Quake II (2023)

Quake II
Developers: id Software, Night Dive Studios, MachineGames Publisher: Bethesda Softworks Platforms: Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X Released internationally: August 10, 2023 This game has unused areas. This game has a prerelease article

Quake II is the sequel to (if you can believe) Quake. This game has a lot more of a mission aspect to it, but is still mostly fight monsters with many guns. The 2023 Remaster has all the improvements Quake's 2021 Remaster did, along with new models, AI improvements, and an entire id Vault to show things from Quake II's development. It also includes the Nintendo 64 version of Quake II as a playable campaign, if you prefer those levels.

To do: Check the "old" maps folder. It consists of pre-release/development maps from the original game's development that aren't in the Id Vault. Speaking off which, should those maps be documented in a development article for the original game's page? dupes.txt; According to engine dev Paril, "it was an output from a script I wrote to migrate unused textures into the unused/ folder". There is probably more than just unused maps.

Test Levels

As before with Quake, this remaster also got a lot of test maps bundled along with it.

To do: The "mal" maps are all about Bot Stuff. See how bots handle them, and be sure to use the nav_edit cheat when taking screenshots.

test/base1_flashlight

A very early version of the remaster's version of Outer Base (the first map of Quake 2), whose only difference to the retail version of Quake II is the addition of level transition anchors. As the name suggests, entering and leaving the dark crouch-only crawlspace automatically enables and disables the flashlight used in some of the other campaigns in the remaster. This particular test map was put together by Paril to demonstrate the feature to MachineGames.

test/gekk

A mostly empty map, with two cubes you can push. With the first cube, it displays the text for the Congratulations screen. The second cube turns off the text.

This particular map ("gekk") was originally used created by Paril to test the new boss health bar feature, and contained two Gekks whose displayed name was "Gekk Brothers". During development, this particular .map file was used as a dumping ground for testing various other features just out of convenience, and the last feature tested in this map was a special target_story entity, used in the Call of the Machine campaign, to display text on screen until the game is ended.

test/mals_barrier_test

An enclosed room, with two box formations you can climb up. There's (rudimentary) stairs up to a teleporter on a ledge, that teleports you down to a platform under the ledge.

The "Mal" in the filename references John "Maleficus" Dean, an AI programmer at Id who wrote the remaster's bot system.

test/mals_box

It's just an enclosed room with the Super Shotgun, Hyperblaster, and Rocket Launcher placed on the ground. The four corners have two lights on each. with nav_edit on, there's 9 nodes placed evenly, with all 9 connected to each other. Playing this in multiplayers add two platforms for players to spawn, and the bot just goes in-between the 9 nodes.

test/mals_ladder_test

An enclosed room, around the same size as barrier_test, with a ladder up to a ledge with a teleport, which brings you back down. Behind where you spawn are stairs that bring you to a different ledge, where there's a ladder that doesn't reach the ground floor. The nav_edit shows its MEANT to have the bot jump and go up the floating ladder, down the stairs, up the ladder to the ledge, then use the teleporter. In-game, the bot gets stuck on top of the spawn platform and shoots at nothing. Trying to load this in Co-op mode just straight up crashes the game.

test/mals_locked_door_test

An enclosed room, with a door and a blue key. Above the door is text saying "What's on the other side of this door?" and above the key text saying "Grab this key to open door". Grabbing the key causes the text above it to disappear. Opening the door gives you an objective to "Locate Unit Exit and kill all resistance." There's a BFG10K in the room, along with an Iron Maiden with blue text saying "Shoot her" above her. Killing her causes the text to go red and say "She's Dead Jim!".

test/paril_health_relay

A rectangular room with a Hornet inside of it. This map showcases the new health relay entity, which can fire targets when a particular monster reaches a certain threshold of health. The map is designed to fire off three targets when the monster reaches 100%, 50% and 0% health *after* being damaged, respectively, and to ensure that all three targets fire even if the monster is over-killed from a single shot.

