[JD557]

> You can even tell that from the quality of Quake's levels which start with beautifully crafted and intricate levels, and as you approach the end, progress into "whatever, let's just ship it, this is gonna sell" kind of levels that were mostly just filler to pad the play time.

This rings really true to me. I only had played the shareware version of quake and only recently played the full game, and the second half really felt like padding.

Some gimmicks in particular were really overused later on (I specifically recall that at a certain point I could just tell "There's going to be an ogre hidden in this corner").

I'm not sure if there was also some other reasons - maybe they decided to use some of the best designs for the shareware, maybe ran out of space for more enemies or maybe there's just way more nostalgia for the first levels - but I'm happy to see that some people share a similar opinion.

[RobotToaster]

They probably didn't expect many people to get more than half way through the game.

[Sharlin]

It was a different time. It's not like today when everybody has a Steam collection full of games played just a couple of hours and then abandoned.

[ChoGGi]

I swear I'll finish more of them when I get some free time.

Though it certainly is nicer on my wallet to normally grab games on sale.

[ascagnel_]

I was looking at my Steam library and wishlist last night, in anticipation of the upcoming summer sale season (other storefronts have already begun their summer sales), and I was somewhat disappointed in myself. Even though I try to only buy games on sale, I think I'd likely save money overall by only buying (and finishing, if I'm enjoying them) games at full price when I'm ready to play them vs. speculatively buying games on sale.

[ohthatsnotright]

Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Quake 2, Descent, Descent 2 and Duke Nukem 3D are pretty much the only games I've ever completed because Steam didn't exist and that was basically all there was to play at the time. Now it's easy to get stuck or bored and move on to something else.

[mrob]

You can play the episodes in any order, so I expect most people tried all of them.