hfm: Also, the "enhanced" version uses the Nightdive KEX engine, but I have to admit I've been replaying it from scratch (I own it over on Steam, not here..) and I honestly can't tell the difference aside from just the ease of running it on a modern system.
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. First of all the movement is different. Player moves faster forwards than in original Quake and player moves slower when moving backwards than in original Quake. This affects the strafe circling and monster prioritisation making some sections easier and some more difficult to pull through.
The origin point for mouse movement feels like it's been moved and seems to be different now. It's been probably moved from the middle of the player model to the beneath the foot and back of the model like it's in Unreal engine. This makes it easier to control the viewpoint with gamepads which is why they probably did it. But it feels really strange.
The in-game physics are slightly different and some of the jumping tricks don't seem to properly work although most of them do. Because of the increased forward speed and having the origin point likely moved where it should be it's actually easier to pull some of the jumps now.
Talking about the jumps... monsters behave differently now and there are more jumps down and up than in normal Quake I think.
There's a huge amount of input lag also in the Enhanced edition no matter what hardware you use, which operating system you have, it just feels like playing drunk. This is especially annoying in the multiplayer modes in enhanced release.
There's probably something strange going-on with the mouse accel/deaccel now and at least I haven't been able to figure out how to make it accept raw input from mouse. Again... this is probably something to do with making the game easier to play on gamepads which makes the game less comfortable to play for keyboard and mouse users.
Then there's a weird walls distortion thing something that deaccelerates player movement which is unlike what it is in the original game as far as I remember but haven't tested it enough to be certain. Normally it would accelerate player to strafe against the walls just slightly enough to make some interesting jumps for example.
Nightmare difficulty has been adjusted so that HP is gapped at 50HP now. And that makes it easier to play through the game on Nightmare than it used to be.
Some of the levels have been adjusted and probably the most notably e2m6's opening is vastly different. They took the incomplete and unfinished section that was cut out from the final game and added it back in. While it was made by Romero during development of Quake, it was cut out because it made the level larger than 1,44MB limit they self-imposed for artistic reasons. As far as I know it wasn't due to any technical limitations.
Multiplayer is now moved to Bethesda's own servers and the enhanced edition has crossplay feature allowing game consoles to play against the PC players. It's not compatible with Quakeworld and has absolutely silly amounts of latency. During these few days I've never seen lag below 130ms. I presume that the nearest EU servers are somewhere in Germany and I have to play on those from a Nordic country.
And more and more and more... some of the most notable non-gameplay things that people should be aware is that enhanced edition has a different EULA to the regular Quake which prohibits e.g. modding basically.
The Enhanced edition also incorporates telemetry you cannot disable. It will send at least all the menu movements to the Bethesda, every setting you do, every console command you input to KEX engine and also your physical location as accurately as possible (presumably for matchmaking purposes) but it collects a lot of information.
There are a lot of bugs and glitches. My favourite so far is that it's possible to glitch the new weapon wheel that slows down in-game time while it's open in such a manner that even if the weapon wheel isn't open the game will run in slow-motion mode until player dies and respawns.
By the way some of the save games aren't precise now and if you save your situation and keep loading the same game the monsters move and their location isn't saved properly. Or at least I experienced that with the new quick save quick load functionality.
It's also fairly easy to make the enhanced edition to crash. It has a buggy Vulkan API implementation it defaults to and that causes some issues for some of the users.
