Quake II
Quake II is a 1997 first-person shooter game developed by id Software and published by Activision. It is the second installment of the Quake series, following Quake.
Developed over the course of a year, Quake II was released on December 9, 1997. In contrast to the first game, which featured a combination of science fiction and fantasy elements, Quake II entirely drops the latter elements and is set during humankind's war against a rogue alien race known as the Strogg, half-mutant half-machine creatures whose homeplanet, Stroggos, is the target of the humans' invasion force. The player takes the role of a space marine as he crash-lands on the planet and, being the last survivor of his squad, is tasked with completing a series of missions to cripple the Strogg and end their plans to conquer Earth. The game's storyline is continued in its expansions, including one tying in Quake II and the first game, and Quake 4. The game's heavy metal soundtrack was provided by Sascha Dikiciyan.
Besides its single player component, Quake II also uses a client/server network system similar to that of Quake for multiplayer. Unlike Quake, where hardware acceleration was only implemented through later patches, Quake II was released with native OpenGL support. Quake II was also the first id Software game not to be released for the then-deprecated MS-DOS operating system, rather running natively on Windows 95, with several ports to other systems following afterwards. The source code for Quake II was released by id Software under the GPL license on December 21, 2001.
Quake II received critical acclaim on its release, and similarly to its predecessor is generally considered to be one of the best video games ever made. An "enhanced" version of Quake II developed by Nightdive Studios was released for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S on August 10, 2023. It includes the original game and its two expansion packs, an episode consisting of the levels from the Nintendo 64 version of the game, and a brand new episode designed by MachineGames.
Gameplay
Quake II is a first-person shooter, in which the player shoots enemies from the perspective of the main character. The gameplay is very similar to that featured in Quake, in terms of movement and controls, although the player's movement speed has been slowed down, and the player now has the ability to crouch. The game retains four of the eight weapons from Quake, although they have been redesigned visually and made to function in slightly different ways. The remainder of Quakes eight weapons are not present in Quake II. The six new weapons are the Blaster, Machine Gun, Chain Gun, Hyperblaster, Railgun, and BFG10K. The Quad Damage power up from Quake is present in Quake II, and new power-ups include the Ammo Pack, Invulnerability, Bandolier, Enviro-Suit, Rebreather, and Silencer.Single-player
The single-player game features a number of changes from Quake. First, the player is given mission-based objectives that correspond to the storyline, including stealing a Tank Commander's head to open a door and calling down an air-strike on a bunker. CGI cutscenes are used to illustrate the player's progress through the main objectives, although they are all essentially the same short piece of video, showing a computerized image of the player character as he moves through game's levels. Another addition is the inclusion of a non-hostile character type: the player character's captured comrades. It is not possible to interact with these characters, however, as they have all been driven insane by their Strogg captors.The game features much larger levels than Quake, with many more wide open areas. A hub system allows the player to travel back and forth between levels, which is necessary to complete certain objectives. Some of the textures and symbols that appear in the game are similar to some of those found in Quake. Enemies demonstrate visible wounds after they have taken damage.
Multiplayer
The multiplayer portion is similar to that of Quake. It can be played as a free-for-all deathmatch game mode, a cooperative version of the single-player game, or as a 1 vs 1 match that is used in official tournaments, like the Cyberathlete Professional League. It can also be played in Capture the Flag mode. The deathmatch game benefited from the release of eight specifically designed levels that id Software added after the game's initial release. They were introduced to the game via one of the early patches, that were released free of charge. Prior to the release of these maps, players were limited to playing multiplayer games on the single-player levels, which, while functional as multiplayer levels, were not designed with deathmatch gameplay specifically in mind.As in Quake, it is possible to customize the way in which the player appears to other people in multiplayer games. However, whereas in Quake, the only option was to change the color of the player's uniform unless third party modifications were used, now the game comes with a selection of three different player models: a male marine, a female marine, and a male cyborg; choice of player model also affects the speech effects the player's character will make, such as exhaling in effort while jumping or groaning when injured. Each model can be customized from in the in-game menu via the selection of pre-drawn skins, which differ in many ways; for example, skin color, camouflage style, and application of facepaint.
Plot
Quake II takes place in a science fiction environment set against the backdrop of a war between humanity and an alien race known as the Strogg, who capture and convert organic creatures into horrific cyborgs for their war machine. In the single-player game, the player assumes the role of a Marine named Bitterman taking part in "Operation Alien Overlord", a desperate attempt to end the war by launching a counter-offensive on the alien home planet of Stroggos. Most of the other soldiers are captured or killed as soon as they approach the planned landing zone. Bitterman survives because another Marine's personal capsule collided with his upon launch, causing him to crash far short of the landing zone. Bitterman fights his way through the highly industrial Strogg city, destroying strategic objectives along the way, and finally kills the Strogg leader, the Makron, in his orbital asteroid base.Development
Design
Originally, Quake II was supposed to be a new game and intellectual property; titles like "Strogg", "Lock and Load", and just "Load" were toyed with in the early days of development. But after numerous failed attempts, the team at id decided to stick with Quake II and forgo the Gothic Lovecraftian horror theme from the original in favor of a more sci-fi aesthetic.In the 2023 documentary FPS: First Person Shooter, designer Tim Willits revealed that Quake II was initially almost titled "Wor." However, due to legal concerns, the development team ultimately decided to use the Quake name despite the sequel having no narrative connection to the original game. Willits also noted that the game's premise drew inspiration from the 1961 World War II film The Guns of Navarone, particularly its depiction of a mission to destroy an apparently impregnable fortress housing a massive weapon.
The game was developed with a 13-person team. Activision obtained the worldwide distribution rights to the game in May 1997. Artist and co-owner Adrian Carmack had said that Quake II is his favorite game in the series because "it was different and a cohesive project". This is the last id Software game to feature American McGee as he was fired shortly after its release.
Technology
Unlike Quake, where hardware-accelerated graphics controllers were supported only with later patches, Quake II came with OpenGL support out of the box. Later downloads from id Software added support for AMD's 3DNow! instruction set for improved performance on their K6-2 processors, and Rendition released a native renderer for their V1000 graphics chip. The latest version is 3.21. This update includes numerous bug fixes and new levels designed for multiplayer deathmatch. Version 3.21, available as source code on id Software's FTP server, has no improved functionality over version 3.20 and is simply a slight modification to make compiling for Linux easier.Quake II uses an improved client–server model introduced in Quake. The game code of Quake II, which defines all the functionality for weapons, entities, and game mechanics, can be changed in any way because id Software published the source code of their own implementation that shipped with the game. Quake II uses the shared library functionality of the operating system to load the game library at run-time—this is how mod authors are able to alter the game and provide different gameplay mechanics, new weapons, and much more. The full source code to Quake II version 3.19 was released under the terms of the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later on December 22, 2001. Version 3.21 followed later. An LCC-friendly version was released on January 1, 2002, by a modder going by the name of Major Bitch.
Quake IIs game engine was a popular license and formed the basis for several commercial and free games, such as CodeRED: Alien Arena, War§ow, SiN, Anachronox, Heretic II, Daikatana, Soldier of Fortune, Kingpin: Life of Crime, and UFO: Alien Invasion. Valve's 1998 video game Half-Life used the Quake II engine during early development stages. However, the final version runs on a heavily modified version of the Quake engine, GoldSrc, with a small amount of the Quake II code.