I went and grabbed 0.40 of Quake II Evolved. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it supports the addon packs, although I haven't had the opportunity to try them out.
I was also very impressed by the jump in quality - if it's this good now, it should be superb once all of the models, shaders and maps are completely finished. Makes me want Quake 4. 8)
Anyway, pictures say a thousand words, yes? ;) (Click pics for a full sized JPEG)
First, a quick shot of Quake 2 Evolved in 1024x768, because there was only 848x480 and 1920x1200 available in the menus. Fortunately, you can get whatever widescreen res you want with the Quake 3 trick of 'r_customheight', 'r_customwidth' and 'r_mode "-1"' :D
If you're wondering why the HUD looks like Doom 3's, it's because I loaded the optional Doom 3 HUD pack. ;)
The Main Menu. :)
Video settings. For a change (and sensibly) if you force a custom res, it says so! :D I had to turn the gamma and intensity up, otherwise the screen was too dark to see...
Full control of FOV. :D
Quake 2, with the FOV set to 105 degrees. Noticed a problem?
That's right - I didn't turn off the weapon display, but it isn't there. It is however, if you set the FOV back to 90. I don't know if the same thing happens with one of the widescreen resolutions available in the menu - would someone with a 2405FPW test it out?
Finally, let's have a couple of shots of boring old vanilla Quake 2. Well, not quite 'vanilla' as this uses the recompiled .exe so that we can use widescreen. ;)
If you take a look at the first and last screenshots, you can see the most obvious difference - the explosive effects. In Q2E, they're really quite something, considering. :D Oh, and the tattered flags, too. ;)