I have, I have like six different wiki tabs open to check dates on things.Īustin: So, is it that Half-Life gets the credit for what the emerging immersive sim was already doing?Īustin: Yes, thank you Emanuel, thank you! System Shock is out in 19– Rob: Austin's gonna get gravity assistance by traveling around Jupiter, and is gonna come back from a different angle.Īustin: I do. Rob: 'Cause I feel like there's an oblique hot take coming.Īustin: It's not a hot take! Well, it is. Patrick: That's our new podcast! "Two Old Men Arguing About Quake 2."Īustin: If I can do the most Waypoint thing possible here– Whereas Half-Life is constantly breaking in and saying, "Ah, here's the next part of the story unfolding," right? Everyone's saying "ah the government's going to come and help us out." Spoiler they don't and you see that play out very clearly.Įmanuel: I don't want to turn this into two old men arguing about Quake 2.Īustin: No, no, no, wait. Whereas I think Half-Life throughout it, storytelling is part of the experience, right? Quake 2 after that first level basically sends you on your merry way and it's like "go fuck up these monsters." And there we are, there's Quake. Beyond that first level where you get guys screaming over the radio about "Agh the Strogg kicking our asses," there isn't much storytelling. You're in a fucking Strogg meat factory or whatever the fuck, whatever they are, but it's very classic Id design of industry torture devices. Quake 2 never has any interest in you buying that you are in a place, that you are a person in a place where things happen. Rob: Yeah, but I think that I think the ambitions are so different. It's like," I'm going to this facility and to get there I have to go through this part of the base" and it was all one connected space. I agree that they did it very well, but Quake 2 was actually starting to do some of that. And what Half-Life did is it felt like one continuous world in one continuous space that felt real.
To Rob's point, up until Half-Life people felt like games were broken into levels, it's DOOM and I jump into a level and I get the red key, and I get the yellow key, and then I push a button, and then we go to the next level. The story of the Strogg!?!Įmanuel: No, no, it's not the story. I'm gonna have to call my daughter down here, she is going to scold you. Patrick: OK you know what, there are takes, there are hot takes, and then there is what is happening right now. Rob: Well yeah, because it was a Quake 2 engine derived game.Įmanuel: Right, so Quake 2 did a lot of what Half-Life did it just a Half-Life did it better.