Aside from a few titles i think alot of 1990s titles deserve the praise they get its that duke when compared to quake feels like a blip.
I'm not even sure what you mean by this statement. Duke came out six months before Quake, and yet in many ways it arguably had better graphics, despite not being a true 3D engine.
Don't misundersand this as me hating Quake - I've said before I'll defend it where it's due defense. But Quake was a muddy, blocky mess. Empty, featureless, indistinct rooms connecting to more empty, featureless, indistinct rooms, by featureless and indistinct corridors. Sure, there were exceptions... But they were that,
exceptions.
Your choice of color pallets was between muddy brown, muddy green, or strangely muddy oranges, purples, or blues. I know, I did mod development work for Quake 1 at the time - that 256 color pallet is burned into my mind forever. Well, I say 256 colors... But really it was only 224 of which you had freedom to use for textures... The other 32 were reserved for special use cases like flame effects and fullbright lights. And if you were developing player model skins, it was worse than that - Another 32 colors were served for Shirt Color and Pants Color, and would be swapped out for other colors depending on the player's color settings.
I also did work with Duke 3D modding. While technically Duke 3D used 256 color pallets too, it used
multiple 256 color palettes... This let it do things like faking colored lighting, for example. Red-lit areas used a red-shifted color pallet, underwater areas used a slightly blue-green shifted color pallet, etc. Sprites could also use their own pallets if I remember right, and I think there were some other tricks too (I did far less modding for Duke 3D). The result was that although both games nominally used "256 colors", Duke 3D
effectively had far more color options at it's disposal. Also it's base 256 color pallet was just better than Quake's.
So did doom and yet look which had the wider impact on gaming.
Doom came out
three years prior. No shit it had more "impact" on gaming. Duke 3D did not basically create* a whole
genre of gaming, nobody is saying it did.
*Yes, Doom was nowhere near the first FPS, but it was the first wildly successful, easily modded, multiplayer-focused FPS. Before Doom, FPSes were just a novelty. Doom brought them into ascendency.
It's not a criticism of Duke 3D to not "be Doom".
He's really not. Once you get past being pretty much the first
fully 3D FPS*, Quake brought very little to the table that Doom, Duke 3D, or several other games by that point didn't.
*Again, like Doom not being the first FPS, Quake was not technically the first fully 3D texture mapped FPS... Descent, Mechwarrior 2, and Jumping Flash both preceded it by several months to a year, and Earthseige/Battledrome by a couple of years. But Descent was a crude, janky engine strapped to a very obnoxious control scheme that appealed to some, but not everyone, and Jumping Flash... Well, nobody heard of. Earthsiege and Battledrome were mecha games, with very very crude level geometry and they were slow, sluggish, foggy messes graphically, and only
barely used texture mapping. I don't think the world geometry even did, certainly not in BattleDrome. Same deal with Mechwarrior 2.
At least... as far as the core game went. QuakeWorld, six months or so later, would go a long way to establishing online multiplayer over dialup modem as viable for the masses, and GLQuake a couple months later would go a long way to starting up the 3D accelerator boom, but those were after-the-fact additions to the game, and are more of a technical/usability issue, not really anything to do with the gameplay or game design.
