Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-26005008-20160407215658/@comment-3547390-20160612220609

I wasn't joking, Q2 is better than anything made in Doom. The levels might be extremely similar to each other and quite the lazy attempts at level design, but they keep the same basic core gameplay of killing everything. Quake isn't a game that requires complexity, everything beyond the killing is simply window dressing. Similar to how Quake is simplified from Doom, Q2 is just a simplified Quake, getting rid of any frustrations or annoyances to focus on core gameplay. Q2 is probably the closest we get to Doom, but I still feel it is superior.

This is different from most of Doom as that game features many things found in Doom even in the worst levels. We usually get pushwalls, which tend to require the player to spam every wall and spend an hour trying to figure out where that secret you can't find is. Q2 just requires you to run down corridors and doesn't have secrets, though when secrets exist in Quake they always seem to work. The editor for Quake is a lot better than the one for Doom as well, I could easily load up a Quake level and tell you where the Secrets are in the level. You have been unable to help me figure out where one of the level's secrets are because we don't get such information.

Due to the fact that Quake also doesn't have an Item count, I also don't have to spend the next half an hour looking for that one small health vial left on the ground that gives 1% health. In fact, those types of things don't even exist in Quake. Everything in the game is made to be large and visible, I can easily see what is in a level and therefore not spend a bunch of time hunting for something that is easily missed on the ground.

Note also that a Q2 level tends to have about 20-30 enemies or so on average. This means that the levels tend to be small and quick to complete, which is better than most of Doom which promotes levels that take a long time to complete. In the era of everything throwing projectiles directly at you, apparently difficulty was based on how long you could make the levels, which is absolutely annoying to me. I would rather something small and contained to chaotic and large, unless the later had conceptual grandness. Quake has the capabilities for conceptual grandness, though it is not shown in Q2, so it cannot be used in a comparison. Doom does not have conceptual grandness, the engine is so limited that there is no possibility for it existing unless modern levels have overhauled things greatly.

Even when a Quake level is terrible, the core game is so simplistic that it leads to a lot less annoyances than your Doom level. I can accept the levels as being subpar and terrible compared to Quake standards, but even Q2 is better than anything we got from the hellhole of games prior to 96, simply because it remains on a game that has a lot of good qualities that show even when the level design is crude. This is why I could write for them, why I was willing to play all 101 Q2 levels.

Heh, I will plan it after we get past the next stream, which I believe will be tonight if all goes well.