![]() The game begins not by plonking you unceremoniously at the start of a map, shotgun already in-hand, but with an elaborate cutscene that sees Kane scrambling to his feet after his dropship crashes, surveying the horror of the wreckage. ![]() This is why Quake 4 initially plays like Call of Duty in space. But Quake 4 emerged in the wake of games like Half-Life, Halo, and Call of Duty, which placed greater emphasis on scripted spectacle and telling coherent stories, drawing influence more from Hollywood than pen-and-paper RPGs. ![]() Id’s early shooters had been primarily inspired by the team’s own Dungeons and Dragons games, which explains their mazey maps and ad-hoc storytelling. Quake 4 was developed at a time when the FPS was changing. Quake 4 switches to new protagonist Matthew Kane, who joins the Marines’ Rhino Squad as part of the vanguard force for securing the planet. Quake 4 follows-on directly from Quake 2, taking place immediately after that game’s protagonist kills the Makron, overlord of the planet Stroggos and commander of its cyborg soldiers. In this, Quake 4 is as much a Quake game as any other, seemingly trying to resolve two conflicting ideas. Quake is defined not by some specific formula, but by a cold and unflinching pragmatism. Quake 3 killed its singleplayer to become one of the best multiplayer games of all time. The second basically decided it was a Quake game regardless of its differences to the original. The first Quake somehow managed to reconcile these diffuse concepts into something amazing. The only element the three games share is a tension between ideas, and the way each title responds to that tension is what ultimately shapes the game. Quake 3 undoubtedly has the purest vision within the series, but only because it cuts away half of its identity to attain it. Meanwhile, Quake 2 wasn’t intended to be a Quake game at all, going through various original titles before id decided to slap on the Quake branding. With the original, half of id Software thought it was making a fantasy RPG for the first year of its development, which is why that game is such a bizarre infusion of different themes. Indeed, there’s an argument to be made that, if Quake has a brand at all, it’s ‘not knowing what Quake is’. Beyond the fact they’re all first-person shooters, there’s little connective tissue. The third game ditches singleplayer entirely, focusing exclusively on multiplayer. The second is an industrial sci-fi shooter with a slower pace and a greater emphasis on storytelling. The first is the poster child for classic, fast-paced FPS action set in gothic halls with rocket-jumps and gibs that bounce like basketballs. What exactly is the Quake “brand”? Romero departed id after finishing the first game, and the sequels that followed it all differ wildly. In his excellent article about the history of Quake modding, writer and game developer Robert Yang states “everyone agreed that Quake 4 didn’t have it.” Yang then cites a quote from John Romero himself, who said that “Quake 4 is where the brand went off the rails” in a 2016 interview.īut here’s a question. This has led to it being accused of not only being a bad Quake game, but not being a Quake game at all. Cinematic cutscenes, squad-based gunplay, scripted in-game events, vehicle sections, Quake 4 has them all, where the previous games didn’t. Instead, it was a direct, story-driven sequel to Quake 2, and in telling that story borrowed many post-Millennium FPS trends. Developed by Raven Software and released in 2005, Quake 4 wasn’t a pure arena shooter like Quakes 1 and 3. Quake 4 is mainly remembered for two things-the scene in which your character gets turned into a Strogg, and being the worst Quake game. ![]()
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