Awesome, the episode they added to the original Quake was fantastic so this should deliver as well. Also, I never played the N64 game either. Nightdive is too good for this world.
It’s linear in the sense that there’s only 1 correct way to go, but there’s so much back tracking and with no map and very little contextual clues where to go, it’s fair to look up how to progress once or twice if you’ve never played Q2 before.
I never had trouble with where to go honestly, except for one of the later areas that I don’t remember the name of. For me wherever I needed to go was always pretty obvious. ROTT though…
Bit disappointed that it doesn’t include the RTX functionality, but still really excited. Always loved the first three quakes (even if Unreal is better) and this has been a great opportunity to run through the game again while waiting for AC6.
I’ve seen this sentiment in a few places, and feel like I’m going nuts over here. Am I really the only one who thinks Quake 2 RTX looks like absolute ass?
It’s got nice real-time shadow effects, obviously, but everything else is a washed out mess of stretched textures and normal maps that make everything look like it’s made of plastic.
If you think that is a 2007 tech demo then… You clearly don’t remember 2007
But yeah. It isn’t a flagship use of ray tracing (… actually, it is, but that speaks more to the general lack of ray tracing in gaming). But it is a really cool nod to history (since quake 2 was one of the earlier games to have dynamic lighting) that does a good job of making quake 2 look like what we remembered quake 2 looking like (same as you remember 2007 looking like that).
The dynamic lighting never looked ANYWHERE near that good but… in our minds it did.
And it also kind of became a weird time capsule of what ray tracing was. When the two big early examples of RTX were… Minecraft and Quake 2 (Control existed but the specs were already high enough for most folk before you popped the toggle).
Mostly it is just a bit disappointing that something that exists and was mostly official isn’t part of the re-release. But I suspect there are some shenanigans with how nvidia licensed that and so forth.
And as an add-on. Yeah, the RTX is gonna look shit in the outdoor maps. Mostly because of how those were lit, relative to the indoor ones. Most people never got past the first level (or really, first room or two) in Q2RTX and those were some of the best. Because they were meant to show off the dynamic lighting back in the 90s so all light came from sources that had corresponding texture and geometry. So switching to ray tracing makes those lights look a LOT better. Whereas external areas still involved a lot of ambient lighting and multiple fake sources to represent the sun.
It is similarly why stuff like Control and Cyberpunk… didn’t look all that amazing. Because most scenes were not lit solely with “real” lights. Yes, you had the overhead fluorescent and that desk lamp. But you also had ambient lighting to get the right “vibe”. So once you switch from (largely) pre-baked lighting to ray tracing… all of those ambient lights and false sources are now making things look washed out or like they “glow” in the wrong way. Because now you do have realistic ray tracing of the light from the overhead and you might even have the right materials on the walls to get the diffusion of some shitty taupe paint over drywall. But you also now have the light from those “fake” lights being traced too.
I am not up to date on how modern level design works. But if you are really interested? Go look up a few editor tutorials for Unreal Tournament or Quake 3. UT in particular is really easy to see all the lights that get put in the scene before you bake them in. You obviously want to put a light source on the desk lamp mesh. But… you also probably need a few in the hallway to mimic the diffusion that comes from said desk lamp’s light reflecting off the walls.
I noticed a few things while playing the N64 campaign.
It’s not 1:1 parity with the console version, and it’s not meant to be (and that’s a good thing, actually).
How it works is they use N64 textures, OST, and maps. Everything else is from the new engine - including the new enemy AI changes and balance adjustments, etc.
A good portion of the game is spent in anti-gravity. You may not have the rocket launcher, or much ammo for it yet, relying on grenades to take down bigger baddies like enforcers or tanks. The trajectory of a grenade on authentic hardware is net positive, so it’s about impossible to aim. On Q2 Enhanced, it just means the grenade fires straight out of the barrel. Little things like that stand out.
The Nintendo 64 campaign on Hard, with deaths, took me about 3 hours. This is how I have always wanted to play this version of the game. It’s indescribably better than trying to play it on an actual Nintendo 64 or even emulated.
I’m liking it but some of the gameplay changes are a little jarring after having played through the original hundreds of times over the years. The only one I really wish I could toggle off is the barrels exploding after a short timer, it’s bit me in the butt a few times and even helped when I managed to somehow make a barrel launch across a room and kill some strogg when the one next to it went off.
In addition to existing source ports not being very good, the DOSbox experience wasn’t great. Mouse feels a bit sluggish even if you make it super sensitive, getting Gravis music to work is a pain in the ass and super low resolution.
So the remaster, unlike most other remasters in my opinion, is a very welcome modern release.
Cracking, I’m always sceptical when I read the phrase “free to play” as half the time it just means “you’re allowed to play it for free but we’ll try and get some money out of your anyway” so very happy when it turns out to mean “this full game is now free to keep, no strings attached”!
