Shub-Niggurath?

[triple_agent]

Man with an axe defeats the Wood Mother of the Forest with Thousand Offsprings. Completed the Quake on Nightmare and in fact, for the first time ever, completed it. I do not still get what was the key to defeating of the Dark Mother? Teleport frag for certain, but how was it that for the first time I teleported near the monster, only later into it, directly onto the place where it stood, seizing it? The monster was resistant to all common damage, is that correct? What was the purpose of that Vore-like missle spiked sphere drifting around? I tried jumping into it, shooting it, but it seemed out of the current dimension, ethereal.

Anyway, best game in own genre, most tight shooter ever made, excellent combat dynamics, all elegantly wrapped up in a neat but showing simplicity.

Hail Quake! Long live, unparalleled.

[Sunsetter]

Yup, that was the only part of the game I found really badly designed. Completely unintuitive and contrary to game rules previously established.

Aniway, the missile thing was the teleporter, you teleport in the monster once the missile enters it.

[triple_agent]

@Samael, thank you, I have replayed the level and entered the teleporter exactly the moment when the spiked sphere was drifting through the abominable entity of the Dark Mother.

[=RaggA=]

The final boss level is probably the biggest disapointment in an otherwise great game. I read an interview with John Romero from around 2006/07ish (I think) where he mentioned the boss situation. Aparently it was all dowm to time constraints.Quake had a notoriously troubled development, by the time they had got the game as we know it now on track they had like 7 months to build the entire thing and as a result a lot of the ideas they had were cut. Regretably this lead to the boss fights being half baked just so they could ship on time.

[triple_agent]

I have read somewhere that Quake was supposed to be something like an RPG, but both the time and the financial conditions pushed iD to do what they knew best - and they did!

[ULTRA]

Technically: the code marks Shub not as an enemy but as a shootable level entity, so the only way to trigger it is to do enough damage to "kill" it all at once. This value is higher than any weapon can possibly achieve, but not higher than a telefrag.

Artistically: they're probably just suggesting you needed some kind of magical means to defeat Shub, which is the telefrag of course, since the whole game revolves around this concept of portals and slipgates. This is what the character in Quake Champions is in homage to - you throw the "dire orb" and displace your enemies by teleporting into their bodies.

[Captain n00by]

Originally posted by Triple_Agent_AAA:

I have read somewhere that Quake was supposed to be something like an RPG, but both the time and the financial conditions pushed iD to do what they knew best - and they did!

At first, a 2D RPG, then a 3D 3rd person brawler, then a 3D slasher RPG.

Finally, they decided to mix Doom, Descent, Hexen, Super Mario, add a hefty dose of Lovecraft and see what happens.

They chose wisely imo.

[triple_agent]

Originally posted by Thy Pancake Consumed:

I red on internet there was bug in early versions where you could actually kill Shub by shooting at her but it was later patched.

For sure that would take a lot of axe swings, even with quad damage on!

[triple_agent]

In the latest versions, though, it is immune to damage at all, AFAIK.

[triple_agent]

It seems the telefrag is instadeath to whatever is being telefragged upon, but somewhere I read that it deals also certain fixed amount of damage. If that was the case, how it is that it kills the Shub-Niggurath? Perhaps the Shub-Niggurath is still described with some amount of health, only the regular mode of receiving damage has been turned off for it, which the telefrag bypasses.

[ULTRA]

It's not immune to damage, and telefrag does a finite amount of damage. It's just that no weapon can achieve the amount of damage necessary. In the Quake source code it's defined as 50,000 damage. Shub-Niggurath is a button with some 40,000 HP or so. You can only trigger it if you do more than 40,000 at once (by telefragging).

[ULTRA]

BTW there is also a case in the code for when both players have pentagrams, so technically yes, telefragging can still bypass pentagrams