Forum Overview :: Quake 4 :: Quake 4 misses the point as much in the character models as the environments.

[quote name="Dream Cast"]In Quake II, the Strogg were a bit like the Daleks, in that they still had some semblance of free will and a hierarchal command structure, despite being an entire race of kill-crazy man-machines. Stroggos was a feudal brutocracy ruled by overbuilt warlords, with a single planetary overlord - the biggest and baddest of them all - known as the Makron. It lived in a palace and taunted you in the human language and everything! In Quake 4, the Strogg are much more like the Borg of Raven's own Star Trek: Elite Force games, an unblinkingly efficient army of zombified slaves co-ordinated by a central Nexus. The Makron itself is now a purpose-built construct; ostensibly intended to serve some executive function, in practice it just seems to be a guardian for the giant brain at the center of the world. (I mean, it's literally a giant goopy brain on a pedestal. You win the game by pumping rockets into it until it explodes. Spoilers.) This fundamental change in characterization is reflected in the design of individual Strogg. Where they once looked cartoonishly crude, taught faces with angry brows and bared teeth resting on mountains of steroid-boosted muscle and chunky industrial machinery, seemingly designed by someone who took great joy in killing as messily and inefficiently as possible (for god's sake, the Berserker was running around with a giant chisel for one arm and a giant piston for the other, for no possible practical purpose besides chiseling and pistoning people to death), the Strogg in Quake 4 are sleeker and more efficient, less malevolently modified human and more rotting flesh robot. Faces comparatively blank, mouths or eyes obscured by dehumanizing masks, too often based on an assimilated alien with the desired animal characteristics instead of a human form pushed beyond where it was ever meant to go. One of the bosses can only be described as a cave troll in robot pants; another is your former commanding officer, haplessly welded to a battlemech against his will. Both are more apt to evoke pity than the terrified giggling brought on by Quake II's busty-woman-who-replaced-each-hand-with-something-equally-unsuitable-for-buttoning-her-blouse. It's times like these I miss Paul Steed more than ever. <a href="http://www.caltrops.com/pointy.php?action=viewPost&pid=150290">(I also miss whichever defunct image host once held the various tributes and collages we made to remember him.)</a>[/quote]