Thoughts on Quake Maps for Hardcore Players... I think?
I've almost completed the entirety of the 70-something maps in the Quake Brutalist Jam III.
Let's talk some numbers first -- I would say I put... roughly 40 hours into it? According to Steam's stats. I've been playing it as a mod on the original Quake - that number sounds like a long time, but time flies when playing this jam. And I need to underline those 40 hours to point at the fact that, at this point, I can't exactly call myself a n00b. I'm an experienced Quake player -- or rather, a player that's put more time into this game than any other single player FPS campaign I can think of. That's important.
The bite-sized nature of most maps in the collection (average length is somewhere between 15 and 25 minutes) makes for something that's extremely easy to fire up at night before bed, or whenever you feel like shooting a few demons to unwind or wait for something to get done or have a gap in activities. 20 minutes is the perfect "not enough to start something Serious, more than enough that you want to do something with your time" length. It's a great bag of snacks to consume over time.
Of these 40 hours, so far, I've godmoded and noclipped my way through only 3 of them.
And I have thoughts.
I need to start those thoughts with a disclaimer, though: I picked up Quake for the first time specifically to play this jam. I'd never played it before, thought it would be a good chance to fill up a gap in my gaming resume, went and gave myself a full immersion into 90s pseudo-satanic video game edge.
Very quick Quake review: amazing atmosphere, astounding toybox and enemy behaviors, godawful level design. Scourge of Armagon comes across as the missing link between the shooters of the early 90s and Half-Life. Overall it feels like an experiment that found some incredibly fertile ground and didn't know what to do with it -- which, I suppose, explains the decades and decades of people still making levels for a toybox they understood the power of.
This puts me in an awkward position, though. Quake modding has a few decades of experience based on a few decades of playing with this specific toolkit; I've only played this game for 50 hours, between the original Quake and the jam. I understand FPS games -- hell, I worked professionally on FPS games -- but I don't understand Quake.
By "I don't understand Quake", of course, I don't mean that I don't understand how to play Quake -- after that many hours, I better. Run fast, aim true, each enemy has an appropriate response that feels almost fighting game-like in its precision; break line of sight with Shamblers when an attack is coming, sidestep slightly to avoid Ogres' grenades, dance in a square-ish circle to evade a Fiend's jumps, everything in this game has you juggling appropriate reactions in a way that's less twitch reflexes and more about keeping adrenaline from overwhelming your brain. That much I understood perfectly, and early on.
But hardcore Quake maps are like learning Latin and having a conversation in Italian: I know the roots, but I've been left entirely out of a long period of evolution in the understanding of the language that's being spoken here. It's not that they're hard; it's that I straight up don't understand them.
I was left... mainly confused by a lot of the choices made in the most hardcore maps in this jam. I expected hard, and I got hard. I played the jam on Hard, I wanted to see how well things held up when tested, I like having to think and try and strategize. Maybe that was a mistake on my part, but even after going and checking out Quake youtubers doing commentary playthroughs on maps, I was still left with a question: how is this fun?
A common theme in most hardcore Quake maps seems to be gotchas. I don't know if there's a community-specific terms for them, but it's when the game goes A-HA! and teleports enemies all around you, or you turn a corner and Oops! All Spawns, or a wall blows up and you're jumped by kamikazes, or you yourself are teleported into a historical re-enactment of the scene at the end of Half-Life that's triggered if you refuse the G-Man's offer. Most of these are impossible to see coming even if you move like you're playing Arma III, inching forward triggering one group of enemies at a time.
It feels like these maps are built entirely around quicksaving.
This in the middle of levels that often assume a level of proficiency that I find... frankly tedious. Shimming back and forth to bait attacks while hitting enemies with a wrench isn't exactly white-knuckle action, and neither is slowly and repetitively peeking corners because Shamblers do massive hitscan damage and you aren't given powerful weapons to deal with them effectively. Peek, shoot, hide, peek, shoot, hide... I'm probably missing something, but this feels like the opposite of a retro shooter to me. I'm playing a slower Gears of War. It's not what I signed up fo-- and I'm dead.
Are you meant to just quickload constantly and then play the map after memorizing all enemy spawns? This is a genuine question. It seems to be what Quake youtubers do? All playthroughs I looked at, it was pretty evident it was being played by someone who already knew where enemies were hidden or would spawn from -- not to imply people there were lying to their audience, they seem pretty open about that. It made me think that this is less about playing a map and more about dissecting a map .
I can intellectually appreciate, quote, "Very very nasty Blister ambushes at point blank range" (from a commentary of a map considered excellent) as an expression of aesthetic sensibilities of a community that's all about pushing themselves to the limit, but in the moment I mostly feel like I'm being fucked with. "Oops! Quickload and learn to deal with that now that you know about it!" or "One enemy would be enough, but ten enemies is better, now keep plinking at them for minutes" doesn't really feel like a fair or fun challenge -- but granted, I realize this isn't the point. The point is, the tastes that developed over decades inside a specific subculture have drifted so far from mainstream that choices made in the most extreme (non-negative) fringes of that community come across as inscrutable. It's black metal.
The conversation these maps are having aren't with me, the generic FPS games enjoyer. They're talking to other hardcore mappers that go "Ah, it's so clever how you surprised me with 5 exploding enemies hidden inside a container behind the switch I need to press." It reminds me of the Mario Maker troll levels community -- not in the sense that I'm being trolled, but that the people making maps for this game are designing a fundamentally different game than what I'm thinking I'm playing. That conversation is being had in a language that resembles a language I speak, but it's gone through so much evolution that I often can't understand what's being said at all.
The longest, most hardcore map in the jam is three hours long.
I kinda gave up there.
damn are these maps pretty tho like holy shit