Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20180827202615/@comment-3547390-20190820023420

As stated, Quake is very much just a simplistic shooter for me, it is more about enjoying the simplicity than holding some real passion for it. The experience of most maps being multiplayer based can make it a bit tedious, but overall it is nice in the way first person shooter mechanics can generally be nice. Combine that with a darker atmosphere and it works quite well for me. I will say that exploration is a big part of gaming for me, so Quake fits all the niches by having a world with a consistent lore.

There are little details about Quake I can highly appreciate. For example, I love patrolling enemies just because it feels more like things in a living breathing world. I like the different idle sounds, the ability to freely look around in a 3d environment, and the overall streamlined nature that means few keys need to be pressed (challenge is by the visible opposition generally such as E2M6, not finding hidden objects). Quake basically offers a lot of things that just work right, almost like a baseline of sorts. Older FPS titles had PAR to pressure you to rush, AI that was less complex, the inability to look up and down with the mouse (except in Descent, which is a vehicular simulator and thus less of what I like). So while Quake doesn't really offer an ambience I can be highly passionate for, it is also something to appreciate. My specific nature means I pretty much need a streamlined FPS, which Quake fits.

Flight simulators end up feeling very barren for me. I can't see the opponent as easily, there is little in the way of exploration, so it ends up becoming more of a waiting simulator. As seen with X-Wing, I don't do well with long periods of nothing happening only to need to spam a bunch of buttons to avoid damage due to pinpricks in a black world. You also know my sense of power and feelings on that, I actually am the exact opposite, seeking powerlessness.

Arena and Daggerfall never felt much like living worlds to me, the mechanics often got too much in the way to really get into it. I would love a modernized version with mod support for Arena possibly, just the problem is the clunky controls. As for Daggerfall, that was not a living world to me; if anything, it felt pretty dead and lifeless, which is much of the reason it became miserable.

Strategy games tend to be an odd genre for me, but it sort of falls into a sort of category I generally really like. One thing I tend to enjoy is visual forms of progress, of working through things to get to other things that look and feel different. This has led to some odd tastes, such as an appreciation for the Gran Turismo series due to being able to upgrade my car. Strategy games usually mean either Age of Empires (Galactic Battlegrounds) or Empire Earth. Age of Empires is pretty decent of a game, especially with the progress levels, but nothing quite compares to the feeling of progress you get in Empire Earth. Just the ability to take cavemen and build them to a robot army by working through 20+ eras is quite the satisfying thing.

Oh, I imagine you would like Ayreon if you like stories and albums interconnecting, he is pretty well known for making an entire world out of his albums that appear unconnected before linking them together as time went on. There is also the Kamelot albums of Epica and Black Halo. There is also the symphonic metal band Ancient Bards that has made a story across their albums. I think some power metal bands have done something like that as well. There is also Black Countess if you enjoy stories set in the same world, though each has the plot of a porn album, meaning woman gets tricked into castle for lesbian orgy while the men are slaughtered violently.

Maybe it is just me, but I find I can barely follow lyrics even when I look them up, like the stories are so confusing that trying to follow them is too much of an effort. I can't really follow song lyrics in general either. Some time you need to check out Samsas Traum just to translate the German and explain to me what is even going on in them, there are literal operas and yet I cannot even begin to grasp what is going on half the time. Pretty much, the bands I listen to could sing songs about leprechauns and Spider-Man trading drugs on the bombing of 9/11 for all I know. Yet ironically, if you remove the vocals, the song itself becomes lacking due to the lack of emotional intensity. So there need to be vocals saying stuff, I just don't necessarily need those things to even make sense.

The biggest issue with my music, if you notice, is that it is a sort of hybrid between different genres. It isn't really metal in the strictest sense, play normal metal riffs and it bores me to death. Rock sucks, classical is too broken, hip-hop and rap annoy me with their bass beats, jazz bores me due to the sluggish nature and wind instruments. I need something which is structured with heavy instruments, but also isn't too conventional, meaning most bands end up just sounding the same and end up being uninteresting to me. I seek that which the feelings can be felt.

Oh, no surprise there, it once was seen as the evil thing much as black metal would likely be the new evil today. Of course you got people in the scene just for that, which of course makes it worse, and the popular bands are far too horrible to even bother with.

