When I first got it I didnt like the multiplayer too much but more recent patches have totally fixed it! I'd say B+ / A
=== Now, on to the very angry and biased review of several months ago ===
I should have known. iD, Activision, and Raven Software team up again to make another game with expectations set so high, you can only be disappointed. Before I start, please let me express to you that I am definitely not a hater, and both Quake III Arena and Doom 3 were some of my favorite games of all time. I was just so miffed when I went to the store, and spent a whole fifty dollars on this game only to find out that it was a big bundle of hot steaming crap. The single player is fairly good, the multiplayer has the POTENTIAL to be very good once some good server-side mods are written for it, but right now, as an overall package, this game deserves a 6 out of 10 at best. This was the most disappointed I think I’ve ever been with an iD game. Downright awful.
There are three categories that I’m using to describe the shortcomings of this game: interface, graphics, and gameplay. Maybe some future patches can fix a lot of these inequities, but for now, I’ll let you read below exactly how and why this game sucks as bad as it does.
Interface:
Let’s start off with one of the most visible components of the game—the menu interface. It’s the first thing you see when you startup the game, and therefore creating a likeable and easy-to-use interface will go a long way towards improving the first impression of the game as a whole.
Unfortunately, the developers chose not to give a flying something about the interface. They instead, seem to have tried as hard as possible to create one of the worst excuses for a menu I have ever come across. It’s almost as if they wanted it to be unintuitive.
First of all, the mouse on the interface is incredibly fast, and very hard to actually click the buttons you want. It’s probably worse than the main menu for Halo PC, if anyone has experienced that atrocity. If you try to minimize the game to set down your mouse sensitivity in the Windows Control Panel, you will find that there is no way to minimize the game. Anyway, even if you exit the game, set down the mouse sensitivity, and get back into it, it won’t even affect the cursor in game.
Other things that always indicate the effort put into the game are the small details… for instance, the inclusion of an option to unbind mistakenly bound keys in the keyboard and mouse setup menu would have been nice. It was easier to just open the .cfg file with Notepad and bind all the controls manually. But I guess, nobody at Activision thought there would be much of need to change the controls from their defaults.
The multiplayer game list lounge is probably one of the worst attempts at such a feature, and is only superseded in its uselessness by that of Quake III Arena. Its lack of features and complicated filtering system makes you almost wish you’d flushed 50 dollars down the toilet rather than purchased this sorry excuse for a multiplayer game.
Right off the bat, as soon as you click on the Multiplayer button, it starts searching for one thousand servers. You can’t change this number, and you can’t cancel this search. If you do try to cancel the search, it will hang up your computer for several seconds, and then bring you back to the main menu… great. Now you realize that in order to play any multiplayer games, you have to just go back into Multiplayer, and just wait for it to load up the 1000 servers, which would probably take quite a while on anything lower than cable internet access. Note, that you of course cannot do anything wile the server list is loading because it brings even a high-end system to an outright crawl during this process.
Finally, the list of available servers is loaded and you want to play a particular game-type, such as CTF. You quickly find out that you can only sort the list by one category, so you can EITHER sort by game-type OR by ping, OR by number of players OR by map. Of course this is to be expected… why oh why would anyone want to see only servers of their desired game type that are neither empty nor full, that are at a decent ping, and that are running their desired map? I can’t imagine a situation where this would be useful .
What’s even worse, is that (remember) there is a list of ONE THOUSAND servers to scroll through and your mouse is EXTREMELY sensitive. It’s amazingly hard to try and scroll up or down without skipping tens or hundreds of servers at a time. “Well”, you say, “that’s fine… I will simply use the scroll wheel on my mouse to scroll up or down”. To your surprise, however unlikely as it may seem, yes—this game (which is released in the year 2005, mind you) has no support for scrolling with the scroll wheel! “Oh that’s okay”, you say, “I’ll just click the up or down arrow buttons at the top and bottom of the scroll bar”. Well, unfortunately, no such buttons exist. Hmmmmm… “Well that’s really a pickle”, you say, “but couldn’t we always click on one server in the list and just use the up or down arrow keys on your keyboard to move up or down?”. The answer is a resounding “NO”, as it seems the creators of this game were apparently unaware that arrow keys exist on keyboards.
