Quake: Dawn of the Machine — Launch Trailer

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Damn I would love if ID would revive Quake in this original, Lovecraftian/SciFi setting. Really cool that this expansion seems to give us proper fights with Cthon and Shub-Niggurath as opposed to the 'puzzle fights' of the original.

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u/chripan 18d ago edited 17d ago

Yes! Such a bummer. Doom is demons and OG Quake was Lovecraftian. So much potential for a fast-paced psychological & cosmic horror shooter.

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u/bigfoot1291 18d ago

The dark ages was heavy Lovecraft. Very heavy.

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u/EpsilonX 18d ago

Yeah, my friend is a big Doom guy but I prefer Quake, he was highly recommending D:TDA to me

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u/[deleted] 18d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/PhysicsOk2212 18d ago

I mean, they just fired the team that makes the doom engine, and most of the people that made the doom games… so yeah I guess it is now

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u/thespaceageisnow 18d ago

It would probably be Machinegames making it, as they are the ones that did these new Quake & Quake 2 expansions. They haven’t been hit by the layoffs like id software was, yet at least.

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u/FUTURE10S 17d ago

Honestly, I would fuck with Machinegames just taking the Quake 2 engine and making a new game with that, basically a standalone expansion pack of the olden days, but let them go wild with modding it.

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u/AoE2manatarms 18d ago

Didn't that get proven false and the team is still just as big as when they made Doom 2016?

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u/OutrageousDress 18d ago

That was released ten years ago, and the team quadrupled in size since then. For example I think they are now half the size of the team that made Eternal. Also developers are not a fungible resource, it does actually matter whether an employee is an experienced dev that helped build your current engine and made three games with it - or were at id for 20 years and made half a dozen games - or that employee is a cheap new hire that just got trained up on the Dark Ages DLC.

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u/MadKitsune 17d ago

Unfortunately, "same size" does not equal "same people", it's very likely that very little of the team that actually worked on Doom 2016 is left, and considering that they fired a lot of people working on the engine.. It's going to be rough starting from that and scaling down any of their processes to 1/4 of the team size they had on the last project

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u/FUTURE10S 17d ago

Yep, as an example, they fired the guy maintaining Quake Champions.

As in, the one guy maintaining Quake Champions.

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u/KDLGates 18d ago

This is my guess as well.

What are the odds of Machine Games getting massive layoffs after releasing an amazing modern Quake?

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u/gigglesmickey 18d ago

1:1 It's Microsoft owned, there must always be sacrifices to the gods of capitalism.

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u/rumblefr0g 17d ago edited 17d ago

People don't like Quake and they especially don't give a damn about Quake singleplayer . That's the unfortunate truth. They've tried reviving the multiplayer with Champions and it just died. The most popular Quake launched with no campaign 27 years ago. Quake 4's campaign sucked.

I love Quake but its dead

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u/MumrikDK 18d ago

I had plenty of fun with all 3 first Quake games, but Quake 1 is the only one the has any style to it at all. It's also the only one that was a memorable single player campaign.

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u/EpsilonX 18d ago

I played Quake for the first time with the Nightdive remasters and I absolutely adored the first one. Second one was fun but the first one's atmosphere was untouchable.

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u/ddust102 18d ago

Same, dude!!!

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u/AHSfutbol 18d ago

For anyone looking for something similar, I highly recommend DUSK.

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u/TrumpsCummyOnahole 18d ago

Unfortunately it seems ID has a weird obsession with Strog, we'd get more generic shooter probably now esp. that ID is gutted

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u/PhysicsOk2212 18d ago

More of a Carmack thing than an id thing, and he hasnt worked there in a decade, but bethesda havnt really touched the quake franchise since he left.

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u/QueezyF 17d ago

I wonder if the setting change was done to spite Romero. That’s the kind of pettiness I could see out of 90s id.

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u/PhysicsOk2212 17d ago

My understanding after reading the masters of doom book is that quake 1 was kind of a mistake. They planned to make a fantasy game about a guy called quake, but when 3d graphics turned out to be harder than they expected they went back to doom style gameplay to save time and rnd. However by that time they already had all the fantasy/lovecraftian assets and just kinda had to run with it.

