Though many blame it on nostalgia, I can’t stop playing the very first Quake. Other first person shooters may come and go, but Quake’s simplicity and large community of mod makers has kept the (almost) 20 year old shooter alive well past it’s expiration date.

While there are plenty of terrific player made mods and level packs for the game, a recently released one, called Arcane Dimensions, goes quite a bit farther than most. Adding in a slew of new enemies, weapons, and 7 very well-crafted, secret-laden maps, it’s more of a third mission pack than it is a simple fan-made bundle of levels.

Arcane Dimensions consists of seven brand new beautifully detailed maps, jam packed full of new monsters and weapons to play around with till your hearts content. There are specially designed start maps, countless secrets, alternative routes and plenty of uniquely made areas to explore. For those players who love to search for secrets there are four runes scattered throughout the maps to collect, which when combined will unlock a special mystery map as a final reward!

What started out as an experiment into projectile only gameplay eventually turned into an 18 month project which ended with a seven person strong team. It has been a crazy long journey with many ups and downs and people coming and going, but in the end it all came together and out popped from the oven a feature rich new expansion pack for Quake!

There are many new monsters that have been added which will run, fly, duck, dive and chase the player around while trying their best to burn, poison, spike and blow the player up in the process! Each new monster has been designed with various flaws which players should learn and exploit! The new monsters really shine when they are combined together to compliment each others unique abilities.

The MOD comes with many features for content creators, all the Quake Code (QC) is released under a GNU license, the readme file contains extensive details on each of the new feature and there are even eleven test map (including source) to demonstrate all the new features. To get every mapper up and making content quickly two of the most popular editor files (def/fgd) have been setup ready to work with Trenchbroom, Jackhammer or Radiant.

Having played the first couple of levels, I can attest to the quality of the mod. The enemies are clustered very close together, making fights far more DOOM-like than what you get in the base Quake game, plus the levels have mild puzzle elements to them that involve a bit of wall-button pushing to navigate. Still, it’s incredibly fun and well crafted. Just don’t use the Dark Places engine with it, since it completely screwed up the game’s lighting. I learned that the hard way.

You can download Arcane Dimensions from its ModDB page.