Forsaken: A Game That Was Years Ahead of Its Time
The 1998 vehicular combat FPS called Forsaken built on the same id Tech 2 engine as Quake II, but it made some genuinely bold choices that nobody really talked about at the time. You controlled hovercrafts in massive enclosed arenas, mixing gunplay with physics-based movement. The campaign mode alone took maybe twenty hours to finish if you had any skill, but the multiplayer is where the whole thing actually lived. People forget that now. It was running at high framerates on hardware most gamers couldn't afford back then. "Forsaken" is a loaded word. It means abandoned, left behind, given up on. When you look at the game's lore, you've got the Chakobsa — an ancient alien race that built all the technology everyone fights over. The human players are descendants of colonists whose ships were destroyed, survivors who got stranded and eventually turned on each other for resources. So the word works on two levels. The Chakobsa were forsaken by whatever happened to them, and the human factions are themselves forsaked societies, fighting over ruins of a civilization that already got left behind. There's a layering there that a lot of people skimmed past in 1998 because they were too busy trying to land headshots with a railgun mounted on a tank. The lore wasn't delivered through cutscenes or dialogue trees. It was hidden in the map geometry, in item descriptions you'd only find by exploring every corner, and in the manual which was basically a short story. I remember spending an evening just reading the manual cover to cover because the actual in-game text was so sparse. The best piece of lore is buried in an obscure terminal entry that describes the Chakobsa's final act — they didn't die out, they left. They abandoned their own creations. That reframes everything about the human conflict. It's not a war for survival, it's a petty squabble over toys left on the doorstep by gods who stopped checking in millennia ago.
How The Multiplayer Actually Worked
The core loop was simple on paper. Join a deathmatch or team arena server, pick a craft, grab weapons from power-ups scattered around the map, and kill people. But the depth came from the vehicle arsenal. You had anything from fast light fighters with plasma cannons to heavy siege craft that moved like they were underwater. Each vehicle had unique flight characteristics. The Jink was fast and skittish, the Hammer was a brawler, the Scythe was a sniper platform. Learning to control all of them properly took months, not days. Map design was genuinely excellent for the era. Arenas like Nibiru and Storm were large enough that you could pull off tactical maneuvers, but tight enough that getting lost felt pointless. Verticality mattered a lot here. A lot of maps had multi-layered geometry where experienced players would camp upper ledges or use zip lines to reposition. If you only played on the ground plane, you were giving up a significant advantage without even realizing it. I ran into a specific issue that almost made me quit the game entirely. The server browser in the original release was terrible. Finding a populated server meant scrolling through pages of empty or dead servers, and there was no ping filter or quality indicator. What I ended up doing was joining one well-known community server hub — the QuakeNet relay — and staying there. The people running those servers kept player lists updated and routed traffic efficiently. It saved me from wasting another hour searching through useless server listings. If you're setting this up now, I'd recommend using a dedicated community server list rather than relying on the built-in browser. Most of the official servers are gone anyway.
What Made It Different From Other Shooters of That Era
Quake III Arena came out the same year and did arena combat better in most respects. But Forsaken had something that neither Quake nor Unreal Tournament replicated. The hover physics created a kind of aerial awareness that flat-surface shooters couldn't match. You were constantly thinking about altitude, about whether to go up or down, about momentum. It wasn't just a Quake clone with a different skin pack. The weapon balance was also more forgiving for beginners without being dumbed down. In Quake III, if you couldn't Strafe-jump and rocket jump effectively, you were stuck. Forsaken let you be competent on foot or in a slow craft and still contribute. The game didn't punish you for not having elite movement skills, but rewarding good positioning and vehicle choice instead. That meant more people could find a playstyle that worked for them, which kept the community larger for longer than you'd expect. There's a counter-intuitive thing about Forsaken that nobody talks about. The campaign is actually harder than the multiplayer for most players. Not because the AI is smart — it isn't — but because the campaign doesn't let you practice movement. You're thrown into arena fights with no room to learn the vehicles. I spent more time on the campaign than I expected and kept dying to the same enemy types because I hadn't learned to use the environment yet. The workaround was boring: I'd load a campaign level, die repeatedly, and gradually figure out where the power-up spawns were and how to route through them. It took about three hours total across all the campaign levels, but after that the fights opened up significantly.
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Current State And How To Play It
The original CD release is effectively dead. The servers are gone, the disc copy won't run on modern Windows without patches, and the manual is scattered across random forums. But the community kept it alive through unofficial sources. There's a project called Forsaken Reborn that maintains a working multiplayer infrastructure. You download the game files from archival sources, apply the community patches, and connect to their relay servers. It takes about thirty minutes to set up if you're methodical, or twenty minutes if you just want to skip straight to playing. The performance on modern hardware is solid. The id Tech 2 engine runs fine on anything from the last fifteen years. I've seen it run at locked framerates on integrated graphics, though you obviously won't be competing at a high level on that. A dedicated GPU helps with the larger maps where the engine struggles with draw calls. There are real limitations to the current state of the game. The player base is small, maybe a few hundred active people across all servers. You won't find a match at odd hours as often as you would for something like Quake or Counter-Strike. The single-player campaign has no official patch support, so the difficulty curve stays as brutal as it was in 1998. And the matchmaking system is nonexistent — you're choosing your opponents by selecting a server, which means you'll inevitably run into people who have been playing for years while you're still learning.
If you're looking for a more populated competitive experience, Quake III Arena or Team Fortress 2 are better options. But if you want something that feels different, that has genuinely interesting vehicle combat and a lore layer most people ignore, Forsaken is worth the setup time. It's not perfect. It's not easy to get running. But it's also not available anywhere else in this form.
