A few dataminers have found what looks like nearly certain proof that we are getting Quake II Enhanced, as soon as tomorrow.
While the Quake series has taken a backseat to Doom, it was quite a groundbreaking game franchise in its own time. While Doom was a groundbreaking game for first person shooters, Quake ushered in a new era, powered by tangible advancements in technology in the mid-1990s.
As any boomer who played those shooters at the time they were originally released could tell you, Quake distinguished itself with more complex 3D graphics, enabling levels that felt like real buildings and structures you could navigate, with real verticality, descending entrances and exits, and more. Quake also had better 3D movement systems, one of the important steps forward towards the modern traversal and combat systems we now take for granted.
Quake II, to cut a long story short, doesn’t feel like a sequel to the first Quake, because it was originally made as its own game. While it retains that technological advancement from Doom, it hews even closer to modern shooters with its mission based structure, and even more complex, and the even more realistic design of the buildings and structures that make up the levels.
A redditor named individualizada posted about evidence that a new version of Quake is coming from the SteamDB page. When another redditor prodded individualizada to explain, they shared this on the same reddit:
“Quake 1 Enhanced is on the normal Steam listing for Quake 1, and it’s the same case here.
Quake 2 now has a depot called “old_ver” which happened with Quake 1 a day before
Quake 1 Enhanced was announced and released.
Quake 2 Enhanced was previously rumoured to release on August 11th and this matches up perfectly.”
We have taken the effort to open the depot tab on the SteamDB page and share a screenshot so that you can review the evidence yourself. The original SteamDB page is here.
If all of this speculation turns out to be correct, this port will likely have been approved by id Software, Zenimax, and their new parent company Microsoft. The developer or co-developer will be Nightdive Studios, who interestingly enough, have recently been acquired themselves by Atari (the Atari that used to be Infogrames).
Nightdive’s Quake Enhanced was a critical and commercial success, coming to every potential platform, including the Nintendo Switch. It’s likely Nightdive will have applied their high standard to Quake II Enhanced as well. We don’t know if it’ll look as good as Quake II RTX, but it just might play better. We’ll all certainly find out if this good hunch turns out to be correct tomorrow.
