Why did Quake 4 fail?

[Sonitorum]

No troll here; just curious as to why it never made it big, is all. Watched a few Q4 duels on YouTube and I've kept wondering why since then.

[<M.o.K> Samurai]

The movement was really odd and they didn't patch in "Q3-like" movement until repeated patches were applied. I think it just tried too hard to be different in terms of multiplayer feel.

It is a shame, I really enjoyed some aspects of the gameplay, especially where teleporters and bouncepads were concerned. Having those react to projectiles really created a new layer of meta-game.

[topspeed2000]

I personally found Q4 to be way too dark. I mean literally too dark. Even with gamma and what not turned up it was too hard to see anything. I ended up just saying screw it and moving onto the next game.

[<M.o.K> Samurai]

Originally posted by topspeed2000:

I personally found Q4 to be way too dark. I mean literally too dark. Even with gamma and what not turned up it was too hard to see anything. I ended up just saying screw it and moving onto the next game.

They added global illumination mode in one of the later patches to Q4 to address the darkness and performance hit from real time per-pixel dynamic lighting. It appears that patch came too late as well.

[Brandon]

That was one of the laggiest games I'd ever played. Come to think of it, Doom 3 and Prey were also extremely laggy. Could the engine have caused the lag?

[<M.o.K> Samurai]

Originally posted by GoyoElGringo:

That was one of the laggiest games I'd ever played. Come to think of it, Doom 3 and Prey were also extremely laggy. Could the engine have caused the lag?

What kind of lag?

Back when I was playing it, I had a hard time running them, but on my modern computer, they all run silky smooth.

[Brandon]

Originally posted by <M.o.K>Samurai Jack-ing Off:

Originally posted by GoyoElGringo:

That was one of the laggiest games I'd ever played. Come to think of it, Doom 3 and Prey were also extremely laggy. Could the engine have caused the lag?

What kind of lag?

Back when I was playing it, I had a hard time running them, but on my modern computer, they all run silky smooth.

It's been years, but I think I recall a lot of rubber banding, disconnects, and serious issues with joining matches in Q4.

[yari]

In my opinion Q4 was too similar to Q3 so not much incentive to move on. It wasn't a different experience like how Q2 was to Q1.
They tried to adapt the slower pace to Q4 (the sequal to Q2) but gunplay and movement just felt better in Q3 overall.

[Patrol1985]

Originally posted by yari:

In my opinion Q4 was too similar to Q3 so not much incentive to move on. It wasn't a different experience like how Q2 was to Q1.
They tried to adapt the slower pace to Q4 (the sequal to Q2) but gunplay and movement just felt better in Q3 overall.

My thoughts exactly. Basically it was "Quake 3 with higher system requirements" and thus worse performance, so why not play Quake 3 instead?

Also, a lack of bot support out of the box. Say what you want, but proper single-player mode understood as a series of bot matches (just like in Quake 3) goes a LONG way in popularizing multiplayer. Mainly because you learn maps with those matches and don't feel so lost when you enter a server later on. I think Quake Live should have a proper single-player mode akin to Quake 3.

[Ðꧧï©å‡êÐ ©ø®þ§ê]

It didn't at first, it had quite a bit of popularity for a while. It died around the time Quake Live came.

[Cat]

Q4 got killed when SyncError decided arbitrarily to change the physics to make it "faster". This resulted in most jumps becoming impossible because you would bonk your head on the ceiling when doing them and stop dead, since the maps and their jumps had been designed for the old physics.

[simple cat]

It came out slightly bugged and un-adjustable, Q4Max was released later. And it also has hight sys. req. back in time.

[Doc]

nothing new, raven did a sloppy job with the multiplayer, boring player modells, no offline bots, high performance pc's needed, bugs at release, id tech 4 engine appeals not as good as id tech 3. id itself patched q4 massive. the community (q3 veterans) wanted a more q3-ish game and the patches delivered it. but that was a dead sentence on top, q4 lost its uniqueness and it turned out as a q3 clone.

the precessor q3 had it all, good maps, tools, gtv, smooth gameplay. due to the community which developed things for quake3 over many years. q4 appeared as unfinished/unperfect in comparison to a highly modded q3.

q4 had a 2 years window in esport, after that, players did go back to q3 cpm vq3. unreal tournament 3 had the same fate. good sales but players liked the precessor more.

[Doc]

new in q4 was - crouching, shoot through teleporter, lightning gun not ping dependable as in q3, little faster than q3, rampjumps from q2, weakened railgun 90, 8 side hitboxes, q3 rocket speed instead of slower q2 feeling after patches.

[AN BIFFED ELF!!!!]

Q4 ran well on competent hardware from 2002 and later (Radeon9700+), that's no excuse. The patches delivered the 'q3ness' by having lighting being able to be turned off without cheat proteciton, which enabled the clique and killed the game for everyone else.

[Doc]

hyperthreading and dualcore support was fixed and working after patches (20% more performance), and yes the light option and q4max gave a huge performance boost too.

but all this came late, players left q4 already and didnt came back. you and me it seems had a pc machine from hell. but not everybody had such machines, keep that in mind.