I'd be happy to shop there again if they put out Galaxy on Linux. Community launchers are cool, but I want the same support for automatic updates that their Windows customers get.
Same, Steam on the other hand had been killing it for Linux gamers. What's funny is if you go to the gog forums it's been like the number one requested feature for years.
Same, I recently switched back to Linux and was disappointed they still haven’t made a client. Even just starting with native Linux game support would be something.
I do not fucking understand this. You're never going to compete with Steam. But you have this niche of DRM free marketplace and you ignore the entire Linux community? A community that THRIVES on FOSS and DRM free software.
It's such an idiotic move to not develop a linux client. I will never fucking comprehend this.
Their apple support has always been pretty mixed at best. I always assumed they're the kind of gamers who are like "windows is for gaming, gamers use windows, sure you CAN do other things, but why would you?"
I started buying legitimate copies of games when I was finally able to afford it a few years ago. I love how GOG lets you actually keep the games forever and that's where I was getting games from at first, but then moved to Steam because of how much good they've done to Linux gaming. meanwhile GOG Galaxy for Linux has been a most requested and most ignored request for years.
I dropped Steam because it gradually made the client less and less user-friendly. It’s bad enough that I kinda have to use the Steam client, but then they had to do things like trash the old rendering engine and replace it with the bloat of a browser, and completely discard List View (which GOG Galaxy has just fine) and replace it with a tile view that can’t even display game names in plaintext (which GOG Galaxy also has an option for in its tile view).
And that’s on top of other issues with the platform such as how the Steam client forces updates. (Sure there’s various workarounds but at that point Steam stops being a convenience anyway.)
I never actually needed a launcher client anyway. I gladly buy direct-download installers from sites like itch and Humble and DLsite. I don’t have a fear of command line interfaces, lol, much less simply using File Explorer as my launcher. I’ll use a platform’s launcher willingly if it just offers benefits, but the drawbacks of Steam’s using it as DRM eventually turned out to outweigh whatever minor benefits it presented.
My problem with GOG is that every time I buy a game on GOG, something then happens to result in me having to buy it again on steam. Once it was that the GoG version lagged too far behind, several times it's been that workshop support has been added, or in one case, workshop became the only source for moding.
I like GOG for games that are too old to be on Steam, but yeah, any game that's on Steam I'll get there because of the additional features like Steam Workshop.
My biggest problem with GOG is that Galaxy doesn't rival Steam, same as every other launcher. For example, GOG hosts a lot of older games, that used to be their bread and butter and even their namesake. These games generally don't have native controller support, so if I want that, I have to launch them through Steam anyway to use Steam Input. If I want to play something on a Linux device, which is now more likely than ever since I own a Steam Deck, the fact is that it's a pain in the ass to deal with GOG even with their minimal DRM stance (because they allow DRM now seemingly so long as it doesn't prevent the player from beating the game) because of the lack of support, making it more reasonable to buy games on Steam, even when it's a game that does support controllers (like how I own The Evil Within on GOG).
The big feature of GOG Galaxy is that you can pull every other launcher into it, but that doesn't matter to me when I still have to launch everything via Steam anyway. Feels like they're missing the point a little bit.
It looks like only the multiplayer is allowed to have an online requirement. It's DRM by another name, but at least I know how to avoid them. I too wish they didn't let those games on their store. But for me, the point of the launcher is to automatically update my games and make installing them easier. I want those features, and I want to be assured by their own support, that those things will work, even if community launchers for GOG games I bought previously or got in giveaways will suffice for now.
One thing I also like more about GoG is that you own the game you buy, you don't own a license (like on steam), you actually own it like a physical disc.
The games that are their original meat-and-potatoes, out of print classic games, don't really update much. In many cases, the developer hasn't been in business for quite some years.
For all you Linux folks complaining about why GOG isn’t on there:
For desktop and laptop computers, Microsoft's Windows is the most used at 69%, followed by Apple's macOS at 17%, and Google's ChromeOS at 3.2% (in the US up to 8.0%), and "desktop Linux" at 2.9%. In addition, 5% is attributed to "unknown" operating systems - which are likely forms of BSD or obscure varieties of Linux.
Maybe a small company can’t devote the resources for 5% of the market share when they have 86% covered.
I mean, I think most of us understand why GOG's Linux support is miles behind Steam's, but that doesn't change the fact that it is behind. Years ago I bought several games from GOG because of the no DRM policy; but once Steam released a Linux version, and began pumping resources into Proton, the choice for me was easy, and I switched over. I understand GOG's position, but I don't think there's anything wrong with people pointing out how GOG doesn't have the same level of Linux support as Steam does. That's useful information.
How small of a company do you think they are? Their parent company is publicly traded and worth at least half a billion dollars. Not only that, but after they port their launcher, they can piggyback on the investment Valve has made into the platform for pennies on the dollar, if they were interested in wrapping games with Proton or whatnot.
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