I admit I had some fun with Quake Champions. What killed it for me was the absurdly long wait times between matches. And the fact that you are disconnected from the server and have to find a new server in between every single match, which only makes the wait between matches even longer. When playing Quake Champions, I spent FAR MORE time waiting than I spent actually playing the goddamn game. F*ck that nonsense.
For me it just didn't feel like Quake. Its hard to explain exactly, but noting felt like quake, the asymmetric heroes, the movement, the sound. It just wasn't Quake.
It has gotten quite a bit better. Long wait times have been a thing of the past for several years at this point. I encourage you to log on and play a few matches 👍
lol.. the guy who probably one shot every single player he came across complains about load times of all things. Yeah dude, that was definitely the problem.
Despite all of that, game is still getting updates, its still playable and they even have end of life plan so it will remain playable forever. This is commendable, as usually games get shut down very quickly and end of life plans just dont exist.
and it still plays well tbh, I've never understood the complaints about the actual gameplay, the movement & gunplay is solid... this still feels better to play than a lot of more recent shooters
I would love to see a Quake 3 Arena remaster with the graphics of Quake Champions. No hero abilities bullshit. Offline singleplayer. Map editor. Modding support. Defrag.
offline singleplayer quake 3? 😂 playing the same detahmatch arena with bots over and over? sounds like fun for about 2 houra and ask for a refund. what a joke.
@@etceterax144 You know Quake 3 had a singleplayer campaign, alongside the ability to play online multiplayer... right? I have great memories playing through the base game up to final fight with Xaero. Sorry if you don't share that memory. Quake 3 Remaster would still be dope.
@@Nikolaos34 If you consider playing deathmatch arenas with bots as a campaign, then I am truly sorry for you lol But on the upside, if that's your jam, you should be very easily impressed with modern games and their... uh... "deep and immersive" stories.
I'd be inclined to settle for some cookie-cutter mini campaigns with the various champions already introduced. Perhaps it could work as an appetizer for the fans, and while devs gain experience to tackle a main line quake entry again.
I love the awkward silence after he announces Quake Champions on stage 🤣 This guy shouldn't be in the industry at all, but they let him have the company's greatest franchise.
I was literally the only person I knew who played this game. Near the end of my play time, I was spending upwards of 16 minutes in the queues. I just couldn't do it anymore. I'll always love my memories of sliding around the arenas at lightning speed on my roller skates, but I can't spend a quarter of an hour looking for a game.
I never even played Quake beyond 3. I liked the original Quake, Quake 2 (yes! TWO!) and 3. And Quakeworld. And that's where the franchise ended, if anyone asks me. Do they? No. Whatever.
Time to play was always an issue in QC. From the very beginning, even when the queuing was relatively quick, it took several minutes of various menu loading just to get to the matchmaking menu.
Quake III was the pinnacle of Quake multiplayer, you can't get any better than that game. Quake Champions suffers from the same issue other more recent games do, where a studio/company is making a new entry to a franchise, couldn't figure out how to advance the franchise and genre as it already peaked, so their way of advancing things is mixing and stuffing in elements of different genres, examples being Asassin's Creed adding RPG elements and so on in the later entries and every racing franchise now having all of these open world elements. So with Quake Champions, their way of "advancing" the franchise was adding champions into the game. The game ended up being a mixture of stuff that turns off both arena shooter fans and hero shooter fans. If they wanted to make a champion based Quake game, they would have been better off making this game a successor to Team Arena with champions, AKA a team focused game with team-based game modes and maps.
@@VACatholic Quakeworld generally is better in any mod where you have to deal with multiple opponents. In Q3 there's lot of depth in 1v1 decision making and choosing the right weapon for every situation, but it all falls on it's face in deathmatch and that makes it feel like a random slugfest. Q2 is bit wonky on deathmatch too, but at least you don't get reverse-spawn raped by 2 machine guns while having full gear and quad lol. I think machinegun as a spawn weapon is literally the worst thing to happen to deathmatch.
