Today (albeit with some debate) marks the 25th Anniversary of Quake III Arena, and the 20th Anniversary very first Half-Life 2 mod, JBMod which soon after lead to Garry’s Mod of course. This is freshly off the heels of the anniversary of Half-Life 2 and even DOOM 3 (which we haven’t mentioned yet, forgive us!).

To be honest with you all, we are overcome with a mixture of emotions: One of joy / disbelief our favorite games are so retro now, and concern over their future.

In advance, we are sorry for a news post like this instead of some cool event, there was quite a few reasons for this. Both personal, and later we’ll get to the well, technical… of sorts.

What’s With Games Like Quake III Arena?

Quake III’s lack of intergration with modern gaming social services and recognition from it’s own company makes getting the community together a difficult one.

It was already fragmented years before with Quake Live, before that game found itself in an identity crisis.

The community has done an amazing job at making these games open, ioQuake3 is the way to play Quake III on modern systems, no old hacks or bad code! Yet… you would think a game with an open stable engine with stable community master servers would have a stable sizeable playerbase, and perhaps they do. But, the current online session for new users goes like this:

1. Join a seemingly occupied Quake 3 server
2. Notice that your fellow “players” are acting strange
3. Recieve no feedback, yet the “bots” frag away
4. Half the other players are in spectator
5. Leave confused and or uncomfortable

The oddest thing about these “ghost” servers is their purpose, all we can think of is they must have been around to bad-faith-boost player stats on really antique trackers like GameSpy or more maliciously, boost e-sports stats.
Perhaps it is just some mistake and someone has left a number of broken servers running they have forgotten about. Regardless, it doesn’t matter, these servers SUCK and the experience is bad, it leaves people with a bad taste in their mouth where people think this is all Q3 is now. It’s kind of ironic too considering the game came built in with bot support, and it was great too.

There also isn’t a great way to browse and play the 25 years worth of maps and custom content within the game itself. Quake has QuakeInjector, Half-Life 2 now has Workshop, yet there is no built in downloader for services like LvLworld, one of the greatest and oldest surviving Quake III map archives. Managing custom content for open source games is still somewhat of a problem. How do you expect a newbie to understand that they just need to go LvLworld and install the PK3 without any introduction the base concept itself?

We could list off more issues here, but this isn’t meant to be a wall of shame and blame, it’s more about a realization or a wake up call if you will.

There are a few other ways of addressing this - projects like ioQuake3 should be complemented with a side that’ll make it more accessible. Selecting widescreen resolutions still isn’t a thing because no engine port wants to touch the default menu. There are problems worth solving there on both social and technical levels. We may not have all the answers yet, but maybe we can all have a discussion about building some sort of Community Edition which seems to work for some other games.

Will a remaster attempt to address these things? Maybe, but if it’s anything like the last efforts the community will no doubt still need to “do it’s own thing”, and do it well as that will always outlive any closed solution by a corporation. Speaking of corporations doing closed source remasters…

20 Years Of A “Half Life”

Half-Life 2 turned 20 years old last month. That is scary to us. That stupid old expression, “feels like yesterday” is only too true. Some of us here remember getting the limited edition for Christmas with big box and hat with t-shirt to boot. One of us personally wore that for years till it disappeared under mysterious circumstances…

Point is, we at Frag-Net are die hard fans. These games were our lives in a way. We built entire friendships, lovers, enemies, and even marriages (some still persist today) from these silly online entertainment products. We aren’t alone either, the amount of videos and content we and graciously others have archived documents countless communities and lives of players.

In a sad and deeply troubled world, games have always been a way to provide expression, understanding of problems, and even exchange ideas, much like the art and entertainment before it, just in a much much more impactful and direct way.

What Now?

The last ten years for the Source community, if we had to describe it, had also been one of self-realization about preservation and legacy.

Half-Life 2 has seen so many updates, being one of the first auto-updated games. From day one players were kind of forced to “move forward”. For the most part, this was actually a welcomed change believe it or not…

…because back then, installing patches was a pain. You needed to manually go online and grab installer files or wait for an update disc, and some games such as the first Half-Life had a separate tool that assisted you through the main menu. But the experience was always a bit messy. Steam really changed all that.

Recently we worked on our own video to highlight the past twenty years of mods that were created, and it was a chore to install and get running most mods, if they even do. The number of problems and pre-setup are extensive, ranging from installing different versions of not so small sized Source SDK, to running specific versions of Proton on Linux, to mods not loading due to some Steam API breakage (and we have a fix thanks to bt and mv). Still, hacks upon hacks with tons of wasted space with almost every source mod on steam containing an entire copy of Half-Life 2’s content! This is not sustainable for much of a playerbase, especially not for multiplayer mods, and it impacts users on all platforms to boot.

Thankfully, people have been having a go at converting mods, whether it is their own or mods they were fond of. Of course, the quality tends to be of varying degree, especially as Valve keeps updating their game default behaviour changes, it’s hard for hobbyists/tinkerers to keep up, and who can blame them? It’s not their fault.

A good addition to Half-Life 2 has been the Workshop, although it’s still a very messy affair of re-uploads. Time will tell if it becomes the desired destination for addons over places like GameBanana. We definitely appreciate it, as Valve has a good track record with hosting this sort of content.

Going forward though it would appear obvious that the path is Free and Open Source if we want any chance of Half-Life 2’s historic content surviving into the long future. With the year 2038 approaching rapidly and causing more issues with 32-bit programs, it will become less desirable to run the original binaries on raw hardware.

As no doubt you can tell, we will try to solve some of the problems mentioned above in our way, but this is something we can all contribute to. Even if you’re simply archiving files and/or organizing them on archive.org, or documenting games and mods while they still work - you’re all doing an important part in keeping some of our history alive.

Let us know what you think in the Chat.