About
By the end of Quake's development in 1996, the id software team were burned out and just wanted to ship something and take a break (something I've come to understand quite a bit as a game developer), and Quake became a compelling but hurried Doom clone sewn together from dark fantasy. Over the years since, several high-profile single-player mods have sought to expand Quake's breadth, perceiving problems in its design as gaps that need to be filled and new content as the solution. I wanted to instead polish Quake's existing gameplay the way id might have if they'd taken the time to do so, to improve its depth and clarity as much as possible before considering what could be built on its foundation.
Copper is therefore meant to be "Vanilla+", targeted at being a drop-in improvement to stock /id1/ gameplay and an equally suitable basis for new mods. It neither adds nor replaces any items, weapons, or monsters. It is not intended to be a kitchen-sink supermod like Quoth or Arcane Dimensions, nor move Quake towards a new vision other than what it already is trying to be.
A summary, if you'd like to just get the broad strokes and go play:
- Nightmare difficulty lives up to its name
- Cooperative limits respawns and makes death dangerous
- Mapping tools and quality-of-life upgrades galore
- Ring of Shadows makes you harder to hit
- Vorepods lose your trail when the Vore is killed
- Ogres are 'partially' Z-aware
- Zombie edge cases are fixed
- Weapons fire is not blocked by monsters in death animations
- Plenty of bug fixes and other thoughtful adjustments
Detailed descriptions of every change and the thought process behind each one are all available, but if you're already psyched, download the mod. If you've made your own Quake levels before and you're interested in playing with Copper's gameplay tools, there's a mapping guide for you, too.