@@GroinMischief It's a combination. For TDM, the max armor pickups, strong rl/lg, and super strong powerups make controlling armor/weapons/powerups separately powerful and TB3 somehow are balanced in that it's generally hard to full lock and maintain control, but is very rewarding if you can get there. For duel, though, having RL be so easily accessible and armors so powerful and the maps so bad means it's just camp fest snooze games. In Q3 the cessiness due to the relative strength of the mg in conjunction with way, way weaker armor (25s spawn + only 50/100 + tickdown over 100) means that it's just aimfest nonsense in team games, but in duel games there's a functional cap on how much control you can have and most maps are setup such that you can get back control if you're patient.
the worst part is that the probably best game in the series was never played by the vast majority of its fanbase. unreal championship 2 is a goddamn masterpiece and it's locked in the stupid xbox console with no re-releases anywhere else. i loved ut99 and played it to death for years, but it didn't scale very well with low latency internet. it played much better with 200ms ping. for that reason alone i think uc2 aged better.
Ultra low competence netcode to the point of seeing non-cheating players run through walls. At one point they tried to fix it by fiddling with hit boxes, utterly misunderstanding the real issues. They need to go back and read papers on netcode from the HL1 era and earlier. How many videos even mention this? Did they not notice? Stunning.
unreal died before quake champions because of fortnite which is sad. I was a huge unreal fan and epic just decided to kill the franchise because of a horrible game
@@OlafPawbelt didn't UT3 perished due to Call of Duty 4 MW1 release and people leaving arena FPS for more modern, sorta realistic settings but not too realistic gameplay? Both in 2007 that was PACKED with big games - sadly UT3 was the weaker one. Great music, but bloom was awful trend at the time.
@SpecShadow ut 2003 started bad, ut 2004 was the one who became popular, ut 2007 was horrible from start to end so people went back to ut 1999 and ut 2004.
I've only played QC a bit during the first year or so, but I remember the technical side being all over the place. I've always been pretty good at instagib. Yet I was constantly missing the easiest flicks in QC, that I knew were spot on. Then on a whim I double the mouse polling rate to 800 and half the mouse sensitivity, and suddenly my accuracy improves by at least a factor of 1.5. It wasn't a fluke, either. I've spent several days switching back and forth and the effect was there every time.
Thank you for that great piece of content about one of the biggest disappointments in my life! I used to play Q3 a lot, but then I took a 16-year break due to life (I'm 42 now). Four years ago, I came back to gaming with Quake Champions, and it’s the only game I play. The level of emotion, stress, and everything else that Quake gives me is unmatched by any other game. For me, it’s more than just a game-it’s my church, my therapist, and my friend. (Fun fact: I even met one of my real-life friends through Quake!)
Haha well, I feel like Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal are more Quake than Doom in gameplay anyway. If it needs a Doom skin to sell then I'm all for it, but in my heart I know they're just Quake games because how they play and the levels. Think about Doom Eterenals Map layouts - spawning arenas with jump pads etc. - If that isn't just Quake then what is?
@ I never really thought about the jump pad and swing mechanics but you’re right. I was thinking visually, but Eternal especially feels like Quake Arena style mechanics in a solo game. Im all for whatever is fun, Ive just always connected more with the weird gothic style Quake feel and miss it 😢
They did that with Diabotical, it's exactly what Totalbuiscuit said "people clamoring for a new Q3A or Arena shooter are just farming likes, if they get it, they'll touch the game for a week and then shelve it out of boredom because it's the same shit from 20 years ago".
There's nothing else they can do. Quake fans are simply too picky to please and they will just shit on anything the developers put out, so they've decided to not give them anything as the community deserves it at this point. Q1 players still shit on Q2 for being too slow paced, and Q2 players to this day still shit on Q3 for having dumbed down movement and item timing. I knew Q3 players who nitpicked or straight up refused to play QL because of minor netcode issues as they preferred the jankier dial up focused netcode of Q3. Ultimately FPS games as a whole moved away from fantasy settings as realistic graphics became good enough to present a believable "realistic" looking world with realistic looking guns, and fantasy games switched to other genres like MOBAs. The games with slower movement and console based aiming mechanics was significantly more popular for games like Halo and Call of Duty arena FPSes never adopted that either.
@@dkskcjfjswwwwwws413 then what's the point of calling it quake? Modern audiences don't giva a single fuck about IP, and old fans will shit on you for "simplifing and adding more team play."
