Quake II/Walkthrough

Quake II main menu screen

The game program starts with an "id" splash screen, followed by two recorded demonstration sequences that loop endlessly. Press any key on the computer keyboard or any mouse button to bring up the main game menu. Navigate the menu with the "up" and "down" arrow keys on the keyboard or numerical keypad and press "Enter" to select. To start a new game, the player is given the options of "easy", "medium" and "hard" skill levels. Once a skill level has been selected, the entire remainder of the game must be played at that level and cannot be changed. In the alternative, one can select one of up to 14 previously saved games, plus one auto-saved game, with the "load" menu option.

The game designers suggest that the typical new player should start at the "medium" skill level. The Quake II Manual indicates that the "hard" level is "nearly unbeatable". The skill levels differ both in the number and toughness of opponents that one must face at each stage of the game. This walkthrough set of articles is written from the standpoint of the "medium" level, unless otherwise noted. The two demonstration sequences were recorded at the "hard" level.

The game is divided into a number of units, and each unit is subdivided into levels or "maps". With few exceptions, the player can move back and forth between maps in a unit, but once a unit has been completed and left it is not possible to return to it. This was done to keep the memory requirements for maps to reasonable size without severely limiting the total size of the game environment.

A cinematic sequence introduction is played (running time 3:30) when a new game is started, explaining the background story. The sequence can be interrupted at any time by pressing a key on the keyboard or a mouse button, taking the player directly to the start of the first level.

Click on the "Outer Base" link in the navigation menu below to proceed with the walkthrough.

A note on coordinates

Diagram of Quake II 3-D coordinate system

Quake II uses a Cartesian coordinate system to locate objects in space, including all the players.

The horizontal plane is defined by the x and y axes. The vertical dimension is defined by the z axis, where z>0 is "up". The integer values of x, y and z can range from -4048 to +4048, covering the entire three-dimensional space of a map.

The direction the player is facing is expressed in degrees relative to the positive x-axis. Turning left from 0° are values from 0 to +180 and turning right from 0° are values from 0 to -180. One can discover the player's current location and direction of travel with the viewpos console command. The result is expressed in the following format:

(x y z) : α

where α is the angle value. For convenience, in this walkthrough the positive x-axis or 0° is defined as "north"; +90° is "west", -90° is "east", -180° is "south", and so on. Specific features in the game may be described using their coordinates, typically the x, y and z values, as an aid to orientation. Direction of movement may be described by compass direction or by the numerical heading.

To make it easy to find your current location, you might consider binding a key on the keyboard to the viewpos command. This can be done by adding the following to a text file called autoexec.cfg, which should be stored in the /baseq2 subdirectory under your Quake II installation:

bind v viewpos

You can assign any other unused key to this function, if you desire. To see which keys are bound to functions by default during program installation, you can examine the config.cfg file found in the /baseq2 subdirectory. Of course, you can press the tilde/grave accent (~/`) key to pull down the console and type "viewpos" if you desire a persistent display of coordinates, but it is more convenient to use a keystroke binding during game play, as the coordinates will be displayed for a few seconds at the upper left corner of the screen and then automatically vanish.