Unregistered user “Ogres Obliterator” posted:
Nice but the designers seem to like to waste the player’s time trying to find entities/ items that should not be hidden, compounding the problem lack of clear or coherent clues to read.
9409c0debed303683964af869690583b53c2f0376471b3eed655b65e5f29b673
overall_rating
4.460553278688525
64
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3/5 I will play it again with fun.
Bad points: The road is linear and confusing. Mamy closed doors are blocked doors; bumping in front is repetitive. Secrets are hard to find. New enemies have too much HP, there are too many ogres and insufficient weapons. The sound of knights armor and some skin colors are bad choices.
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Didn’t get far, just past the initial dragon free for all battle pretty much. It’s the 2nd time I had a go at this episode and got to about the same place before deciding to abandon it.
The level design is good, the reskins and so on all fit the aesthetic, there is an attempt at scripted sequences and a story-line, there is a level of polish to the whole thing. No doubt, it would have impressed people for these reasons back when Soul of Evil was first released.
But for my money, well I wouldn’t pay money for it, neither then nor now, as it’s simply not up to the standards of the base Quake experience nor its expansions. All the new enemies are bullet-sponges, are used far too much, and require the minimum of finesse to defeat, its just a matter of tediously pumping bullets into them. The dragon battles you can only win by getting them to in-fight. The medium-size open maps set in valleys and across bridges aren’t an ideal fit for the Quake engine and its combat. The cramped fighting inside houses isn’t ideal either. The aesthetic is consistent but IMO all that orange and brown is just ugly, I’m not a fan. The narrative did nothing for me.
3.4/5
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Completed on Nightmare (except Highlands / SOE2M7)
I had to be a real son of a gun to get past many of these fights. On the highest difficulty, there really isn’t much ammo or much grace given to a player, leading to needing to constantly be in the zone. It’s a helluvan experience, but not one I’m keen to revisit on Nightmare. As Mike Taylor put it, the maps improve as they go on, and it’s wonderful to behold. Special mention to the final fight, wow. I don’t recommend playing this on Nightmare, I had to be like a butterfly and bee and ghandi and bruce lee and george foreman all in one. It was crazy awesome satisfying to finally get through - I’ve never had to play Quake like that, and in truth, that goes for most of episode 2. It really is ball busting stuff.
I didn’t play Highlands on Nightmare because honestly I had gone through the last four maps in the last four hours and I kind of wanted to be done. I’m not sure how one was meant to have found it, but it’s a fun romp. I’ve never had to drop down on a shambler with my axe because three wizards were chasing me and I had no ammo whatsoever with less than 70hp. That was exhilarating. I so badly want to give this a 5, but the first maps just aren’t very memorable, if completely admirable because of Tronyn’s unique style. As it goes on, it’s pure Quake arcane goodness.
HUUUGE NOTE: As others have noted, there is a bug in the big library fight (you’ll know it when you see it) that makes it incompleteable on Hard. After you deal with the enemies, noclip through the doors that say “Not yet…”, nab the stuff, push the button, noclip back out. The direction should be clear after that.
It is known problem, fix already exist:
https://www.quaketastic.com/files/single_player/soe_soe2m5_fix.zip
Ah, damn. Wish I’d seen that. Much appreciated nonetheless. (posted twice because I can’t figure out how to quote).
Yep, I hit the soe2m5 map bug too while playing in nightmare mode and before reading about the fix. I actually came up with my own fix! The problem is one single byte in file pak2.PAK. To fix it, open that in your favorite hex editor, go to address 0xC894EF, change that byte to 0x35 and save. If you are on Linux, you can achieve the same with the following one-liner: printf '\x35' | dd of=pak2.PAK bs=1 seek=$((0xC894EF)) conv=notrunc
That will fix the trigger_count for that map, but if you are like me and only use one save-file and saved after you cleared the library, you won't see the change unless you die and reload the level. I did not want to rewind that far back so I came up with another hack: Editing our save file, in my case quick.sav. This time we don't need a hex editor since these are actually in plain text! But we'll still need to do some research first. I use the ironwail port so I have access to a console command called r_showbboxes. I set that to 1 while my save file is loaded and now I can see the dead sorcerors' boxes in the library. I aim my crosshair at one of these boxes and can see the edict number, in my case I picked edict 291 (yours might have different numbers), which was linked to the bugged trigger_counter entity. Now that we have the edict number for this sorceror entity, we type kill in console, then revive with the spacebar, and then save in a different slot, don't overwrite your current one! I saved to slot17, so the save file for that is s17.sav. I open that in a text editor, search for entity 291, and copy the contents within the { } braces and use this to paste onto my quick.sav file and replace its corresponding section for entity #291. This essentially will revive/reset that sorceror in your quick.sav file. Save your edit and reload from it in Quake. Now just find that revived sorceror in the library and kill it. Its death should now correctly trigger a door nearby to open, with a button you can press to continue on your journey!
Yeah, I know it's quite a bit of work to fix it my way but to me this was the best solution and I learned quite a bit of how quake works behind the scenes while doing so. Plus my way also allows you to fix your save file!
As for this map pack, it's definitely high quality, especially for the early 2000's era! Some of the maps get quite big, and I got lost quite a few times and ran in circles trying to find the next target, but aside from that, very well-made map pack. 4/5.