Q3A & QL were my favorite games of all time, I use to play it almost every day until I was 28 hoping to go pro. I missed them and just discovered QC existed 2hr ago, I couldn't believe this thing existed and I didn't know. The team constantly makes bad decisions which slowly pushed me away many years ago. You hit the nail on its head... great breakdown TBH. I do sincerely hope they redo the game with ID or UE engine and the core gameplay we all loved. i don't mind them incorporating skins and other stuff to purchase in games like rocketleage, fortnite, etc. it keeps players coming back. The core gameplay must return, no character should be more special than the other, the players competing is what determines whos special with their skills. I wanted to introduce my kids to the most competitive game I grew up playing and thoroughly enjoy... it hurts my heart I may not be able to as the experience has been diminished and it may not exist years from now! 😔
Those games need dedicated casual servers and game modes to bridge the downtime gaps between competitive matches and to give the casual and new players a non stop playground.
No joke i think if we could mod and do stuff like defrag, QC would actually offer something alternative to the sweatfest that typically is quake. I just think that QC doesn't offer a motivating way to stay in the game long enough.
Man, what could have been. Thanks of showing off QC:DE btw! I've been working on new from-scratch graphics for every champion to make it more "full game" than "mod", I'm glad to see praise for DE.
Game de developers really want to develop games for competition even before establishing the player base. It is like a builder that starts building a house from the roof.
Promoting the game to streamers that cant even figure out strafejumping was a bad idea, but also says alot about how noob many of these cs and fortnite players are.
@@lbo87 It is essential for fps games. Why do you want to move slow? Fast is fun. When you jump you are more predictable and its harder for you to aim. So it has strategy element to it aswell.
Willits was a very good mapper - just look at his work on Q1 and Q2 as evidence. For game design, however, he just didn't get it, and was quite obviously trying to play at a few levels above his actual ability. He doesn't deserve all of the blame for Rage, but that doesn't excuse him of responsibility for his part in it. QC and Rage 2 are his though, and his mark is all over them.
Saber interactive is kind of a cursed studio. They either make games with cult following that get worked on and supported forever but whose mechanics and gamplay underappreciated until they copy the same game and reskin it with a much more popular skin (space marine) 2, support other studios doing good work but then taking fault when players don't like stuff they didn't even work on for that game, make niche vehicle games that get a cult following and are made to do generic franchise/movie tie in slop where they still somehow do great work
As someone who started to play Quake since Quake 2 back in 90s, then played Quake 3 and OSP, took a huge break until QC and played QC for 3500 hours - I like QC. I like it for being something newer than just yet another copy of Quake 3. I played Q3-OSP a ton, I played it at PC clubs, I played it at home, I played it at LAN tournaments (nothing huge), I'm honestly fed up with that. Hence why I skipped QL. Quake Champions offers different physics in movement from all the Quake games and perhaps something completely new. It was incredibly fun to slide with Slash - something that I never did before in Quake. We played custom games in TDM, SAC, duels, 2x2, ranked as well. I've met a lot of good people that I never knew before but they are still enthusiastic about Quake and it's remarkable honestly. QC unites people from all over the world again, we had Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, French, Swedish, Israelis and many others. Even if the community is small, I think it was nice to play with all of them. Of course there were a few damn weird people who'd flame or ruin the games on purpose but it happens in every single competitive game and Quake is very competitive even if you are not a Pro League tier player. The game was outsourced to Saber Interactive, a studio that wasn't prepared for such a complex FPS game. They are doing good now with Space Marines and the other projects and I'm happy for them. But back then during the QC beta phase, it was messy. It was also obvious that Bethesda had no clue how to manage it properly and rushed it a lot, their first big LAN tournament used a barely functional version of the game, lots of technical issues took a long time to be fixed, marketing campaign and sustainable model with the in-game store were poorly implemented. I guess it was also not easy to operate with 2 split offices - one is Bethesda/id software and another one is Saber in another country. Eventually the contract with Saber was terminated, Tim Willits quit as well. And that was the end of QC's development. Since it relied on the heroes/champions' model, it could be only sustained with the addition of new champions but it was obvious that there's no money for that. And since then there was not a single new champion added into the game. Yes, SyncError was making and adding some maps into the game, they even had some budget for Quake Pro League for a while. But without the MAIN REASON why regular players would play this game and return to it - new playable champions, the game is practically dead and would bleed the remaining players. Oh and of course there was no mod or community support. Like...NONE AT ALL. ZERO. NOTHING. Can you imagine it in Quake that has a very loyal fanbase, it has a lot of fan-made modes like OSP, CPMA, Defrag (unique and entirely different scene with its own players, tournaments, map-makers, etc). Nobody but Sync could make any maps in QC. Nobody could try and make a mod that would balance the things and perhaps become a new standard for competitive scene. Nothing of it was allowed or introduced in QC. A huge shame and that's coming from Bethesda that relies on fans for ages to fix their damn buggy games since like Morrowind. Pushing out the community was a HUGE MISTAKE. All in all, I enjoyed played it and I played it quite a lot. Visuals, animations, sound, movement styles, the speed - it is something unique that I could find only in QC. I couldn't enjoy the other FPS games after QC, they just don't have the same Quake vibes.
