'Quake II' remaster might debut at QuakeCon next week

QuakeCon is returning to an in-person event on August 10th, and id Software might have a re-release to mark the occasion. Historically reliable leaker billbil-kun claims id will unveil a remastered version of Quake II when QuakeCon kicks off next week. Details of the upgrade aren't available, but the classic sequel would make its way to PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Switch. The title would be available through Microsoft's Game Pass on launch.

An enhanced version of Quake from 2021 might provide some clues as to what to expect. That remaster added support for widescreen resolutions as high as 4K, new character models and upgraded visual effects like dynamic lighting, depth of field and antialiasing. The refresh also bundled every official expansion while adding a new campaign created by Wolfenstein: The New Order developer MachineGames.

This won't be the same as Quake II RTX, provided the rumor is accurate. The 2019 tweak was meant to showcase NVIDIA's newer computer GPUs with ray-traced lighting and improved textures, but didn't include truly new content or hardware-agnostic visual improvements.

Quake II was originally released in 1997 and represented major strides forward in technology and gameplay over its predecessor. It introduced a semi-open world, objective-based gameplay and visual effects upgrades like colored lighting. The very first release was heavily focused on the single-player mode (competitive online play even took place on single-player maps), but it quickly became a go-to game for multiplayer thanks to updates and third-party upgrades like ThreeWave's Capture the Flag.

An introduction won't be surprising.given that a Quake II Remastered game went through South Korea's game rating authority in June. Billbil-kun also saw documents for North American (ESRB) and European (PEGI) ratings. As it stands, id, Bethesda and Microsoft have incentives to keep producing Quake remasters — they keep the first-person shooter in the limelight and make it playable on modern platforms without resorting to unofficial modifications and ports.

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