After plenty of rumours, the Quake II remaster has been announced and released during QuakeCon 2023, with a sweeping set of visual enhancements to the classic 90s FPS, and even a brand new campaign by Wolfenstein developer MachineGames.
Quake II is out now on PC, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. PC and Xbox gamers can also grab it from Xbox Game Pass if they’re subscribed, and anyone that owns the game already via Steam, GOG and the Microsoft Store has a free upgrade to the enhanced edition, and still play the original version if they prefer.
Similar to the Quake remaster from 2021, this is an all-encompassing release that bundles the original game with the two original mission packs: ‘The Reckoning’ and ‘Ground Zero, as well as an all-new ‘Call of the Machine’ expansion by Machine Games. Between them all there’s a nice round 100 campaign levels (not accounting for how they are often grouped together in a non-linear fashion).
But wait, there’s more! There’s also the campaign from Quake II 64. This version of the game for N64 had a new campaign that blended new levels and some levels taken from the PC mission packs.
All of this can be played in both local and online co-op for up to four players, with crossplay enabled by a room code system.
Unsurprisingly, the game runs at the maximum resolution of every platform it’s on, up to 4K, and either 60fps on the last generation, or at 120fps on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
There’s been a number of improvements to the game engine made so that, while the visual style and core assets are practically the same as the original, the fidelity is significantly improved. It stops short of adding in ray tracing, though, which was custom-built for Nvidia’s RTX GPUs.
You can read all about it here, but the graphical improvements include:
- Improved Luxel Density
- Light Grid Support
- Texture Independent Lighting
- Baked Ambient Occlusion
- Phong Shading
- Translucent Materials
- Lit Liquids
- New Skeletal Animation (from original animation files)
- Glowmaps
- Height Fog
- Muzzle Flashes (alongside original dynamic light flashes)
- Improved Audio Code
- Per Material Sounds
- Room Size reverb
- Improved AI Navigation
- Improved AI Decision Making
- New Flying AI
- Restored Unused Animations for Berzerker, Parasite
- AI bots for Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch
For modders, there’s also some new bot features, improved navigation and debugging tools and debugging lines.
And there’s also a set of accessibility options that help to make the game a bit more readable, can rebind and adjust controls, switch gameplay  and multiplayer options (like turning off cross-play), adds damage indicators and more.
Source: Bethesda