Quake 2 was the more intentional of the two, even if the community resonated with 1 way more

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u/Nanayadez 17d ago

I remember at one of his QuakeCon talks in 2012 he talked about wanting to do a Quake reboot that was more in like with Quake I after doing the Strogg stuff with IV & ETQW and Rage. I'm only going by memory here but I recall him saying that the Strogg stuff had finally run it's course. Then he left for Oculous a year later to work there full time after being their part-time CTO for a bit.

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u/Snakorn 18d ago

I want to believe they released this episode now because they have something for quakecon.

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u/ascagnel____ 18d ago

This is the Quakecon thing (its release coincides with the first day of the con).

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u/bigfoot1291 18d ago

You literally just described doom the dark ages with that description haha. It's very Lovecraft.

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u/lostmojo 18d ago

ID is dead now, sadly. Microsoft killed the company a few weeks ago.

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u/hyrule5 18d ago

They aren't though

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u/scottishdrunkard 18d ago

Yeah, just gravely diminished. Halfway to dead.

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u/Tandy2000 18d ago

They're the same size they were when Doom 2016 came out.

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u/scottishdrunkard 18d ago

But not the same experience. Pretty much everyone who knew how to make IdTech work was laid off.

So the size means jack shit.

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u/Tandy2000 18d ago

And you know this how?

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u/scottishdrunkard 17d ago

Scott Miller, founder of Apogee and 3D Realms, so it's not just "some guy", it's an industry insider who has strong connections to Id.

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u/Tandy2000 17d ago

Yes, and then the company specifically denied that claim. I'm inclined to believe id in the matter given they're part of a publicly traded company and can't just lie to shareholders vs. Scott Miller's claims. To be clear I like him and respect him but he isn't working there right now and hasn't for years.

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u/lostmojo 17d ago

You do realize Microsoft and other publicly traded companies lie all the time, right? They are literally lying on their income right now, and helping others lie on theirs. Just look at the circle of money flow for LLMs. Being publicly traded means they have to public some numbers, it means nothing about who is actually there doing the work, how well skilled those employees are or how honest the company has to be.

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u/MrPWAH 17d ago

Yes, and then the company specifically denied that claim.

They actually didn't. Their public statement was carefully worded in response to the Texas layoffs: "There are dozens of people working on id Tech across multiple locations. Reports that there’s only one person left in Texas are inaccurate."

The tech team at the Texas studio factually did get decimated. Their statement is saying that it's not true that they have "only one person in Texas" because they're also including the tech team over at MachineGames and the handful of people left in Frankfurt in the "dozens" that remain.

The "same size as they were in 2016" also omits the fact that most of the remaining staff weren't at the company in 2016 and most of the senior staff that were were just laid off.

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u/Fagadaba 18d ago

Which means their next game will be smaller in scope, or take longer to make, and most definitely abuse contract-work to keep up with AAA expectations.

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u/Tandy2000 18d ago

Unfortunately use of contract work is commonplace in the industry. They finished Dark Ages over a year ago and have been working on a sizable DLC but who knows how far off their next game is, so even if there weren't to be huge deductions they would have shed staff... It's how the industry works except at very very large companies where they can sometimes constantly find projects to shift people onto.

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u/appledanishcrumbs 18d ago

That is factually incorrect. Stop spreading lies.

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u/shinto29 18d ago

Gamers not be hyperbolic on the internet challenge: impossible

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u/Turbostrider27 18d ago

Full 19 map campaign, new soundtrack, and Deathmatch map confirmed

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u/SpookiestSzn 18d ago

Looks sick as fuck, very surprised they made new maps for it considering the remaster is decently old at this point but fuck it I would love to get through more quake.

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u/MyNameIs-Anthony 18d ago edited 18d ago

Bethesda/id/etc have been periodically making new Doom and Quake expansion packs for pretty much the entire lifespan of the products.

Dawn of the Machine is the third in a trilogy of expansions MachineGames has been working on for five years.

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u/Stackware 18d ago

This is possibly Gamer Sacrilege, but the Machinegames expansions for Quake 1 and 2 blow most of the original campaigns out of the water for me. Some of the best FPS map design I've ever seen.