Precisely, it is just one of those well-known ones like Team Fortress or Threewave Capture, both of which I have tackled in likely their earliest (if not one of their earliest) versions. What I have mostly learned from bots is that Deathmatch feels rather... mundane for me. I have played and beaten the Reaper bots in every vanilla Quake DM level by this point. The element of exploration is gone in Deathmatches, you just respawn over and over, with the focus being a lot more on rote memorization to be more efficient. It also promotes fast paced gameplay and rushing, when I quite prefer slowness like in Thief. I guess a good explanation is sort of like what you described, you are constantly spawning and killing the same people over and over until an objective (frag limit) is reached. It is almost futile, you just have a number going up while trying to hit things as fast as you can. I should mention that the Reaper Bots are also only real nightmares on DM1 and DM4; the latter in particular is quite evil due to the accuracy they get with the Thunderbolt. You don't want to know the number of times I had to replay to even have a chance at beating them, I was quite surprised when I pulled it off.

Doom 3 had wave-based enemies in LMS, but I guess that is somewhat different from Deathmatches in certain ways. For starters, waves often progressively get harder, they don't keep the same opponents that you endlessly kill. This is the difference between Hexen's respawning enemies, one is futile since the same enemies you kill keep getting back up, another gives you a sense of progress. Secondly, the levels I recall often had things you needed to do to make it out of the level, the waves were something that needed to be done while waiting for the objective to complete. The most annoying level of Unreal has a wave based mechanic, you get locked in an area and keep killing the same enemies over and over, it is an absolute nightmare just due to how tedious it feels.

The lesson here is that I enjoy things with a sense of progress in some way, that progress can't just be a number on the screen. Killing the same things over and over, if that is the focus or not, is a tedious mechanic and definitely not something I would want to bother with (meaning I don't think wave based Quake monster spawning would be the best way to randomize things unless you can control what spawns in each round). Furthermore, doing it in Deathmatch levels would not be the best since there would be no level exit to work for, it almost seems like waves would need to be generated throughout a Single Player level. The problem there of course setting up locked or sealed areas to prevent the player from just progressing past all the waves, since setting noexit is of course not a solution in this case. Aka I am not sure this idea would work as well as originally hoped. The hope needs to be more on a level entity randomizer, possibly with the ability to pick new spawn locations.

As seen, I am very visually progress based. One thing I found enjoyable about MMOs was the change in attire and gear as you leveled up, plus the zones meant there was progress in the location you were at. My main issues in games tend to be when there is little to no progress or progress stagnates. For example, Arena was the better game due to taking a lot longer to get to the top tier, thus meaning less stagnation and wondering what the point was for most of the latter half. X-Wing had no real sense of progression, each mission was still set in space and felt sort of like the last. Quake has a sense of progress by traveling through different areas, like opening up more and more of a world, in a sort of progressive fashion (note I eventually get burned out as I realize that each level is pretty much the same in the opponents you face). Lack of sense of real progress, give no real incentive to keep going, and I start finding it worthless. Deathmatch maps aren't meant to be played in any specified order, you set one and go, and the enemies just keep continuing to show up while you get the same things every time. The only real progress is eventually making it to another map where you need to endure the same thing; compare this to progressing through areas with more gradually getting added. This issue can be seen in a lot I have tried, even Stronghold had a sense of progress by adding new buildings, only to feel like no progress was being made due to it being essentially the same units over and over.

The problem with the above is that I love visual change and representations, but also love challenge, meaning things like MMOs end up getting mundane since it is all dice rolls and following guides other people have designed to get optimal results. Note that this is probably why I like something like Unreal more than Quake; the former has a much better curve when it comes to introducing opponents. The problem is there are also "slow levels" there, levels that feel very mundane and uninteresting. Non-surprisingly, you can pretty much link them all to the levels where you are pretty much facing what you have already experienced.

Note this progress leads to an inevitable place where I reach the top and get bored, but removing the game in turn leads to me wanting to play it again, which means redoing the curve to once again experience the changes. This is also why I tend to be so focused on first appearances of stuff in levels; it was what I was doing on Liandri before I even came to QuakeWikia and was much the reason I started editing here. All due to an obsession with progress, progress which sadly means games which are more action than exploration end up feeling mundane. Thus why Deathmatch is something I wish I could appreciate more, especially since it is the ONLY viable multiplayer I really see for Quake with Coop being so brokenly easy. It is a big part of what makes the game, yet it is a part that just is very...mundane. Primarily because there is no difference in a Deathmatch game beyond the level you play. Needless to say, a lot of disappointment when I was hoping Deathmatch maps would offer a lot more for me; now I realize by using bots that Deathmatch in general just isn't for me.