Illkillya
James Galvin
Entering a world of pain
clan : fish heads
posts : 892
site administrator
ive donated to quake.ie!
| Its good - needs some work but for straight out of the box it’s well done. I like the movement… still trying to grasp that slidy thing myself, although I found some cool movement today (which most of ye probably new about already) on The Fragging Yard – going over the bounce pad from shards towards LG, rather than crouch sliding, just let go of forward and as you land off the bounce pad you’re launched into bunnyhopping type movement, and you can maintain a very high speed, sliding not necessary, strafing optional.
The maps are a bit dodgy, but I don’t want to judge them until I’ve played them in 4v4 and seen how the strategies develop. I think CPM4 would be very well suited to Q4, I hope that’s on the way. 1v1 isn’t bad; less of the boring game of concentration and armour stacking than in Q3 1v1, but it badly needs some new maps.
As for the net code… the jury is still out on that one. Railgun is extremely accurate online – I had a game of Q3 with sol the other day and was amazed by the amount of shots that clearly should have been hits but weren’t. In Q4 I usually find that if I aimed right, I hit the guy. Getting stuck to the spot when the ping spikes a bit is not really acceptable. There are too many problems with ISDN, and I fear that this could be decisive in FH’s first season. Too many players on the server gets far too laggy.
Q4 doesn’t really feel like a whole new game to me… it’s more like that time when all the new maps got released in Q3… ospdm5 and ospdm6, etc., and FH and nD had a LAN to learn them. It was refreshing to see new strategies being developed, and how it took some time for people to realize that primary area on osp5 is actually railgun. It brought a new lease of life to the game imo, even though I was always more of a dm6, dm7, dm14, cpm4 fan. Q4 is a bit like that… the game is similar enough and most of the dedicated Q3ers are there, but the canvas is clear and we have a new palette.
Needs:
Full brights
Forcemodel
Teamplay locations
True lightning
The ability to see who is ready or not ready on a server (have I missed something here?)
Ability to lock your team (perhaps I missed that also?)
Wants:
Team overlay
Proper flags – what the hell are those glowing things?
Drawspeed
Simple items
Damage given / received stats
Clanarena
Cpm4
Q3dm6 
I’m slightly disappointed by the relatively small player base in Ireland. I’m glad there are at least a few future superstars playing the game, with a bit of luck they’ll stick with it and not be lured away by CoD2 or anything. Hopefully quetzal’s clan will get off the ground, and maybe we’ll see something of xLh the Lithuanian-Irish clan based in Dublin.
Jolt leagues, when are you starting?
Clanbase has got it right this time around… the deals they made with the Americans has paved the way for Quake4 to measure up to its predecessor.
Q4 TDM: $25,000 with $12,500 to the first place winners.
Q4 1v1: $15,000 with $7.500 to the first place winner.
With the game just a week old, this is exactly the slap in the face needed for all the top Q3 clans wondering whether to fizzle out or make the effort again, and a greater incentive for l33t pro gaming clans (pcw now have server highskillers only plz) of CoD, RTCW, ET, BF2, MOH and all those other realistic games now in their twilight. Clanbase has put Quake right back where it belongs – second only to Counter Strike.
With the CPL having unveiled Q4 as their main game long before it was even released, and Paddy Power offering odds of 1/100 on its inclusion in the WCG, for its debut season at least, Q4 will be a success.
While these big tournaments don’t hold any particular interest for me (unless I know somebody competing), they foster an enthusiasm and a competitive spirit at every level. As we saw in Q3… once these tournaments disappear, apathy sets in. The big clans realize they have nothing to play for… why should they make a special effort to win a Eurocup with nothing to gain but a little golden cup icon, 16x13pixels and only 592bytes. The little guys have nothing to aim for.
In God’s master plan every living thing has a function in bringing a balance to nature. The oxpecker eats ticks and other parasites off the backs of cattle and rhinoceros, while the trochilus will clear the leeches from the open mouth of a crocodile. Similarly, on a server near you, observe the ultra-competitive 15-year-old Dutch guys, with spiked hair (dyed blonde at the tips) who dominate the pickups at 10am on a Sunday morning, bursting with enthusiasm… crying themselves to sleep at night after losing a duel, forever sapping the joy from game. Though their continued presence drags the game lower and lower till it begins to resemble a half-life mod, paradoxically these guys who threaten to destroy the game are the very ones who sustain it. As long as our servers are home to the familiar hooting of the greater spotted m1rv, the constant cries of ‘n00b’ echoing through their hollow lives can always remind us that the game still lives.
