates. It generally seems like Hipnotic wanted to make something that was cool in the action-packed way Doom was, muting the contrast between the high-action gunplay and discordant, oppressive ambience that made Quake it’s own kind of cool. It rides on enough of Quake’s fundamental design to be decent, but ultimately fails to understand the delicate mixture that made Quake more than decent.
Ranger Versus The Evil Dead
Next up is Quake Mission Pack 2: Dissolution of Eternity from Rogue Entertainment, released on March 19th, 1997. Rogue has an even more brief history than Ritual did, but somewhat more of an impact. I’ve actually heard of the two original games this team made, Strife and American McGee’s Alice, and the company’s staff would largely move to Nerve Software after Rogue went under to assist with other titles like Return to Castle Wolfenstein’s PC port. Rogue was also based in the same building as id, and everything they made was either a Quake expansion pack of some kind or an original title on id’s engines. It makes sense that they would have a little more familiarity with how to do Quake right, and I think that’s an accurate description for how Dissolution turned out compared to Armagon.
In the interest of brevity, I’ll start by saying this pack has a lot of the same general problems as Armagon. It’s definitely still not on the same level as Quake proper, but it does do a smidge better than Armagon did. The music is a bit more like hard rock this time, with a little more room for atmosphere. Though I think it’s still a major loss compared to the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack, there were more moments in Dissolution where I noticed the soundtrack did something cool. Level designs are more unique, which helps this pack stand out more than Armagon does as its own thing. Many levels use an Aztec-inspired aesthetic which, curiously enough, calls back to an Aztec texture set which was developed for Quake that went unused. This, along with new enemies and bosses that lean more heavily into Quake’s medieval aesthetics, makes the game feel much more like fantasy than eldritch horror. They still aren’t quite getting it, but this does at least zero in on something that is a part of Quake’s DNA. Armagon felt confused by comparison, focusing more on sci-fi elements that played a minor role in the original game.
The story this time is that Quake’s forces are messing with the past to bring about - yes, you guessed it - the dissolution of eternity. Hey, that’s the name of the mission pack! Along your journey through time, you meet new enemies like floating swords, Egyptian guardians, and hooded skeleton wizards called wraths. The new enemies this time make a more of an impact, especially wraths, but it’s not always for the best reasons. Wraths fire a faster version of the vore’s homing projectiles, which is only even remotely balanced because they hardly deal any damage. It’s still not satisfying having no real chance to dodge these shots. The new variant of Quake’s most annoying enemy, the spawn (or, as I like to call it, the bastard), can multiply itself if you leave it alone too long. Luckily, the best way to deal with spawns was already to blow them up as soon as you laid eyes on them so they didn’t get a chance to start bouncing around, making these new hell spawns kind of moot. Most notable of all is once again this pack’s final boss: a bona-fide fire-breathing dragon. It’s green instead of red, but once again a piece of Quake’s turbulent pre-release history is resurrected in an expansion.
Rather than brand-new weapons, Dissolution opts to give every weapon (except for the poor shotguns) an alternate ammo type that changes their function. A couple of these are creative; multi-rockets allow the grenade launcher to detonate into a cluster of explosives when the fuse runs out, and using plasma with the Thunderbolt lets it launch projectiles which cast lightning to nearby enemies on impact. However, these alternate modes are mostly just more damage. The lava nails for the nailguns have the interesting trait of ignoring armor in multiplayer, but they simply deal extra damage against monsters. Using multi-rockets with the rocket launcher literally just makes every shot launch four rockets in a spread. In effect, the dual ammo types basically just double your maximum ammo for most weapons, with some of that ammo being better. This makes it tough for the game to challenge you once you’ve got a decent stash going.
It’s not for lack of trying to challenge you, though. Dissolution is a good bit harder than standard Quake in the earlier maps of any episode, pitting you against tough enemies when you only have a few weaker guns. The map design is still not as smooth as the base game, but I think the increased challenge ultimately feels a little more honest than Armagon’s gimmicky maps. The whole game would probably be harder if not for the alternate ammo types, making this mission pack a great example of how every part of a game’s design has knock-on effects. A theoretical Dissolution without the extra ammo types - which I could probably make myself if I knew literally anything about Quake’s mapping tools - might actually be interesting. Less is so often more in games.
Finally, Dissolution marks at least one major innovation in Quake multiplayer history; the introduction of an official capture the flag multiplayer mode with its own maps. Though the Team Fortress mod had CTF almost a year before, Dissolution’s CTF functions on standard Quake rules and also includes a unique grappling hook for every player. Though the hook takes a while to travel, it provides a ton of momentum the second it hits a wall, enabling some crazy movement. Grappling hooks would remain a key part of CTF modes in future Quake games. Why CTF specifically? Honestly, I don’t know. All in all, Dissolution of Eternity doesn’t suffer as hard from its issues as Scourge of Armagon did while bringing a few more genuinely good ideas to the table, but ultimately remains a lesser kind of Quake.
What Do We Learn From This?
Overall, Quake’s mission packs aren’t terrible, but they fail to carry forward Quake’s best qualities. It’s easy to believe that more features and more content on top of a working formula makes for a better game, but I think the mission packs are an excellent example of how much more complicated it really is. With how superfluous much of their extra content feels, it becomes clutter instead of enhancements. Little care was given to match the feeling of the new levels to the original game’s vibe, and many of the additions didn’t fit the gameplay either. Even if the proximity mines had good damage, why would I want to be laying down traps like that in a game all about moving fast and shooting faster? It’s new, but is it good for this game? Even back before games were more widely understood as art, the big picture always mattered; nothing in these games happened in a vacuum.
The early 3D era was an experimental time, though. We learned a lot, but the “less is more” mindset did not prevail. With id’s official follow-up to Quake, we’ll witness even more experimentation…
Thanks for reading this bonus article! Look out for the bigger, badder Quake II in “Episode Three: Stroggification,” coming soon!