The "paril" in the filename refers to Jonathan "Paril" Barkley, a long-time Quake modder and programmer at Night Dive who worked on the remaster.

test/paril_ladder

A rectangular room, with no baked lighting. There's a hole with a ladder down to an area with shallow water. Further ahead is a ladder, which you must switch to a ladder higher up behind you to get onto the ledge. This map was used to test the new ladder behaviors in the re-release - mainly to make sure that existing movement options are possible via controller and not too difficult to accomplish (relative to PC players).

test/paril_poi

A room with skybox access as the roof texture. There's a door on the wall, along with two switches, one of which is behind bars. In-between these two switches is text saying "Simple, linear objectives can just use chains of trigger_help's or target_poi's". Hitting the switch that's out in the open moves the bars in front of the other switch. If you wait too long, these bars will go down and you won't be able to access the switch. The switch opens the door to another room, which contains 6 switches on the left and right (3 each) walls. The game gives you a secondary objective to "Follow the text to enlightment." The objective test bleeds off the sides of the computer UI.

This map was made to show off the new Compass feature to Machine Games and give them test scenarios for the different ways POIs were set up in the other campaigns.

The 'text of enlightment' as the game puts it says:

Teamed POIs provide flexibility for objectives with multiple steps.

The lowest style is always the highest proirity among a triggered group of POIs.

Killtargetting is used to remove potential POIs from the list of valid POIs.

A dummy POI acts as the central point of activation.


Note that both sides of this wall can be done in any order;

the POIs will figure themselves out.

Once both sides are complete, the style key on the next POI is higher than the ones in this room, so even fi they are triggered again, they won't take effect.

Pressing the switches on the left say "2 more to go", "1 more to go", "Sequence Completed". Pressing the switches on the right do the same sequence. Once all the switches are pressed, the text disappears and a door behind it opens.

More text is displayed here:

That's basically it for linear & split objectives.

You can set the NEAREST flag on teamed POls, and

the game will always pick the one that is closest

(navigatable) distance to the player The DYNAMIC flag on teamed POIs will

cause the paths to get checked every time compass is used

test/paril_scaled_monsters

It's an enclosed rectangular room that shows a feature of being able to scale monsters. There's a few that are made tiny, and a few made bigger.

test/paril_soundstage

A very long room with a wall blocking you off from walking down it. There's three teleporters, that all activate a sound test for distance scaling of volume.

test/paril_steps

A small room with skybox set as the walls. On the floor are multiple different materials, to test the sounds of footsteps. The materials are steel, water, grate, dirty water?, grass, concrete, and barrier.

test/paril_waterlight

A long dark room with water set as the floor. There are two lights set down, one blue and one green, to test lightmaps with liquid textures - a new feature to this engine - and to track down a particular lightmap corruption bug that occurred early in development.

test/skysort

A room with a block of skybox. This map was specifically designed to showcase a bug in the engine, where sky surfaces "in the world" are rendered visually, unlike other Q2 engines which cull them out due to the special technique used for rendering it. This bug still exists in this form, but was worked around via special load-time code to remove non-solid sky surfaces that exist inside of the world.

test/spbox

A large box with a low-gravity pad, a small box with some lightmapped water, and two dividing walls preventing some Guards from seeing the player. Going near the Quad pickup near the start causes the music to change and one of the Guards to become alert. Has two doors with hallways leading to spbox2.

This map was created by Mike Rubits to test new single player features, such as level transition landmarks, health multipliers and dynamic CD track changing.

test/spbox2

Connects to spbox with two hallways. The doors to these hallways clip through the walls when opened. This map is mostly empty excluding these hallways and an open room. Strangely, the viewmodel lighting is completely broken and always dark. Many parts of the walls and floor are completely dark (though shots from the blaster will temporarily light it up), while other parts are completely bright.

This map was created by Mike Rubits to test level transition anchors (connected to spbox via changelevel).

test/test_jerry

A moodily-lit pair of Base-themed rooms with a door between them. A rocket launcher sits in front of the player spawn, illuminated by a spotlight overhead.

"jerry" is Jerry Keehan, the Mission Design Director on Id's level design team.

test/test_kaiser

A short Base-themed level with a couple of Guards and Enforcers and several items, testing several graphical features added in the remaster like dynamic shadows, height fog and glowmaps.

"kaiser" is probably... Kaiser, shockingly enough.

test/tom_test_01

A single Base-themed room with the player spawning on a Y-shaped catwalk with a shotgun pickup. All entrances above and below are sealed up.

"tom" is Tom Perryman, the Combat Designer on Id's level design team.

