T w e n t y S i d e d

A few words about the visuals in Quake 4:

The graphics are good, but that’s a given. Saying a first-person game has good graphics is like trying to sell a guy on the idea of a blind date by telling him the girl doesn’t smell bad. Of course the graphics are good. These days, even the terrible games have awesome graphics.

I’m going to nitpick the engine a bit here, but let me start by saying that the Doom engine is a fantastic piece of technology. This is the second game I’ve seen that used it, and taken together the two games show us a lot about what the engine can and can’t do.

It’s interesting to see the Doom engine in another context. It turns out that a lot of the look of the world in Doom was the result of the engine, not artistic direction. The “everything made of dull metal and plastic” look remains, and I don’t think you can get the engine to do anything else. I’ve never seen it do wood, for example, and I can’t help but wonder how the engine would pull it off without making it look like formica.

Here we are outside in broad daylight, but the ground directly underneath the bridge is pitch black.

One of my gripes with the engine is the way that a room can have a light source of sun-like luminance at the center and still be pitch black in the corners. There is no way around this: I’ve played with the editor and I can see that the wonderful unified lighting system (which is a real boon and great breakthrough for all sorts of technical reasons) has this one annoying limitation, which is that shadows are absolute. Imagine this: You are in direct sunlight, at high noon, out in the open. Now you have an awning sticking out from the side of a building. Using the Doom engine, you will need to use your flashlight to see stuff under that awning. This is obviously not realistic, but is the annoying result of those thechnological tradeoffs we keep making to make our videogames look pretty. Probably this will be resolved in the next-gen engine, but for now you’ll be giving your flashlight a lot of use. The reason for this is that light doesn’t bounce off of surfaces, so anything that isn’t directly illuminated will be pitch black.

(Top) The similar lighting behavior on these objects makes it look like they are all made from the same stuff. (Bottom) The specular highlights have been circled just to show you what I’m talking about.

The other thing that surprised me was the uniform specular lighting. The problem is this: All of the shiny stuff in the world (which is almost everything you see that is not sky or dirt) has a bit of a gleam to it; a blob of light that serves as an approximation of a reflection of the light source. This is a common effect and is often called a “specular highlight”. If you want the object to appear to be very smooth (like crystal ball or a freshly waxed car) you make the gleam a very small, precise dot. If you want the object to still be shiny but have a coarse surface (like an upholstered couch or a stainless steel bowl) then you make the gleam a broad, fuzzy blob of light.

The problem with this iteration of the Doom engine is that all objects have the same level of “polish” or “smoothness”. You can adjust how bright the reflection is, but not how tight or diffuse the reflection is. There is just one universal setting for all objects. If they made this universal smoothness too smooth, then it would look like everything in the world was brand-new, wet, or had been given a fresh coat of wax. If they made it too diffuse it would have made everything too plain and the effect would be lost. So, they selected one global value somewhere in the middle and stuck with it. After a while the eye notices this. We’re used to seeing some objects with more shine than others, and seeing every single object and surface in the room give off the same exact specular highlight makes it feel like it’s all made from the same stuff. Even if one surface is painted to look like diamond-plate steel and another like plastic, their specular behavior tells our eyes they are just the same material in different colors. John Carmack mentioned after the release of Doom that he was working on this, but I guess the changes didn’t make it in time for Quake 4.

(Top) This is what the game normally looks like. How big is the room? What’s going on in here? (Bottom) After adding a few lights, we can see this place is kind of cool.

My biggest complaint about the game is the pervasive darkness. In Doom the place was relentlessly dark because the base lost power, but in Quake 4 you are ostensibly attacking an operational enemy location. Do the Strogg really fumble around in the dark like blind men? On three different occasions I blundered over a ledge and fell to my death because I couldn’t see where I was going. Darkness is fine if you want to create a sense of fear, but restraint is needed. Going into a dark room is frightening. Being in a dark room is frustrating and boring.

Using some cheat codes I was able to add some lights to the more difficult rooms and discovered that there is a lot of cool stuff hidden in the darkness. The place looked a lot more interesting and I was finally able to get a feel for the area, instead of peering at the world a little slice at a time through my flashlight beam. What is the point of artists making detailed rooms when we can’t see any of it? Might as well make the rooms simple empty cubes.

They did a wonderful job of preserving the original industrial feel of the Strogg homeworld established in Quake 2. The games are generations apart in terms of graphics engines, and I wondered how well the original would translate. By borrowing just a few sound effects and some architectural cues, they really managed to capture the gritty style of the original.

