What are you reading this for? Nightdive’s rumored remaster of Quake II has been released, and you might already own it if you already had a version of Quake II on Steam or something. If the PC version is too good for you, then it’s also available on Xbox, Switch, and PlayStation platforms. What am I even writing this for?
Okay, because I’m expected to meet a certain word threshold to please the internet robots, I’ll tell you more. Bethesda and Nightdive dropped a remaster for the original 1996 Quake back in 2021, and it was an excellent source port of the classic game. It kind of felt like a similar Quake 2 remaster in the KEX Engine was an inevitability, but we only heard murmurings about it until today.
Quake 2 was initially released at the tail end of 1997, and featured a new, jazzed-up engine to take advantage of hardware acceleration. It wasn’t initially planned as a sequel to Quake, but gradually began shifting in that direction. Most notably, it has no narrative connection to the first game’s very loose story. Instead, it introduces a space war against the cyborg-like Strogg.
Quake is often considered to be the last game by id Software’s classic line-up. After some creative differences, a bunch of staff departed id, including John Romero. You can absolutely feel it in Quake 2, as it’s unusually cohesive for the studio. There was sort of a wild experimentation in early id games that kind of lags behind the technical wizardry in Quake II.
Okay, good enough? The Quake II remaster is now available on PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch. It includes all its expansions, as well as a port of the N64 version’s campaign. Cool, bye!