I started playing quake champs seriously 1 year ago (im 26y), played Q3 and QL occasionally when i was younger (beated all Q3 nightmare mod hehe) , I got 1000hour on the game now and i'm addicted to it, i learn so many things and i still learning things. If you want to learn how the world of quake work, QC is the best because its slower than QL for example, it's better to understand how things work. This game builds perseverance and mental/dopamine control , I think i help me in my life on this point, it learn that defeat is not a sad purpose
I like your style. I believe that QC is a small project and was expected to have a very low chance of success. It's still a legendary game to me just because there isn't anything better than it or QL so far. Also at 6:25 DOOM Mp run much worse than QC right now. 9:50 you are a genius! :D This video must have taken a lot of time to make. Good stuff! I'd add that maps are completely static (unlike Elder from QL), maps are missing a lot of cool trickjumps and different surface physics like SLICK surfaces in QL/Q3. And invisible wall clips are unprecise af. I hope Sync sees this vid and have a grin :D
I liked the fact that there used to be more variance in map balance/design in older Quakes. You had maps with two mega healths, maps with no red armor, maps where items were stupid close to each other and generally there just used to be more stuff that was little bit inconvenient. Maps had unique character and you had to approach them differently. Now everything's too fleshed out, everything is too "fair" and it's catering to pretty much just one standard. It makes all maps feel the same. Quakes used to have lots of more bullshit, but it was fun bullshit. Traps, elevators, moving platforms and even secret rooms used to be a thing in Quake1-3. Those stopped to be a thing when Quake became a try-hard esport game. Also, I could swear the hovering platform above the drop-hole in Lockbox used to move in some version in the early access, I'm half confident that I didn't imagine it.
First of all, cool video about history and great point of view. As somebody, who was tryharding QC in 2017 i can clearly say, that Willits, community managers and saber have been problem since the early access. The game was most playable in April 2017, except 0dmg rockets, parkinson lg, clutch's shield and insane pummel dmg. With each update (and ofc all of them came very late) the game most more difficult for PCs and became more and more unplayable. I thought since start, that dev streams are such a huge plus, but since they have been caring about skin commens only and not gameplay, i knew, that this was a start of crushing QC future, as any other game. Ignoring pro scene, main bugs, being able to make server listing again.. I mean, i downloaded the game like 20 times and always uninstalled, because even in 2022 i had startup resolution bug, joining the game with broken sounds even knowing that somebody using LG behind my back and I am already -200hp, after that time being able to find out after many years, that enemy can hear you when you are low HP, just because it is set up in your settings.. Some things shouldn't even exist in that game and yet still happening. Not gonna cry more about this one and looking forward for Q6 if devs didn't just make fun of us :) Happy fragging everyone
Quake was originally more RPG Adventure than FPS, but FPS what was Id knew. So give us Skyrim with Guns for the next Quake. Just imagine a massive open world with Quake's movement and eldritch horrors to hunt down.
About the strafing - didn't they make it a hero special ability? Sorlag has "CPMA movement" in it's description card. Sarge has reduced self damage for rocket jumping. The punk on hoverboard also has CPMA movement. I have 1.3k hours in Quake Champions and I played almost exclusively Sorlag for that satisfying movement
I'm so annoyed because CPMA is just about almost perfect for me. I just can't move at all without sideways/diagonal aircontrol. CPMA aircontrol feels like trying to walk with forward key only. They added literally every Quake movement from the franchise, except the original. What were they thinking?
