Posted June 24, 2022
Kuroko: There are several major changes to the gameplay and maps in Enhanced edition and you would realise them instantly had you actually played Quake at all.
hfm: totally missed this reply but WHOA.. slow down there on the hyperbole. I bought Quake AT RELEASE and played A LOT in the 90's and early 2000s, I just hadn't played it in what.. 15-17 years? I wasn't a professional, just Threewave and Action Quake mostly toward the end. I suppose I didn't notice these nuances after that long just doing a complete SP run through this one time. It was a damn impressive port to KEX at just an SP run through. I suppose if you've been playing all along you'd definitely notice these things. Port to KEX engine is impressive and to be fair towards its developers, they've kept patching it with more content, added fixes to things which were broken and are likely to fix things that are still broken. But they broke a lot of things which never ever were issues and should've not been issues had they kept using the actual Quake engine. But their focus is clearly on the game consoles and gamepads in my opinion despite what they say.
I should add that I'm not a purist in a sense that only the id Software's original release is "good enough". There are plenty of great source ports which do great justice for the Quake. And I'd warmly recommend for example people to play with a fork of the original Quake engine, Quakespasm engine or its excellent fork vkQuake which showcases number of improvements that can be made without breaking things completely.
And the sad irony? vkQuake was made by Axel Gneiting, an id Software employee who was credited as the principal engine programmer for the id Tech 6 and Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal. Bethesda could've asked for that to be the foundation for the re-release.