Quake

TOTAL PLAYTIME: 20.4 Hours

Finished all of the campaigns included in the 2021 Remaster! I think my preference is Q1 > SoA > DoE > DoMa >> DoPa; I liked the original expansions because they add some fun new toys, and DoMa does some very interesting things with the game, though some parts drag it down somewhat. DoPa isn't bad, but it just feels like an extra poorly-balanced episode of Q1.

Quake Playtime: 6.1 Hours

Played the 2021 remaster by Nightdive, went through the original 4 episodes (and Shub-Niggurath) only on Nightmare difficulty. As far as I know, NM is a little different in this game than in the original release; for this remaster, it's identical to Hard mode except HP is capped at 50 (megahealth items will overheal to a maximum of 150 that drains over time). For whatever it's worth, I have tried the original version (on an engine port), but that was well over a decade ago and I don't remember getting very far past the first chapter.

SoA Playtime: 4 Hours

Knocked Scourge of Armagon (the first expansion) out in a few hours; this one was quite fun, definitely a step up in difficulty but generally felt quite reasonable. The final boss was a complete joke though, mostly because I got him stuck behind a pillar so I could just dump ~30 rockets into him for free. The new weapons are pretty interesting (prox mines & the laser cannon), pretty disappointed that they don't come back in the other expansions at all. I really like how this expansion keeps you very well stocked with explosive & thunderbolt ammo; it always felt a bit too scarce in the original campaign, probably because they're so strong. Levels were well designed and generally quite interesting, though the number of Vores/Shalraths is quite absurd in several of them. I see quite a few people saying this is their favorite expansion campaign and I can definitely understand why; I haven't played the others yet myself so I can't speak to my own preferences for now.

DoE Playtime: 4.4 Hours

Dissolution of Eternity is the other 1997 expansion, and it also wasn't bad. Like SoA, it felt significantly harder than the original Quake campaign but still stuck to a very reasonable difficulty throughout, except the final boss was terrible this time around. Earthquakes & lava in the boss arena make it extremely difficult to move around, and the dragon's attacks are ridiculously powerful (can often be an instakill) and have wide splash & knockback, in addition to very high velocity making them even harder to dodge. I don't think it was ever playtested, and it made for a pretty poor final impression of an otherwise solid experience.

I like the different themes of the levels (Greek, Egyptian, and Aztec if I remember correctly), the new enemies are pretty cool without being too annoying in general and the weapons/ammo types are really fun to play with. I will say they're quite overpowered - lava nails & quad-rockets mulch everything you shoot them at, and the plasma ball thingies can wipe an entire room almost for free, which I didn't realize for most of the levels. Compared to SoA, this expansion is way more generous with ammo - shortages were almost a complete non-issue outside of a few times where I over-used the shotgun. Note that even in those cases, I still had fully-loaded nailguns, rockets, thunderbolt, etc. Overall, some levels had some BS but I might consider this roughly on-par with SoA. Part of me likes this better because of how absurdly powerful the new ammo types are.

DoPa Playtime: 2 Hours

Out of the 4 extra campaigns added in the 2021 remaster, Dimension of the Past is probably the most basic one and generally the most barebones, feeling more like a 5th episode of the original campaign than anything truly new. To be fair, that was exactly the objective of the campaign - to be a 2016 throwback to the classic Quake feel, and I think it does so reasonably well given that it was all designed by one person. While the levels aren't revolutionary, I don't think they're particularly bad either - and I found the ammo limitations to be overblown by people online; all of the complaints about the difficulty of this campaign & the lack of resources didn't hold much water in my opinion, though I did notice that my ammo levels were consistently below maximum - a problem I didn't have often during the other expansions so far.

I will say there are some pretty stupid encounters though. There are a few places where the game decides to just toss a few shamblers at you seemingly out of nowhere, mostly as a meat wall to drain your ammo. Also at least one situation in which you fight a shambler in an open room - which is pretty stupid design. Also, to make a couple of concessions - I found a couple of "secret" (not well hidden) Quad Damage powerups in the levels that let me eviscerate several of the worst encounters, including the entirety of The Year Zero (final level) with all its shamblers and shalraths which made it pretty trivial. I suspect my take on the resources would be wildly different if I didn't grab them. Also, since I was prepared for a complete drought of resources, I'll admit I was a bit more quicksave-happy than for the rest of the game thus far, which also helped a lot.

Overall, this was decent and nowhere as bad as it could have been, but I'm happy that it was short since it didn't really offer anything new (enemies, weapons, environments) that all of the other expansions have. This will probably be the least memorable of the bunch.

