Discuss.
What did Quake 4 got done right and where did it fail?
It's pretty bold to claim that Quake 4 was great but nothing was ever gained by parroting the same old line, especially if it was one handed to you by someone else. It's conventional "wisdom" that Quake, with its incoherent mishmash of failed ideas for an RPG with hints of poorly executed Lovecraft and terrible bosses is the best shit ever, and that Quake 2, with its focused on more mission-based gameplay was a step in the wrong direction. Quake 4 then by actually being the only game in the series to actually be a fucking proper sequel to an earlier game, is treated much in the same way as its ancestor. Despite being an edge connoisseur I never cared much for the original Quake in terms of setting nor the NiN soundtrack. I still admire it for the purity of the gameplay.
Since they are all made in the same engine people tend to bundle together Doom 3, Prey (2006) and Quake 4. It's an objective fact that Prey is the best of the three, partly because like Duke Nukem Forever it had perfectly retained a design and script from the peak of the genre in the 90's and Human Head perfectly executed a 90's shooter in that era when consoles rose and the PC was in decline, and unlike DNF it kept the best bits in and didn't change into a console first shooter. In my conception Prey is the final great shooter in the old style until the recent revival which resulted in only a handful of worthwhile games, one among which was running on the Build Engine.
Doom 3 on the other hand was a total failure at being a sequel and sought to achieve something much more like System Shock, with only a few enemies at the time, very dark locations forcing you to use a flashlight, and audio logs and door codes. Quake 4 in comparison is much more of a throwback, one last hurrah for the Quake series, and was to follow up on the only coherent setting and plot in the series. So far so good, it was better than Doom 3.
But even if you had asked me around the time, it was released the same year as F.E.A.R. by Monolith, who at that time retained their PC shooter excellence, so I'd compare it to that. Perhaps that's an unfair comparison, even Monolith's blunders blow most others, and perhaps particularly indie efforts out of the water. Blood 2's gunfeel and impact was top shelf despite the game being essentially unfinished. Other games from the same year are more flattering to Quake 4, Call of Duty 2, one of the worst series of mainstream shooters was released then. But perhaps one of the issues with Quake 4 is that it wants in on that game, of military cinematic shooters. In Quake 2 you were dropped into a hostile world as a lone survivor, the few humans you meet are driven insane by the troon-humanist shit going on.
What makes it hard to evaluate Quake 4 is in what you compare it to, if you consider that it managed to retain a lot when at the time Serious Sam had gone over to consoles with Serious Sam 2, a game most fans of the series wants to forget, or that Deus Ex spinoff that was rebranded as Project: Snowblind, you have to give Raven credit. I mean, if you asked someone to play Quake 4, Vietcong 2, Pariah and then Bet on Soldier in a couple of sittings they'd probably, if they had any sense and taste, tell you that Quake 4 was great in comparison. But now that Quake 4 is older and was too outdated in the time of Call of Duties, Battlefield 2's and console shooters like TimeSplitters at the time to get a proper following it gets compared to the icons of the genre instead of where it was historically situated. Being old school without being a retro callback doomed it to being underrated and underappreciated. Even Prey, which had the interactivity and dynamism of a Build Engine game or SiN has fallen into relative obscurity, so what chance did it stand?
Not only do you lose the impact of the first time when you make a sequel years later, nobody was very impressed with Quake 4 when Half-Life 2, for good and mostly ill, had come out the year before, but typically, if something is great enough to warrant a sequel or spawns a genre, or establishes principles, then that first instance is in most cases the best. Quake 4 is not a bad shooter, nor even mediocre, it is professionally made, it keeps to the core tenets of a pure shooter, it has great skyboxes, tested and true weapons, good craftsmanship, but since it wasn't revolutionary like Quake was it was destined to never become iconic or even very memorable. Despite the transhumanist themes being more relevant than ever now and the gameplay being comparatively very true to the genre when genre-mongrels are the new standard.
TL;DR: It's a better game than retro revivalist boomer shooters or the Ashes mod for Doom, and certainly most of the competition at the time. It was just made in a bad period, some of that influence can be found in the game with the CoD wannabe stuff or vehicle sections. Nobody remembers the bad games of the time though so people with no memory of the time will rate it shit since they compare it to Quake 1.
