Why so few Gugs?

[zaratzara]

I was gratified to find the glorious Gaunts as one of the themes of Snack Pack 3, and overjoyed that @stickflip had made a consummate Knave-themed experience for their contribution. I adore Quoth above all other extensions to the Quake universe and I'm glad of the longevity it's had: Gaunts are clearly not forgotten, and Arcane Dimensions did a great job of fixing Vorelings (2 SSG blasts for each of those little critters always felt off). But the greatest single addition Quoth gave us in terms of bestiary was the Gug. Quake is still chronically derided for its dubious ability to offer epic boss battles, and compared to eg Doom 2 struggles to produce mechanically interesting tactical by combat. The Gug goes a long way to offering a drop-in solution to these problems, and it's by far the most interesting community-made enemy resource ever made for the game IMO. So why do we never see it used in community maps?

 

[h4724]

Quoth has always been closed-source. For something like the gaunt or voreling it's fairly easy to reverse-engineer, but the gug has been intentionally closely-guarded. I can't find a primary source but according to Lunaran: Kell released Quoth closed-source, and cited as a reason a desire to avoid such fracturing caused by "everyone compiling their own interpretations of Quoth."

 

[Fairweather]

Yes, the reasoning is that Quoth is closed-source. I had to manually re-code all of the Gaunt behavior for Snack Pack 3 from scratch to include it. As for it not being in many Quoth maps, I think people are generally frustrated at the undodgable earthquake ability, and they find it hard to dodge the projectile attack.
I personally love the monster too. The model looks perfectly Quake-like. Being able to jump over the earthquake attack would make it a lot of fun in more general scenarios too.

 

[zaratzara]

Oh wow that's all the more impressive @Fairweather! I didn't like the nerfed attack of the Arcane Dimensions incarnation — which I guess proves Kells point.

I just replayed Func Jam 9 and got my fill of Gugs for a while. I think the thing I really like about the Gug aside from the whole essence of it is that it foils standard evasion tactics: if you circle strafe, the spit will get you; if you hide behind cover, it'll be the earthquake.