Flak Cannon

-low ammo consumtion

-bouncing projectiles

The Flak Cannon is a replacement for both of Quake's shotguns. Itself a shotgun, but with a much wider horizontal spread than either of the base game conical spread weapons. It tends to shine either at extreme close range, where few or no pellets miss and you have a strong chance of causing the enemy mob to flinch, or at slightly longer range against clusters of horizontally spaced enemies. The large number of pellets causing stun means it can be used at longer ranges, but will drop off significantly in DPS and take far more ammunition. Its output is definitely stronger than the Super Shotgun. For comparison it can kill a death knight in 3 shots, vs 5 for the SSG. Not only that, the SSG takes 2 ammo per shot, where the FC takes 1, making it both stronger and more ammo efficient. Its very easy when mapping to flood the player's inventory with shells, it takes a long time to go through it.

The FC's pellets bounce off walls up to 2 times, doing less damage after bouncing. In tight areas this mitigates the larger horizontal spread a little, as the spillover pellets have a chance of still finding a target. It also opens up a few encounter and map design approaches. It can fire around corners to some degree with the bounce and there's almost certainly a few novel ideas out there involving hidden buttons and targets.

Twin Nailguns

-Medium Damage Output

-Effective at short to medium/long range

-high ammo consumption

The Nail Gun/Super Nail Gun in base Quake are fine, but really long and widely recognised as being far too similar (the SNG is just an NG with faster ammo consumption and higher DPS). Some mods try and fix this directly (Copper makes the SNG far less accurate over long rangers), but QBJ3 opts to simply merge them. The result is an automatic projectile weapon with a fire rate somewhere between the NG/SNG. There's not a lot to add here, its a pretty strong all rounder, being usable at pretty much all ranges and limited mostly by chewing through ammo pretty quickly. A solid addition.

Rebar Cannon

-Strong burst damage

-Effective at short-medium range

-penetrating projectiles

Another New Addition. This shares ammo with the new nail gun and fires large rebar spikes in a gentle arc (the metal bars that are put in concrete as reinforcement). These pierce through enemies, I think unlimited times, doing enough damage to kill all low tier enemies and do a chunk of damage to mid tiers. To compensate, it has a relatively slow reload animation, and a relatively (compared to the nail launcher) slow projectile. I suspect this is probably the highest skill weapon of the roster, making it quite unpredictable to plan around when mapping. It takes ten nails per shot, but that's quite an investment for something that in the hands of less skilled player is going miss quite a bit more and waste that ammo, and in the hands of a skilled player could save a lot of ammo over the nailgun by getting multiple kills or damage instances with it. The main problem I think is that to get the most from its penetrating property, you need to consistently be lining up 2 or more enemies. A lot of whether you can do that is down to map and encounter design, but it is also just hard to do. I often found myself just defaulting to using the ammunition on the nailgun instead. It has about an equivalent effect but is a more straightforward and consistent use of your ammo a lot of the time.

Overall its an interesting weapon, but maybe a little underpowered. I could see some maps designed around it (or perhaps just not giving you the nailgun) being interesting, but those are never going to be the default.

Grenade Launcher)

The Grenade Launcher was born nearly perfect in 1996 and so has remained unchanged except for cosmetics.

Multi Mini Missile Launcher (MMML)

- Strong Burst Damage

- Ammo hungry

The MMML is an interesting addition, replacing the rocket launcher. The RL wasn't strictly better than the grenade launcher in Q1, the utility of bouncing grenades off walls and around corners was always useful. Even so, if you weren't doing that, the RL was normally quicker and more reliable way of using up your explosive ammo. A fast moving projectile that goes in a straight line is just an easier tool to manage, so it was easy to slip into leaning on it over the GL.

The MMML is something of a horizantal move then. It fires 8 micro-rockets in a quick volley, which cannot be cancelled once it begins (so watch for splash and monsters running into close range). It then has a reload animation before it can be fire again. This volley takes 4 ammo and its damage is roughly equivalent to 4 GL canisters. One volley will kill a vore outright. 4 grenades from the GL will do the same, but will put out that damage much more slowly. This, combined with the brief reload leaving the player vulnerable during the downtime makes the weapon excellent at putting out high burst damage. Conversely, it has weaker splash and a smaller radius on each of its missiles, making it weaker and much less ammo efficient at dealing with large crowds than the GL.

I like this addition a lot. It fills out a niche that wasn't really well explored by the default arsenal, but still has distinct enough drawbacks that it doesn't overwhelm the other options. Good stuff.

Pistol

- Unlimited ammunition

- Low-medium power

- Effective at short-medium range

- How do I delete this from the game

Cards on the table, I don't like the pistol. Its not the quality of its model, animations or sounds (which like the vast majority of the mod, are excellent). Its what it gives to the player and takes from the experience.

Something I really enjoy about the ID style FPS is their similarity to survival horror games. Both have strongly designer guided experiences. They control pacing, mood and tone not just through encounter design and set dressing, but through ammo availability and resource placement. The tone is different in Survival Horror of course, but it has that same tension of feeling like you might run out of ammo, while in reality just about enough has usually been placed for you to get by. This is the ideal of course and few games actually live up to that, these are games and player input into what and how well they do is important. Resident evil games typically struggle to account for player choice past the halfway mark and so lean harder into action. Early ID games typically err on the side of caution and lean more towards flooding the player with ammo rather than being stingy.

All that said, The pistol is an infinite ammo weapon that's accurate beyond ranges at which virtually all enemies in quake unable to target the player. This is not strictly a new problem to quake. It has always been possible for player to fall into boring patterns of play, sitting back and engaging at long distances or letting enemies slowly funnel through chokepoints while sitting back and clean house. Map design can mitigate this to some degree, but it can't eliminate it entirely without severely limiting the kinds of encounters it can present the player.

The pistol greatly exacerbates these poor play patterns, while greatly weakening the designer's control over pacing and ammunition supply. I have seen the defence that if players really want to play in boring ways, we should just let them, and only cater to the those more willing to engage with the game more closely. I reject that. It is of course true that no experience is immune of the player's ability to strip the fun from it, but that doesn't mean that game designers should abdicate any responsibility to try and make sure players have the experience they're trying to create. If you give gamers a cannon aimed directly at their own feet, you should expect them to fire the cannon.

Final thoughts

The power of the player's arsenal has increased. The baseline weapons are stronger than the Q1 equivalents and the rest of the new additions fill out some of the space not covered in the original weapons. If the baseline player is stronger, you need stronger challenges to meet them too. The expanded roster helps with this, but in general low level encounters are either squeezed out or made less consequential. The pistol is also a big factor in squeezing out these low level fights, demolishing low level enemies with little risk and no ammo cost. This shift is comparible to the introduction of Doom 2's super shotgun, there the encounters had to dramatically increase the numbers of low tier enemies and add several mid and high tier enemies to keep up with the player.

Upping the pace and power level is no inherent sin of course, even if its not always to my taste, but it is a significant and noteworthy shift. All the new weapons are fantastically modelled and animated, and the new weapons are greatly appreciated, especially those that fill out some of the gaps in the original roster.