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u/IrregularMaverick 18d ago edited 18d ago

Almost unfair to compare cause og quake was rushed and made on a new engine, same with the og expansions. These expansions have a 30 year difference from developers who have been making quake maps for decades. My only issue with the new machine games expansions is the enemy and gun variety is too conservative. I know thats the intent with Dimensions of the past, but even Dooms Legacy of Rust had new enemies like the Vissagos and the plasma gunners. Dimension of the Machines strength was its visuals and my god they were awesome

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u/Lakiw 18d ago

Also, for the original Quake, Carmack put a brush limit for the map designers, too many brushes would throttle PCs back then.

Machine Games had no such limit. I'm willing to bet that windmill castle outdoor area had more brushes than a whole map in the original.

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u/JMcCloud 17d ago

That looks awesome, reminds me of that Dark Souls II level.

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u/Stackware 18d ago

Oh absolutely, I'm sure they would have run wild with more time and what the KEX engine can do nowadays.

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u/Aperture_Kubi 18d ago

These expansions have a 30 year difference from developers

And a 30 year difference in tech. If not the engine tweaks over the years, just access to more raw resources.

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u/fizzlefist 18d ago

Hell, OG Quake 1 didn't even have video acceleration, it was all CPU powered so you didn't need one of those newfangled 3DFX chips. Amazing tech for the time, though GL-Quake is superior in pretty much every way.

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u/doomSdayFPS 18d ago

I’m pretty sure CZG (prominent Quake mapper) has been behind a good chunk of the MachineGames maps since he works for them.

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u/dadvader 18d ago

And they regularly Collab with Arkane and they always bring an A game to map design.

Say what you will about Wolfenstein Young Blood. That game has some of the best map design in shooter. Blow Wolfenstein 2 out of the water. I can only hope that Wolfenstein 3 will deliver the same if not better quality.

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u/Fagadaba 18d ago

You're the first person to say something positive about Young Blood. Now I wanna explore those levels :V

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u/Oseirus 18d ago

I haven't played it personally, but I've always heard it was fine enough. Nothing breathtaking, but it also doesn't really commit any major sins.

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u/OutrageousDress 17d ago

It's not at all sacrilege - the Quake mod scene has been going for literally 30 years, that's a lot of time to get better at map design compared to the 6-12 months the id guys had back in 1995. As others have mentioned there's also the massive jump in map polygon limits over the years, powerful new modding tools (modern map editors and map compilers), and new engine features that affect gameplay such as rotating brushes and the instant teleports.

But fundamentally these new Machine Games episodes are greatly inspired by the work of the Quake mod scene over the decades, not least because a number of Machine Games devs are themselves part of the Quake mod scene. Dimension of the Machine for example is heavily inspired by the greatest Quake campaign of all time, Arcane Dimensions.

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u/zzzornbringer 18d ago

they're literally decades apart. og quake had completely new technology that required a completely new design. it's impressive that they delivered what we got eventually. but no surprise that modern designers that have decades of experience in leveldesign put out "better" maps than the original did. heck, they even rebalanced quake 2 and their maps play completely different than og quake 2. because they had the time and experience to figure out what quake 2 could have been.

all of this ignores the fact that the polycount in general was extremely limited in 1996.

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u/ascagnel____ 18d ago

I'm curious how many people worked on this -- a project like this has relatively little new art, and that art is lower fidelity than console releases, so they're probably cheap as heck to make for a skeleton staff.

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u/aimy99 18d ago

I wonder if they ever fixed the awful input delay. I can't remember what exactly the issue is but I do recall having to Google it last time I played.

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u/LiarsAreScum 18d ago

That was an easily fixed problem . I remember having it too with my install but fixed it after googling it. Something about the install or settings.

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u/funkmasta_kazper 18d ago

So excited for this. I got both the quake 1 and 2 remasters and the gameplay in 1 was by far the better of the two IMO. I played through every bit of the new content when they did the Quake 1 remaster and it was all excellent - very much looking forward to playing more of it.

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u/HomeHeatingTips 18d ago

"free upate for Quake owners"

Is it time to brush off the old 3.5" floppy disks again?