Five Months Later: Looks like I was wrong about how the engine worked: After a graphics card update, I see that the pitch-black areas are not pitch black any longer. Dark, sure. But the game doesn’t have the perfect shadows in broad daylight effect it had before. I assume this was a result of some wacky settings somewhere along the line.

The game is a lot more fun now.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Cliché 1: Lots of videogames and Paul Verhoven love to imagine a future where 102lb girls fresh out of high school can slug it out in the trenches as infantry units while wearing lighter and more revealing versions of what the men are wearing.

Cliché 2: Lots of videogames and most Hollywood screenwriters dislike or misunderstand military etiquette. Main characters almost never respect the chain of command. People who go in for the “Sir yes sir!” formality are usually throwaway extras or otherwise unsympathetic. Real heroes march to their own beat and don’t take orders from anyone. Real heroics happen when people disobey a direct order.

These two clichés are not terrible crimes against the plot. Butt-kicking females can be fun sometimes. A rogue soldier can be compelling. But writers have taken us down this road so many times they can’t seem to find their way back. The clichés are now tiresome. Just once in a while can’t we have a hero with discipline and respect for authority? Can’t we have a story where females fill an interesting and vital role without them trying to out-macho the men?

Quake 4 manages to sidestep both of these, and the result is that the story seems a lot more grown up and a lot less cheesy than you might expect from something with the name ‘Quake’ on it. While it isn’t a deep game and the story is not one filled with mystery and wonder, it does manage to tell its tale without resorting to sloppy or heavy-handed plot devices. Quake 4 is the story of a fairly large military operation – the invasion of an enemy homeworld. There are setbacks and surprises, but most of what captured my interest was the small details that gave the world some polish, with a nod towards realism.

The player is assigned to the USS Hannibal, a ship which is roughly the size of a football field. The landing sequence is pretty cool to watch, but don’t stand directly underneath it. Trust me.

Even though the game is set in space, in the far future, they still try to portray the military in a way that is familiar and makes sense. The infantry forces are all men, which might be sexist but makes perfect sense when you see what is asked of them. Some of the pilots are female, which also makes sense. If we were in a ground war for the survival of Earth I would expect everyone to take part, but I would not expect them to send in teenage girls to haul around guns the size of a man’s leg and go toe-to-toe with the seven-foot Strogg soldiers.

The military looks like a real military. Your character is part of a real squad of genuine characters, instead of being sent in alone or part of a team of interchangeable generic guys. They are an able group of guys, and provide real help instead of getting in the way as NPCs often do. Through radio chatter the game hints about other things being accomplished by other capable marines, and how those actions are part of a larger operation. All of this gives it a nice touch of authenticity. The player plays a vital part in the operation, but they do not play the only part and they still need the help of their squadmates. Being a normal, average grunt isn’t a lot of fun, but single-handedly defeating the enemy forces doesn’t make sense. This game strikes a nice balance between those two extremes.

Rhino Squad salutes the officers as they enter the room. How the writers were able to smuggle the closely guarded secret of “saluting” out of the military is still a mystery.

At a few points in the game you get the chance to go back to your base ship, the Hannibal. Onboard, the game does a good job of making it look plausible. People wear uniforms. Their haircuts are regulation. They are clean-cut. They stand watch. Repair mundane objects. Gossip about other operations. Enlisted men rise and salute when the general enters the room. In short, they act like soldiers.

The only breach of military etiquette that I’ve spotted so far is that my character is a corporal, but other enlisted men keep calling me ‘sir’. (This confused me at first. Every time one of them said ‘sir’ I would turn around and look for the officer he was addressing.) Still, this means the game is practically a documentary compared to most Hollywood military movies.

Lt. Voss (left) checks out the room our team just secured, while Pvt. ‘Sledge’ (right) guards the corridor behind us. Because I’m a man of action, I volunteer to gather up all of the ammunition and healthpacks and randomly push all of the unmarked buttons.

This authenticity extends into combat. They cover each other, stagger their movement, regroup before moving forward, and use objects as cover in a way that makes sense. They don’t jump into your line of fire and will hold their fire if you blunder into theirs. Lots of games have experimented with team AI like this in the past few years. This is the best implementation I’ve witnessed so far. They move and act like a team, and this makes having teammates a pleasure instead of a punishment.

I’m sure these details mean nothing to some people. In the hands of different writers, the soldiers could be a bunch of long-haired bad boys with tons of cool, seething with attitude, covered in tattoos, who all have humorous phallic nicknames for each other and no discernable command structure. Thankfully, they went a different route and gave us something fresh. I appreciate that.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.