Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20180827202615/@comment-3547390-20190716221803

Fair enough, sounds like you are finally getting free.

A shame it should be so tedious, hopefully somehow that can be an excuse for Quaking :P

This is indeed one of the biggest crazes in regards to trends, people love power and more power. When people play a game, what usually draws them is the cool attacks and how powerful you can feel. Doom for example is generally preferred over Quake, one of the criticisms thrown at the latter is that the Weapons felt less powerful. You, being big into Doom, should know about the absolute craze and love for the Double-Barrelled Shotgun in Doom II. This is because the gun essentially satisfied a lot of needs. Wanted a gun that could decimate a lot at close range? DB shotgun. Wanted a gun with a lot of ammo that you could freely use? DB shotgun. Wanted a gun that could take down powerful enemies without the risk of splash damage? DB shotgun. My point here is that the Double-Barrelled Shotgun was praised for its powerful nature, when its powerful nature in turn broke the balance of Doom 1 with the justification that you would need it for the new mid-range enemies. My point is that the Double-Barrelled Shotgun in Doom II was loved because of just how OP it was, while in Quake it was highly nerfed which in turn got the reaction it did.

It is normal to want power, to be the great. This is why we likely have VNs where you don't really have the ability to fail, so you get the feeling of getting your satisfied result by clicking a button. This is why games have automated takedowns that allow you to immediately wipe out an enemy who could otherwise pose some sort of challenge. You don't play Jedi Knight to feel underpowered, you play it because you get to be a motherfucking Jedi with all these powers that can wipe out mooks left and right. Even Doom and Quake are about being the tough baddass who charges headfirst into an unknown world and defeats the big bad. It is all the mentality of an action movie, the goal is to be the tough guy who looks cool doing all these destructive things. I bet many FPS advertisements were about the bigger and badder guns when not about graphics.

You never really get that sense of "you are one person, sent against inevitable odds. Try to survive, if you can, though we aren't sure if you can because even the devs died trying to make the game". Few want to play the mook, most want to be in a hero fantasy. This is why there are so many harem porn games, while so few games where you must avoid rape, because one innately implies weakness. A weakness that sadly is something I highly prefer in my gaming and thus am always hunting for. As always, it comes back to Thief, whereby we get a game where you are extremely weak and one misstep can be your last (at least until you get good enough to exploit the AI and do stupidly insane things like I have done in my videos, like show how you can horribly exploit glitches to make the most reckless heist ever made or how you can entirely break the world).

Think of it this way. Since Thief, there has yet to be one stealth based game where it is MANDATORY to stealth like you did in Thief. Oh, sure, it is an option... but then again you get powerful weaponry that allows you to easily assassinate everyone even if you get caught. It has been regulated to an option, a choice... which just kills the tension since without the necessity to do it, the best you get is self-challenge, one that unless you are serious about you can easily subvert and ignore. Choice and freedom in games if done incorrectly can suck for this reason, if you give players a tedious way and a simple way they will always choose the simple for the reasoning that there is no reason to do the tedious. Skyrim is infamous for trying to remove the ability to have such open choices, only to realize that the game isn't really designed with that in mind, leading to a lack of proper design outside of just using everything.

That is actually another point to perhaps make, it is a lot easier to break balance than to make it. We both know that if you make a gun that shoots extremely fast, causes 10000 damage per shot, and homes to opponents that you will have little challenge. But are you sure you know exactly how to balance the game further, to maintain every aspect without breaking something else? Add more recoil to guns, next thing you got rocket launchers being able to break levels even more then they were. Add weaker damage output, you added "artificial difficulty", which means you just made things more tedious without offering any real challenge. Try to build a more intelligent AI, it might come with some oversight that allows for players to exploit things even more. This means that while it is extremely easy to nerf things, it is very hard to add challenge in a way that interests players as opposed to just making it more tedious. Now imagine you are a 15 year old kid in high school who is trying to release your first mod to show you can do one as well.

Note the example above of the 15 year old kid. This is probably important, since older people tend to have things called "lives" which in turn mean they "don't want to waste hours on a game, they just want to be able to complete it quicker". There is a whole mentality of people who just want to fly through content. So we got kids making shitty OP content because it is quick and easy, meanwhile the adults are doing it because they don't have the patience to play as long as it may take to complete Quake in a single sitting. This leaves little who genuinely want games to last and not just be as quick to burn through as a porno magazine. After all, there are so many games out there you can buy, it is "kids with no money" who needed to make them last. Kids that likely lack much in the way of patience.

What would we do in the NES era? Often it was based on lives. This can be problematic, especially in a game where you don't just repeat, because you would like to make actual progress. In games where you couldn't save where you wanted, you had this issue of wondering if all your progress would be lost because you had to stop to do something. One reason games without manual saves were always problematic, you never know when you will be interrupted and need to stop. This is especially bad in games like Resident Evil, where you have a limited number of saves, because when you get interrupted every little bit to do some chore, you easily go through those precious saves.

So where does Quake fall in all of this? As said, Quake is made to be more of a power fantasy to begin with, just by the logic of a dude like Doomguy. But there are subtle differences between the two games, especially in regards to the weaker weapons, that leads people to gravitate more to Doom. Quake failed to be as much of a power fantasy. This in turn leads to a need to compensate. Much like the endless pipebombs and holograms compensate for the lack of interactivity that Quake offered, it is perhaps likely that the OP mods are all trying to restore the power fantasy to the level of Doom. Note that doing such leads to other issues, such as the OP nature resulting in an even shorter game, which is possibly why we ended up with the Doom community being so much stronger. Doom could just output a lot more content, due to being easier to design for on top of having a few years head start, and had a much better balance as a power fantasy to begin with.

THIS is why people will end up complaining about Quake lacking hundreds of enemies to kill. THIS is why people hate the Double-Barrelled Shotgun and hate that the Ogre takes more shots to kill than the Imps of Doom. It all goes against the power fantasy mindset, which as stated is what both games at the end of the day were advertising for. Quake is not a game to play if you want to feel powerless, it is just a worse power fantasy than Doom, and thus why the community got so fragmented.