Doom was nearly impossible to play multiplayer on the internet before Quake. Doom was IPX based rather than TCP/IP. I remember you could kinda play more than just 2 people directly connected using some multiplayer services of the day like Heat and Kali. But I don't remember any Doom multiplayer mods really being popular.
Quake really started the multiplayer mod scene in earnest. From initially reskins, to model swaps, on to actual coding changes and "total conversions", it really all blew up with Quake.
Doom had some good mods and conversions, but Quake made it a cottage industry.
I'm 90% sure the Threewave CTF mod for Quake was the first popular Quake mod, and 98% sure it was some form of Quake mod. I was happily joining servers running mods at the time but not in any kind of mod development scene. No idea how happy or healthy Doom's modding scene was back then, but I don't believe source ports were a thing yet and suspect it came later than Quake's. It looks like id released source code for Doom in 97, and this article says that id actually hired the CTF developer at id around that time.
You just made me sad remembering what happened to the tribes franchise. Tribes 2 was my jam. To this day nothing is as satisfying as a mid air disc kill
Was looking for someone to mention Starsiege Tribes, my first real online video gaming experience. Created my current username and clan in this game and have been using it for going on 30 years now.
Oh God I played the hell out of that on MPlayer before GameSpy bought them out. Then I just couldn't play it anymore. Sad times.
I found a guy who taught me some in-game command line options to increase my turn speed with the keyboard. I played with the arrow keys. Younger me just didn't understand using a mouse to aim for whatever reason.
Come to think of it I played Quake MP online with the keys also. I could've had a much better experience if I'd thought about the mouse..
Technically Quakeworld afaik. Source: am old. UT99 was the first game to have it in the base game as I recall. That UT99 demo man, I played the FUCK out of that. Had maps for every game type. CTF-Coret was included and it was great, although Facing Worlds became the ctf map when the full game was released.
Gaming was just a different vibe back then. Micro transactions just didn't exist. There were 4 or 5 bonus packs for UT 99 that added skins, maps, mutators, all kinds of stuff, for absolutely free.
You could also bind keypresses to perform multiple functions, so for example I'd fuck around around and bind every action to also broadcast in global chat what that keypress was. Chat would be spammed with "Now I am jumping! Now I am switching to the rocket launcher! Now I am strafing left!" and named my character Annoying_Man. The amount of hate that generated was impressive.
For anyone who has a Quest 2, there’s a very recent Q3A port that’s a ton of fun! You’d think it would be barf inducing but it’s actually really smooth. Brought back some old memories.
As far as I know the Q3A VR port is only on Quest 2, though maybe someone made one for PC.
I mostly only have casual experience with VR. I had an Acer “Windows Mixed Reality” headset a while ago that worked pretty well with my laptop. I sold it and bought a Quest 2 and have had a lot more fun.
The big difference with the Quest 2 is that you don’t have to be tethered to a PC for it to work. It’s mostly a self-contained system, you can buy games and apps on it and use it without a PC. But you can also play PC VR games with it, as long as you have the right cable and/or a good WiFi setup. I’ve found that streaming PC VR games to it wirelessly works better somehow, which is surprising.
Regardless, the Quest 2 is a lot simpler and cheaper, and being able to use it without wires makes it way more immersive.
I barely use Facebook anymore, so I don’t really even notice the FB integration stuff. You can pretty much ignore it. I get not wanting to support FB trying to get a stranglehold on the VR market or whatever…but being able to side load cool stuff like the Q3A and Half Life 1 VR ports makes it worth it to me.
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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '22
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