I played Champions at first but when I saw those "special abilities" and such a small character rooster while the others were behind a paywall I gave up and never touched it since and after seeing this video I'm glad a did.
As someone who always enjoyed Quake Champions but was disappointed that there were so few people online and it took so long to find a match, I can appreciate this documentary-style video.
Thanks to Tim Willits Quake Champions existed at all. IF depended on Bethesda, there would be no Quake at all. Tim's failure was not to secure personnel on id Software to solely on Quake Champions with id Tech 6 finished.
Why the fuck only Tim, really man. The intention of id was to flush QUAKE to 3rd party developers. 3RD PARTY DEVELOPERS FOR QUAKE. FOR QUAKE. I suppose to think that Tim, being as cool game/level designer back in a day did a lot to make at LEAST this level game from the situation they had. OFC its easier to blame him as a figure you see.
FINALLY - actually good video about QC, that addresses The Important Issues. Like / share / etc. I was about to make a video like this myself, but i'm so frustrated with this game, i don't even want to bother, at least for now...
if the whiteboard is to be believed and not a joke, Machine Games might be working on Quake 5, this holds up since they made expansions for the remasters of 1 and 2, with Indiana Jones done i do think it'll be their next project.
After what happened to Wolfenstein. I'm not really hyped at MG taking the helm for a Quake game. They're great at making expansion packs, so at least they could have that.
@@hugostiglitz491 Well, RIP then! might be interesting if it gets handed off to another developer, lot to choose from whose made very high quality boomer shooters.
@@CatsOverdrive A good point, but maybe with the right director it could come out good. Though im not sure the director and writer even works there anymore who did the Wolfen games, the guy who did Indiana Jones is someone else
A classic arena shooter is about fairness, with skill deciding who wins (with a touch of luck, usually based on spawn points). The problem with Quake Champions is that they decided to take a formula that worked i.e. Everyone has the same abilities, and thus the game is fair, and added special abilities, making things uneven. Each character having unique abilities means you have to develop a sense for every character, learn every character, to be able to counteract the other players character choice. Which still results in non equal fairness and gameplay. They should not have tried to be like overwatch, and should have tried to be (ironically) quake.
Pfff, zoomers... The main problem with QC is the focus on the "formula". How to reward with cosmetics, what balance, what progress. Let me remind that Q3 became popular thanks to computer clubs and communication between real people at tournaments. Autism to skill quickly gets boring, people want to chat. When playing QC you don’t experience any communication. It feels like you're playing with bots. People still play CS16 and CSS (on pirate servers like CSS ClientMod) despite CS2 just for the communication. The gameplay there is also outdated, but people don’t care because they talking and having fun. So it's not about politics, but about the atmosphere for communication. I also heard the opinion that Saber and ID are connected by one person in the management of ID, so the project was outsourced due to nepotism.
I wish Quake could make a comeback. I tried Q3 when I was a kid because I heard it was the Super Smash Bros Melee of computer games and God they were right.
3:00 Yes it is in this case, all they had to do was not do the hero/class thing and it would've done so much better. Quake is not Overwatch, it's a 1v1/TDM/Free for all game centered around skill and aim with evenly matched characters, not a team and objective based shooter with characters that have different abilities and health pools. A graphically upgraded or remastered QL would have done better than Champions.
Quake single-player game, taking inspiration from Romero's og vision. Like Ranger fragging across the eldritch Dream Lands and multiverse, building a hammer around the dire orb to permanently kill and or sever Elder Gods/Dream Land connection to realities. Dare I say, old-school fps with rpg elements (but not overbearing)?