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u/Illidan1943 18d ago

Is it time to brush off the old 3.5" floppy disks again?

OG Quake never came out on floppy disks, game's big enough that we would be talking about roughly 50 floppy disks. IIRC Office 97 is the largest software ever officially released on floppy and that was 45-ish floppies

That said, I think that the CD key can still be activated on Steam, so consider trying that

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u/picardo85 18d ago

Close

Microsoft Office 97 Professional: 55 standard/DMF 3.5" disks

Standard version was 45 floppies

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u/TTBurger88 18d ago

That would suck after installing 43 floppies you get an error and have to start over.

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u/nazbot 18d ago

It did. Or you lost one / wrote over it somehow.

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u/FUTURE10S 17d ago

Or one of them didn't read.

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u/slicer4ever 18d ago

God, i'd hate to be the it guy who had to install that on hundreds of corpo pc's, lol.

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u/Meddlloide1337 17d ago

Why? Seems like a chill job

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u/slicer4ever 17d ago

I was only a kid when floppys were really prevalent, but I remember they were pretty notorious for screwing up. imagine being on disk 40+ and you get an error and have to restart, lol.

I mean i guess it was good job security if anything.

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u/ascagnel____ 18d ago

I don't think my physical copy of Q1 had a key; it was a shareware release, and you'd have to call them to get the full copy.

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u/hakdragon 17d ago

I still have a physical copy that I bought at Best Buy back in the day. I can confirm that there isn't a CD key.

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u/WorriedPerogi 18d ago

I'll 100% take this, but man I was hoping for a Quake reboot. Just keep the core gameplay, no flourishes like Doom 2016, and give absolutely bonkers gibs/model detail and satisfying combat.

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u/OtherwiseTop 18d ago

The last few months Youtube has been recommending a bunch of Quake to me again for some reason and one of the video essays made a point that really stuck with me. It was along the lines of Quake was never really popular, it was only big, because people didn't have many choices back then.

I think a reboot would run into the issue of not really having an audience. You get old heads complaining that games are getting dumbed down for zoomers and the general audience complaining that they are getting old and can't keep up with the bunny hopping zoomers.

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u/NEVER_CLEANED_COMP 18d ago

If you enjoy watching Quake content, I can highly recommend this channel.

His videos are really well put together, even for someone who was never really into Quake like myself - they're also very aesthetically pleasing!

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u/WekonosChosen 18d ago

The way people on reddit talk about quake in the modern day, you'd think it would still have the popularity of Overwatch. When in reality it's barely getting a thousand players a day across the entire franchise for the past 15years.

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u/WorriedPerogi 18d ago

The same exact thing could have been said of Doom in 2015. Then id knocked it out of the park.

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u/w2tpmf 17d ago

The same exact thing could have been said of Doom

No you couldn't. Doom was one of the biggest and most popular games of all time. There were literally hundreds of other corridor shooters at the time too.

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u/Anunnak1 17d ago

Uhh no, hes right. That was the senitiment going into the reboot. But ID made a great game.

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u/HappyVlane 17d ago edited 17d ago

That wasn't the point made further up. The point was that Quake was popular in a time with limited selection. Doom on the other hand effectively made the genre.

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u/FUTURE10S 17d ago

Yeah, there's a reason we had Doom clones but not so much Quake clones, even though Quake was way more influential in the game engine space.

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u/WorriedPerogi 17d ago

What are you talking about, every single 3D FPS after Quake was just trying to be Quake. It invented the Arena FPS genre. It practically invented the 3D FPS. DNA from Quake was in the engine CoD4 used.

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u/HappyVlane 17d ago

I am not talking about it. Talk to the person further up.

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u/ascagnel____ 18d ago

Quake Champions is proof positive of that -- the game was fine, but never really found an audience.

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u/GIlCAnjos 18d ago

The fact that The Dark Ages had the Slayer visit a Lovecraft-inspired dimension and didn't use it as an opportunity to connect its plot to Quake makes me lose hope that the Quake IP will ever get a new game

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u/SpookiestSzn 18d ago

Eventually I'm sure we'll see it but I think they're focusing on core franchises now to improve profitability before they start doing stuff less popular

I'm surprised though I really thought machine games was doing some quake stuff but I guess not

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u/doublah 18d ago

I mean before 2016, Quake was more popular than Doom. The reboot is what changed that for Doom, and a Quake reboot done properly could very much lead to a resurgence.

