You can ease into the swing of things with maps like Place of Many Deaths or Arcane Monstrosity, both of which demonstrate a lot more restraint in scale and monster count than their sibling maps. If you’re at all like me and prefer concise, tighter design, you’ll have to make the adjustment to the longer-form maps on offer here - but I think it’s worth making that adjustment. The experience improved drastically from there on out, though almost all of Arcane Dimensions’ maps are quite lengthy, and way more involved than Quake’s base maps. At least those were short but I played them sandwiched around Arcane Dimensions’ longest and most confusing map - and you probably know by now how much I hate long and confusing. Among the first three maps I played were two of the “remix” maps (this was before I realized the lower level of the hub was all remixes), which were in almost every conceivable way worse than the id maps they were remaking. I played it in what was maybe the perfect order to give the absolute worst impression of the mod. Your initial feelings on Arcane Dimensions will be entirely up to which order you play its maps. It makes them feel like they were tacked on as an afterthought - despite the reality that they’re just as good as the originals. These are almost universally fantastic, though it’s regrettable that the ones that were patched in later are all relegated to their own separate hub. It’s harder to write off the four “remix” maps, though, since those are accessed from the main hub just like the rest of the core maps - but they probably should be ignored, given that they’re all pretty uninspired remakes of classic Quake and Doom maps and don’t jive at all with the more grandiose new maps.Īs far those core maps go, there’s seven included with the original Arcane Dimensions release and eight more added in the current patch. Sure, you can safely ignore the “test” maps, which are exiled away in a secondary hub area. In my opinion it’s more of a detriment than benefit, and that’s because of how bloated Arcane Dimensions is with unnecessary and out-of-place maps. Arcane Dimensions, to either its benefit or detriment, gives the player the freedom to create their own path through its many maps. Though, at least, those were episodes, and so no matter which you played first, there was a growing sense of scope and challenge from the first map to the last. You can trace this decision back to the source material: Quake may have had numbered episodes, but you were free to ignore those numbers and jump in wherever you chose. All these maps are made by different people, with no real thematic thread to tie them together, and - most obviously - there’s no intended order for them to be played in. Unlike what I’ve come to expect from Doom WADs, though, there’s little in the way of a through-line here. It’s one of the most impressive projects in 22 years of Quake modding, bringing together a team of high-profile mappers led by Simon O’Callaghan, and marries heaps of new monsters, weapons, texture sets, plus introducing new AI systems and destructible objects to the engine. It’s been hard to exist on my corner of the internet for the last couple years without seeing mention of Arcane Dimensions absolutely everywhere. The moment the credits rolled on Boomed, I knew exactly what I’d be playing next: Oddly enough, the thing that finally gave me that push was a Doom WAD… called Dimension of the Boomed. ![]() I suppose I needed sufficient rekindling of my love for Quake first, and something to give me a real hunger for new content. I’ve wanted to get into Quake mods for a long, long time… but moving into a new mod scene is always a daunting prospect. It’s a profound, landmark achievement for its respective modding scene… but at the same time, the edges could have used a good amount more sanding. The mod we’re about to talk about may not be a Doom WAD, but it follows in that proud tradition just the same. They’re works of undeniable (if undisciplined) genius, yet full of strange creative choices and huge fluctuations in quality. Many of my favorite Doom WADs - STRAIN, Scythe, Apostasy on Amalthea - are a bit of a mess.
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