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.

All games exist somewhere on a spectrum between experiences closely controlled by the designer and something more player driven. We can imagine on either end of this spectrum Doom (1993) and Doom Eternal. For the most part Doom keeps a close hand on the player. If the designer wants to change the experience of a level, or just a particualar section of it, they have a lot of levers they can pull. As an example of a gentle shift away from this, Heretic (1994) makes the modest change that players don't use powerups instantly, but can carry them around and choose when to use them. This emphasises player choice, but at the expense of the designer having a rough idea of where a given power up will be used.

Near the other end, nu-doom shifts a huge amount of the burden of level design onto the player instead. Healh and ammunition can be found on the ground, but the intended play experience is that in any given fight the player's health and ammo will pinball between scarcity and abundance quickly and multiple times per fight. A comically large amount of supplies would need to be placed in any given arena to account for this and what is there is intended mostly as an emergency option. The player principally gets their health, armour and ammuntion then by killing enemies with particular special moves. The end result of this is that any given fight feels about the same as any other with little continuity of health and ammuntion between them. When the player is expected to control their own health and ammo that way, its extremely hard for a designer to really have any control over the experience. There is a singular intended experience promoted by the game's mechanics; the player experience conforms to that at nearly all times and is worse for it.

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 powerup placement and ammo availability. 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. Doom has an infinite melee attack and a beserk damage upgrade for it that can save ammo; any player can simply make the choice to save a paticular ammo type for some future moment that will never come and there's not a damn thing the designers can do but grit their teeth and whinge. (I am the whinger in this scenario if that wasn't clear.)

All that said, the pistol pushes this too far for my taste. It's 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. If we take it as a given that we want the player to get stuck in and engage with the enemies we've placed in the level, 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 sit back and clean house. Q1's pathfinding is not sophisticated a lot of the time to make its many melee enemies effective in more complex spaces. Map design can mitigate this to some degree, but it is not a reasonable thing to do to e.g. forcibly lock the player into every room they stray into, that would get boring and samey very quickly.

What the pistol does do is make these play patterns dramatically easier (its a far better weapon than the default Q1 shotgun) and make it free. Even if a player did sit back in Q1 and plink with a shotgun, it still cost ammo. As a designer, if you have some ideal ammunition balance in mind, no you don't. Different players are going to take a radically different approach, some won't use it at all, some will scrape every bullet they can from the thing some will land somewhere in the middle. Its easy to say that we just shouldn't account for those players. If they want to ruin their game or at least play in a way we consider unfun, just let them. I reject that. The best thing about the kind of designer driven experience I described earlier is the sense that you're in dialogue with another human being, that they designed a maze for you to wriggle twist through in particular fucked up ways. There's a difference between accepting that free will means no player will experience your level exactly as you intended or that Q1 isn't a game that can force you to play in a particular way, and actively adding a weapon that promotes poor behaviours.

Do you want nu-doom? This is how you get nu doom.

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 or ammo cost. This shift is comparible to the introduction of Doom 2's super shotgun, 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.

Still, upping the pace and intensity isn't an inherently misguided idea. I do like the new and returning weapons. Stronger role differentiation in paticular puts more onus on the player to make smart decisions on weapon use mid fight.