Note that the lack of a search filter where you can enter keywords to try and shorten the list based on server name, map, etc does not exist either. The only possible way to filter your servers is by eliminating non-dedicated servers and/or servers not running PunkBuster. Since about ninety percent of servers use PunkBuster, you have little choice but to filter all the non-PB servers out of the list. And after you FINALLY scroll to and select a server that looks good, it starts the loading process but freaks out because you don’t have PunkBuster enabled. You would think that it should be enabled by default, given that the majority of servers use it, and won’t even let you join without it. So it kicks you back to the main menu and expects you to dig through the menus and enable it manually, without any reference to where that option might be.
You eventually find the option, enable it, and go back into Multiplayer happy in the assumption that you must be at least “close” to joining a server. Ohhh, but you assumed wrong! For it just so happens that you now have to download this list of one thousand servers AGAIN! And not only that, but all of your filter settings are reset back to default. Yes, it’s true… Q4 does not EVER remember any of your settings!!!
Okay, so with PB enabled, you put back all of your filter settings and try to hunt down that server that you attempted to join before. Well, due to the lack of a “history”, you can’t find it. You finally see one that looks interesting, and you try to join. You soon realize that it won’t let you join because that server is using some sort of mod (which almost ALL servers use, or will use as soon as more are written for this fledgling game). Your join process comes to a screeching halt and it informs you what mod the server is using. Note that, unlike almost every other 21st century game, Q4 does NOT automatically download the client-side mod information that will let you play. You have to physically go to their website, find the client mod files that they provide, and manually extract them to your Quake 4 directory, which of course requires a restart of the game.
Graphics:
The graphics are exceptional. And they run surprisingly smooth, even on high settings. I believe many improvements must have been made over Doom 3’s core, due to the fact that it runs amazingly fast. There’s not much to gripe about in the graphics department, but I did find a few things that were a bit disappointing:
1. Explosions often produce smoke that appears as many little balls of puff, rather than a continuous streak or cloud.
2. Instead of using 3D models in the distance to make the environment look more realistic, the use of simple 3D images provide somewhat of a corny-looking panoramic backdrop. Take a hint from Half-Life 2 and use cubemaps.
3. The flashlight flood area does not become oblique when cast on a surface from an angle. It’s always just an ovular orb of lightened area.
4. Shadows are still very hard-edged, which just subtracts from the realism of the game whenever you look at one. iD really needs to implement soft-edged shadowing, or integrate some HDR like the new Valve games (Lost Cost, etc).
By the way, for those that think Doom 3 and games based on the Doom 3 engine have dynamic shadows, look again. Go up to any object (especially noticeable on railings) and shine your flashlight on it. If you look closely at the resulting shadow, you will realize that it is not cast on the wall(s) behind it. In fact, it’s not cast on anything. The “dynamic shadows” in Doom 3 are nothing more than a semi-opaque, black instance of the object (railing or whatever) that is offset directly opposite of the object by about two or three “inches”. Nothing more; nothing less. The shadows are never actually “cast” on anything. It’s all an optical illusion… sorry to burst your bubble.
Gameplay:
The gameplay was quite good, however there were a few things I didn’t like, that are listed here:
1. Guns should lower when you point at friendlies and interactive panels so you know you aren’t going to shoot them when you click.
2. There should be a benefit in accuracy from crouching that is seen by a change in the size of your aiming reticle.
3. There is no way to see the health of your friendlies / squad members / team mates.
4. Should be able to jump-crouch to jump slightly higher like in Counter-Strike.
5. Lots of NPCs are the exact same character model.
6. Lots of different NPCs are voiced by the same voice actors.
7. Is it just me, or is there a split second delay after you click the mouse button before the railgun fires. I’m not talking about the long recharge delay, which is supposed to exist. It’s much harder to lead and get an accurate shot b/c the shot “should” be instantaneous, but there is a tiny delay. NOT GOOD in multiplayer.
8. BUT MOST ANNOYING: NPCs don’t get the hell out of your way when you walk at them. I got boxed in by this one idiot squad member who felt the need to stand one foot away from my face when he stopped following me. I couldn’t even shoot him, b/c the NPCs are invincible to friendly-fire, and the gun won’t even fire when pointed at them. I had to restart the level to continue, which just pissed me off. These developers just don’t pay attention to the details!!!