Quake’s greatest asset is the balance in the community. In other games, the proportion of pokemon n1njas is so high that it is almost impossible to enjoy any competitive fixtures without resorting to team chat only. Quake will never reach that saturation point; simply because far too many of us are no longer in secondary school. The problem is that when the big tournaments do end, and the enthusiasm from the kids begins to wane, you’re left with a lot of part timers who don’t practise, don’t play on publics, and aren’t particularly interested in learning new maps.
Last time I checked, there were 56 clans signed up for the Q4 TDM Opencup. I was interested to see how this compared to other games, and it did OK for something that was just released. While I looked at the signups I was surprised by the lack of Irish teams. I’ll compare with some other countries: Finland, Croatia, and Slovenia. Croatia and Finland have a similar population to Ireland but a bit larger, while Slovenia has about half our population.
ET 6V6: – 238 clans registered
Croatia 0
Ireland 0
Finland 22
Slovenia 3
UT CTF: – 67 clans registered
Croatia 3
Ireland 0
Finland 1
Slovenia 0
CoD S&D: – 243 clans registered
Croatia 2
Ireland 0
Finland 12
Slovenia 16
MOHAA OBJ: – 133 clans registered
Croatia 0
Ireland 0
Finland 8
Slovenia 0
UT2K4 TDM: – 52 clans registered
Croatia 1
Ireland 0
Finland 0
Slovenia 1
BF2 Conquest: – 124 clans registered
Croatia 1
Ireland 0
Finland 3
Slovenia 0
CS:Source: – 213 clans registered
Croatia 2
Ireland 0
Finland 30
Slovenia 2
Slightly worried at this stage, I’ve seen teams from Cyprus and Malta but still nothing from Ireland.
CS 1.6 :– 269 clans registered
Croatia 1
Ireland 1
Finland 95
Slovenia 1
WOOHOO an Irish clan, Wink – it’s even got a few Cork men in it. They’ve got a q4 icon next to the name too… does this mean you’ll be playing q4 as a clan Tazzle?
F.E.A.R. came out the same day in Ireland as it did in Slovenia… why do they have more teams than us playing it? I think we must be the worst represented European country on Clanbase. For the rainiest country in Europe, you think we’d have a bit more of an online games scene. Just look at CS… Ireland’s most commonly played game by far afaik, and we can only manage 1 team in Clanbase. Finland has 95 teams signed up so far this season for CS 1.6, and another 30 for source. More signups from this one country in this one game than in all of the Quakes put together probably. For a country the size of Ireland in terms of population, it is hard to imagine. We have a grand total of 1 clan signed up in all of the games I checked out there. This clan has a grand total of 6 members. And even at that, it turns out that I actually bump into one of these guys occasionally in real life. Can you imagine the scene with over 100 clans playing the game?
I never would have thought that our mini gaming community here was actually flying the flag for Irish gaming as a whole in Europe. I always assumed that Quake’s day was over. Quetzal et al - its just another reason for ye to get your teams sorted so that we can preserve this last vestige of Ireland’s clan scene, which must have just melted into the UK scene sometime while I wasn’t looking. Did I dream up the 14+ Irish CS teams… was it really that long ago? I went into a couple of the Cork gaming internet cafes this summer and there was such a booming LAN CS scene in this small city alone that there were entire clans playing in the cafes. Did everyone just get bored of it?
Q3 at its height had something over 100 TDM clans signed up for the Open Cup. At this early stage, it looks promising that Q4 has already got 56 signups… I would expect that a lot of teams are having trouble getting their dozier members to sort out their GUIDs, or their cheapskate members to fork out for the game (hi Vin) and haven’t yet been able to sign up as a result. I would expect the tally to rise to 80 or so for the TDM, which is fairly healthy. It sees the return of many big names from aAa and EYE to smr and D&M.
As for CTF… it started off slowly in Q3, developed into something that most TDM clans played “for fun”, before surprising nearly everyone by overtaking TDM to become the bigger mode towards the end of Q3’s lifetime. There was always something about CTF that made it seem frivolous, and again in Quake4 it has really only attracted a handful of those Q3 teams that didn’t play any TDM. It could be fun, especially if players learn to improve on the fancy movement, crouchsliding and ramp jumping and bunnyhopping. I hope they wake up and make it 4v4 though.
For the first time we’re introduced to big names from other games like CoD, with a lot of the signups having Eurocup medals in other games… probably indicating that they’re super l33t multigaming clan with sponsors who sends everyone a new mousemat twice a year. A lot of these guys refer to themselves as pro gamers… there’s dozens of them in #q4.uk. Their goal in life is to collect enough screenshots and irc logs to prove that everyone else is a n00b. When they begin to irritate me I just remember the oxpecker and everything is OK.
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The Verdict
We need to get as many games under our belt as possible, and the more of those that are on LAN the better.