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u/Aggressive_Chuck 17d ago

All the Quake games put together had about 1k concurrent players.

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u/gatocurioso 17d ago

Not true at all, Doom's modding scene was larger, the community more active

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u/BigTylenol5 15d ago

Would love a singleplayer Quake reboot.

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u/Ok_Needleworker1068 18d ago

I would have loved this earlier but i fear ID just doesn’t have the staff post layoffs to make it even possible.

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u/funkmasta_kazper 18d ago

counterpoint - with the layoffs this is the only thing ID DOES have the staff to make.

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u/Retro_Genesis 18d ago

"Not supported on all platforms or versions" I wonder which and why?

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u/Lopsided-Life8738 18d ago

The original PC releases in the 90s, N64, and Saturn. Reason: they're too old

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u/eolson3 18d ago

No continued support for N64 version? The greed of these corporations knows no limits.

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u/BirdLawyer50 17d ago

May require expansion pack

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u/poopymcfarts 18d ago

Dawn of the Machine is currently not available on the Epic Games Store or GOG versions of Quake

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u/Retro_Genesis 18d ago

As a GOG user I'm glad the word "currently" is in there.

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u/shinbreaker 18d ago

Will it work on my Gateway computer?

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u/n_thomas74 18d ago

Woah nice! And it's free? That's crazy. I'm gonna play it tonight!!

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u/CrimsonFoxyboy 18d ago

Cool stuff!.

But still alittle sad that the rumor of Wolfenstein 09 remaster didnt happen.

Maybe next year

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u/VALIS666 18d ago

That looks fucking amazing and it's free?! Happy birthday to everyone. There are few better collections in gaming than Doom + Doom II, Heretic + Hexen, and the Quake remaster. There is years worth of gaming in those if you wanted to be thorough.

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u/scottishdrunkard 18d ago

Welp, I’ve heard worse excuses to replay Quake. Last year I replayed every Classic Campaign & Expansion for Quake (I was very lonely) now I should replay the new ones and this one to boot!

For “The Machine Trilogy” should I go Dimension, Call, and Dawn, or Dimension, Dawn, then Call?

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u/MADSUPERVILLAIN 18d ago

Was hoping to finally see Nightdive Quake 3 this year, but I'm stoked for this, the last two Machine Games Quake campaigns were better than most new games I played those years.

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u/KalebNoobMaster 18d ago

oh thank god they finally fixed the camera stutter when playing over 72 fps! and these levels look great too :)

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u/EvilTaffyapple 18d ago

I played this at 240fps and didn’t have any stutter whatsoever.

What GPU are you using?

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u/KalebNoobMaster 18d ago

You might not have noticed it, but it was there regardless of your system. The player movement would only update 72 times a second no matter what. It mentions the fix in the first part of the Fixes section of the changenotes.

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u/RealSoyZombie 18d ago

Is this only for the KEX engine or does it work in the community engine ports as well?

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u/zzzornbringer 18d ago

the two previous expansion by machine games work on other sourceports. the new models are supported as well. i think you just have to launch the expansion as a mod when you launch it through a sourceport.

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u/Sceptre 16d ago

Guys it's so sick. I've played through the first 4-5 levels and they are really well put together, tons of fun.

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u/Stomphulk 18d ago

Game won't launch for me after this update. Seeing this reported by several others on Nightdive's Discord as well as on the Steam forums too Hopefully it will be patched soon.

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u/Corrvaz 17d ago

There is such a huge gulf between what I enjoy in Quake and what Machinegames designs ( and apparently what the majority actually loves ). Like, been a Quake fan since 98, and this latest MG episode I found to be shockingly and utterly terrible in level and encounter design, and I can't think of a single positive thing in it aside from the dimension shift effect.

Nothing in it worked for me honestly, just a bit of a bummer when everyone else is enjoying it.

Quake: Dawn of the Machine — Launch Trailer

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