i love Monolith. why do i love Monolith?
- it's built on top of Copper. i love Copper! it's been my favorite mod to work with as a map maker. i like all the tools it gives me. it's very cohesive and coherent and tight.
- the ammo economy feels way nicer. i can give small amounts of ammo and drip-feed the player when i desire to.
- the armor rebalance is really nice too, i love leaving breadcrumbs of armor shards for the player to follow. they're just nice to collect. it reminds me of gems in Spyro; just tiny rewards.
the weapons feel GREAT. great great great. they're so punchy in both sound design and just using 'em against monsters. the infinite ammo pistol is a great addition. and the wrench is a great melee weapon, feels so fuckin' good to use -- on it's own, and especially compared against vanilla Quake's axe; meaty thwacks versus paper cuts.
i like that each weapon is unique. in vanilla Quake, there's 2 kinds of shotguns and 2 kinds of nailguns. in Monolith, i feel like each weapon gets to shine on it's own.
the models also look really nice. bulky mechanical firepower.
lots of vanilla Quake monsters are present here, but redesigned. and the monster designs/visuals are BEAUTIFUL. just gorgeous.
the combat against familiar monsters feels great with the new weapons. it's all recontextualized. very hard hitting. i feel like i can be more aggressive in both engaging in fights as a player, and designing fights when i create maps.
i feel like the time-to-kill for enemies in vanilla Quake is too high, they're bullet sponges that soak up damage. But in Monolith i can one-shot a lot of enemies with several of the weapons (example: gibbing enemies with the wrench!) and using the pistol to 2-shot the weaker enemies feels nice and fast as well.
there are also some new monsters, and i love 'em. they're so cool. weird alien monsters.
additionally, something i appreciate is that this mod doesn't have too many enemies with matching silhouettes -- the "army" variants are a bit similar to each other, but while playing i haven't had issues distinguishing between them.
Monolith just makes me feel very enthusiastic! it's exciting to get to work with all this cool stuff! everything fits together and just feels *good* to play with and to work with. i am very much looking forward to makin' more things with this mod. it improves upon a lot of the Quake experience for me.
and so, i love Monolith.