18:50 Quake is a long-running series with a hardcore fanbase. These people have expectations and they are very vocal when displeased. This group hated even the basic idea of champions. Imagine how they would shit up social media if the active abilities were as powerful as ultimates in OW or something. I understand that for the casuals abilities feel neutered. Ideally every multiplayer game would have two balancing branches - one for casuals and one for competitive players, but it doesn't seem to be economically feasible for most companies. :/ 24:15 This is purely an issue of matchmaking. It doesn't matter how high the skill floor is as long as both players are equally good/bad.
cod players who only sat in corners and didn't do anything more than corner camp since they were to afraid to fight like a quake player, and the sweaty spawn killers who knew exactly where people spawned and killed them before they could even give a fight self. Plus the nerf of some weapons such as railgun and other things
Champions being paid also hurt this game alot, it doesn't matter if your game is balanced so well around pure skill, with only Ranger being free any new player would consider a big red flag scrolling through different Champions and see that some of them have bigger health pools than yours, again QC is not P2W but it was just a barrier that i encounter while trying to get people to play this game with me.
it is pay2win, actually. During that period, to master this game you have to learn all characters to play Duels, since they are asymmetrical. If they were the same, as in Q3 but just locked, then it is not pay2win model.
That's a fair point, unlocking individual characters makes sense in a game like League where there are 100+ characters to play. It does actually help new players a lot, otherwise it is overwhelming to play against a bunch of new champions every game, you are doomed to be utterly confused for the first hundreds of hours in the game. For 16 characters each with a single active ability though that's weird. I was lucky that they made every champion free when i started playing QC
My 2 cents, in QC maps were a bit too large compared to quake live, which made the game feel slower. QL had a simple matchmaking mechanism which divided players into 4 tiers, if you did well in deathmatches you advanced to the next one, if you could not find yourself there you was downgraded. Simple as it was, it created a safe place for new players. Quake has this advantage that fragging lower skilled players does not gives you way less satisfaction, so there were not many smurfs back then. To have a decent matchmaking you have to have large player pool, without that you have infinite queue times, which will kill the game.
11:15 I still do that from time to time!😂 i knew about the game since 2017, played Quakelive, but only started to play Champions in 2021 when i got a PC that would play it!😅
The original concept for Quake was to focus on first-person melee. If ranged weapons were to be implemented. These would need to have long reload animations. Short munition travel distances. Slow munition travel speeds. An implementation of a fatigue system for people that never walk and never stop smashing the attack buttons. People will adapt their approach to encounters when their forced to do so. If you want speed and non-stop shooting without needing to reload. We already have Doom.
the original concept for quake was a million ideas daydreamed by romero that could never form a cohesive game. thats why quake ended up being so disjointed even after everyone decided to make it a fully 3d doom
@dkskcjfjswwwwwws413 I am going based on what Sandy Peterson said. He said that idea was scrapped during development, and the developers focused on the gunplay of Doom. That impacted his design work because of the atmosphere found in the level design. It reflected a period of time when melee weapons were more predominant. The atheistic of the enemies had a better fit within the environment. What certainly doesn't fit is firearms in a medieval setting.
i remember after titanfall and CODs with wallrides and tricky jumps and the great DooM 2016 i tought well people needs a revival of arena shooters. Quake Champions and Unreal Tournament 4 appeared... but then the battle royale boom buried the genre forever
Its hard to get folk into arena shooters cos they are seen as old outdated and simple. I think you could revive them if you waited long enough for folk to forget they exist as a genre. About 15 years to 20 years i'd say from now they could make a come back.
Guys! Check out Doom: QCV Edition (basically, Quake Champions in Doom): * Better netcode * More maps and characters * It's FREE! * Mode mods * More skins * Worse graphics but it''s still charming! And you will have 10x of the FPS ;-) 25:48 - And... here it comes!
the biggest problem is definitely the skill gap. unless there is actual full sbmm, getting stomped by vets in quake is a whole different level of torture than getting stomped by vets in a game like cod lol. it's just flashing lights, things zip zapping around and you're wondering why haven't you spawned yet when you already died 4 times lol.
They put hero shooter elements in a game series with a fanbase that doesn't play hero shooters but kept a lot of the original fanbase's favorite mechanics that hero shooter fans would hate. They literally built a game _nobody_ in either audience could love.
Reminded me of an interview I read back in 2008, from a developer of Battlezone 2. They thought they had something in the bag when they were developing an FPS-RTS hybrid game, thinking it would net the two demographic. It turned out, it didn't really meshed well with either camps because; "RTS players don't want to deal with the FPS stuff, and the FPS players don't want to deal with the RTS stuff. It's just two camps, seeing the worst of the other genres and rejecting it." At best, the only playerbase they got was the people who already like those two genres anyway, and it's (un?)surprisingly small.