Old Maps

The maps folder has a subdirectory called "old". According to one of the developers at Night Dive, this contains several old maps from Id's development archives that couldn't be added to the Id Vault for Reasons, but could be snuck into the PAK file for tinkerers to find.

To do: Can somebody more familiar with Q2 dissect these?

old/baseold

A large, empty Base-themed map with zero enemies, items or scripting. Just a lot of static geometry. Outdoor hallway was seen in Quake 2's earliest Screenshots. Bits and pieces were later used in the final game's Base3 map.

old/city2_4

An earlier, rougher version of the geometry for City2, without any enemies, items or scripting. A mix of both the city2 and city3 from the final game as areas from here appear in both. There is a room with a big crystal that is otherwise unmentioned and unseen in the final game. Beneath that is an area with an opening in the roof to see the crystal.

old/fact1

Not an early version of the final game's fact1. Vast majority of the layout is not seen in the final game. Player spawns in a machine with pipes before running through an indoor factory area ending in a pipe returning the player to the map facthub, though it crashes. The lava draining 'puzzle' from the final game's fact1 appears here, which included a second exit back to facthub. The player was intended to drop into this map similar to Base3 in the final game as the facthub map has a pipe the player uses to drop into the map.

old/fact2

Not an early version of the final game's fact2 map. Mixture of outdoor and indoor factory environments with moving factory objects. There is an inactive turret type brush structure in one of the later outdoor areas. Layout entirely unseen in the final game. The player spawns next to an exit back to facthub, this is the only exit in the map.

old/fact3

Not an early version of fact3 from the final game. Similar in style to old/fact2. Mixture of both outdoor and indoor factory environments. Small enemy trap shortly before entering the factory at the beginning of the map. Inside, there is lots of moving brush machinery. At one end of the map there is a room that is a very early version of the Reactor room from Power2 in the final game. Otherwise, the layout is entirely unseen in the final game.

old/facthub

Early version of fact1 from the final game. Same layout as seen in various early screenshots and footage. Layout is similar, though a more open than the final game. Features the later removed exits for the extra factory levels. The pipe drop in the opening hallway takes you to old/fact1 instead of the water Barracuda Shark room like in the final game. This also means there is no door or lasers blocking the outside area of the map unlike in the final game. The outside area lacks both the railgun secret and the secret level entrance (though the waterfall is present). The destructed bridge area is entirely different than the final game. The secret room at the end of the stage exists but is open and contains nothing, the button used to open it in the final game does not exist here.

old/hangarold

Early version of the hangar2 map from the final game. Though the flow is the same, the layout is entirely different. While the final game's map was designed by Christian Antkow, it is entirely possible this original draft was created by American McGee, aka Tokay, as this map would later serve as a base for the multiplayer map Tokay Towers. There is a room that features brush aircraft that look similar to the Tie Bombers from Star Wars.

old/kmdm3

A map clearly intended for deathmatch, with three strange rotating platforms in the central area, clearly intended to fling unwitting players around or dunk them in lava. No item pickups appear to be present.

old/pjtrain1

An earlier version of Train. Monsters are present and accounted for. Similar to the version seen in early screenshots. There is an expanded area past where the map original ends that includes a layout otherwise unseen in the final game.

old/ware1

An earlier version of Ware1. Monsters are present and accounted for, and present a nasty ambush the moment you spawn in.

old/xcommand5

A very early version of Launch Command. This map was visible in pre-release screenshots given to news sites. This map would have been where Launch Command is in the retail version of the game (the map "command") and follows the same basic concept - a computer core, protected by some sort of field, needs to be destroyed before continuing onto the city unit. This map ended up being split into two - Launch Command and Outlands - with only the end pieces of the map being re-used for Outlands and the beginning of the map being used for Launch Command.

64-Player Maps

The following maps are included in the PAK file, but are not hooked up to appear in the level select (presumably on account of their size) and have had no enhancements made. They were originally officially released by Id Software via FTP as experimental maps to push the limits of the era's clients and servers.

• Base64 - The Strogg Base by Tim Willits
• City64 - Courts at War by Jennel Jaquays
• Sewer64 - The Sewers of Stroggos by Christian Antkow

Platform Differences

Owing to hardware limitations on PlayStation and Switch, the Xbox Series X|S and Windows versions of the game feature exclusive 8 player split-screen.