DoMa Playtime: 3.9 Hours

Dimension of the Machine is the final expansion that was developed specially for the 2021 remaster, and it definitely does the most with the visuals and environments out of the bunch. Like DoPa, this expansion doesn't add any mechanical elements to the original game; instead, DoMa is split into 5 smaller "episodes", each with very different environments and atmospheres. To compensate for the reduced level count, each level tends to be a good bit larger & longer than in the other campaigns; some of them end up feeling a bit long but the greater variance of environments makes up for it. I'm a bit bummed how each episode still resets all your weapons though, since it means a sizeable portion of each one is dedicated to the really basic enemies & lots of boring shotgun/nailgun spam; you don't get enough time to really play around with the heavier weapons, and there aren't enough challenging encounters overall (except shalraths - the level designers LOVE them).

As far as the quality of each episode goes, I found most of them quite excellent, both in theming and geometry. The Cultist levels are especially worthy of note for the floating church (level 1), and the inverted/hellish church (level 2) which is an incredibly cool theme. The beginning of the first Astrologist level is also a really cool outer-space astroid-like environment that's very reminiscent of Xen from HL1. Unfortunately, on the complete opposite side of the spectrum is the Stonemason episode, which consists of two of the worst levels in all of the campaigns - they're pretty close to being unplayably bad. They were designed with a very juvenile sensibility of "difficulty", which involves a ton of shambler spam in long hallways & open rooms, shalraths around every corner to completely kill the pace of the level, and massive groups of ogres in tight hallways. Also, the final boss fight rematch with Chthon was completely unnecessary and also very unfun to play. Despite the lower quality of these two parts, I still enjoyed the expansion as a whole quite a lot; it felt mechanically like a classic campaign, but with lots of very interesting visual twists.

I love the feel of the original Quake - the weapons feel powerful, the movement is smooth and precise, and the enemies are dangerous. I've played some of it before over a decade ago, but never committed to finishing all 4 of the original chapters; I'd like to say I stopped somewhere during the second episode, but I do remember trying to learn bhopping in the halls of E4M3 on some source port. That leads me to one of the few things I was kind of disappointed by in this remaster - there's no support for bhopping, though to be fair the original version of Quake's engine didn't support it either. Airstrafing and tight ground controls are still very much in this game, though, which make the fundamental mechanics feel so much better here than the lead skis of Doom 64, which I played immediately after this.

After playing through the original 4 episodes and final fight (not to be confused with the ~4 expansions, 2 of which are newly added with this remaster) there were a few pitfalls, particularly in the way that you can really tell how much of a tech demo Quake is. The most obvious one is the inconsistency of the boss fights - there's just two: one after the very first episode, and the other at the end of the game as a separate final fight. None of the other episodes even have so much as a particularly climactic final fight. I don't think it's much of a loss since both "fights" are extremely simple and actually quite boring, but this sort of bleeds into other aspects of the game too. The environments all more or less feel the same - lots of brown colors, predominantly stone and wood materials with little differentiation between the episodes; you can barely tell that the second episode is supposed to be "medieval" since all the episodes kind of look like that, and what the heck is does the third episode mean by "pure fear"?

The enemy variety is also a bit lacking in my opinion, and the game never seeks to utilize diverse groups of them as the DOOM games are wont to do. The first level or two of each episode has all of the humanoid soldiers & attack dogs - note that your inventory is reset every episode - after that, just unending hordes of knights, ogres, fiends and shamblers (with a few other enemies). With that being said, you have to handle each enemy differently, from dodging the ogre's grenades and kiting fiends, all the way up to "dancing" with shamblers to prevent them from using their thunderbolt attack. For me, that was enough to make the ~6 hour playthrough of the episodes fun and interesting. One last issue I have with the game is the tankiness of some enemies; I didn't realize the depth of this until I got to the later episodes, but some of the enemies have wayyy too much damned health (not sure if this changes per difficulty, but I played on Nightmare). Sinking 30-40 shotgun shells into a shambler is ridiculous, and several other enemies like the death knights and fiends can eat upwards of 10-15 before dropping.

I'm not quite sure what possessed me to suddenly pick this up recently but I'm very glad I did, since it's hard to put into words how much fun I had blasting away at all these creatures over the weekend I played it; Quake has some of the best weapon feel of any game I've ever played, and this holds very true even against modern games simply because of how polished the mechanics are here. I don't think it'll be too long before I give the extra episodes a shot.