I feel like arena fps games aren't really popular in general. The skill ceiling is higher than other subgenres, leading to players quickly falling off. The ones that remain are better, which further contributes to the issue. That, on top of all the other issues the game has. It was doomed from the start. A new Fortnite player can join a match, and win by luck. Or at least get very far. Instant gratification.
Great video mate. Very well put together, thank you. I love all quake games and quake champions and it such a shame that it panned out the way it did with quake champs.
I even updated my PC to play quake champions... Guess what I got? I can't connect to servers... Yep, PhD to start is my story too, but except that it's just a big mess, where you don't understand how and with what they kill you.. how do they do some stuff about movement?... And it feels like I played with pros, cause no one plays this sh*t anymore only PhD users left... 😂😂😂
5:00 This engine now runs Warhammer: Spacemarine 2 and many other games nice and smooth. There is no problem with Saber Engine. The real problem is the company management at that time. So, concluding all it could have been a really fun game if it won't be so focused on esports.
Everything you said is true and well researched, my only comment would be that the death sentence for Quake as a cohesive franchise began as a cancer before the first game was even released. The development of Q2 and Q3 completely ignored the direction of the genre and the interests of the player base. Valve was smart enough to pick up TF software and run with it, then do the same with the Counter-Strike team. There was literally no reason id couldn't have done the same, no reason except for their lack of vision to do anything but repeat the same bare-bones deathmatch formula from the Doom days.
I remember seeing the announcement and being interested, but a little put-off by the champions idea - and this was back when "hero shooter" wasn't a bad label yet. It just felt that, shouldn't classic arena shooters have even starts? Aren't heroes a little antithetical to the classic design? Plus something about wise-cracking hero characters with attitude just never felt right - show don't tell, and do don't show; a character is a badass because of what you do as them in the game, not because they call people names in the results screen, not because they _tell_ you they're cool. I dunno, something didn't feel right about it. And then all I'd hear about it later was that no one was playing it, and I remember a video highlighting the disparity between the in-game characters taunting "get good" attitude clashing completely with the actual players in lobbies being inviting and welcoming to newcomers and trying to help them learn the game. It's a shame because conceptually I _was_ interested, a new arena shooter from a big name is definitely appealing, but it's the same thing as Lawbreakers, you need the entry level to be low so you can get new players interested in that high ceiling Great video, thank you!
One crucial point is missing in the video, why was QPL eventually cancelled, it was their core selling feature after all. The strategy wasn't so bad - cast professional matches, casual players drawn by a great spectator experience shower you with money buying skins. But apparently they had severe budget issues, they overspent on 2017 world championship with a prize pool of 340k while drawing 20k peak viewers, and it was only downhill from there. QPL consistently stayed below 10k, with season 4 finals having only 3800 peak viewers. It's like their marketing was just nonexistent, in a sector that is extremely competitive with a ton of big titles. They thought like the game will speak for itself, but in hindsight it wasn't nearly enough.
Also i'm pretty sure that in 2017 the game was in a pretty bad state after rushed development. Clawz, basically a new player in the scene won 100k in a tournament full of seasoned (in "classic" Quake) veterans, played for a year more, and proceeded to fuck off lmao, that's not a good look
I suppose, with arena shooters that a light sbmm could be introduced. Maybe for the first 50 hours of someone's playtime could be tracked with sbmm, and i'm 100% against any sbmm or algorithms but.. as a ut99 main for a while yeah arena shooters are fucking brutal to new players and absolute hell to new fps players you really need a specific personality to stop caring about being defeated and seeing it as learning and practicing and enjoying it. It's 100% out of some peoples control to totally not enjoy that. I also understand that mastering the movement and memorizing map layouts is integral to the ''skill'' of quake, but i feel like making it easier to specifically make sharp turns and leave everything else up to practice would make new players quit less quickly. Simpler maps, audio ques for power ups with a map and a ping showing its location, and leave the original quake up to a custom server browser with community made mods and whatever.
@@lmaololovsky just out of curiosity, do you dislike the champion system in general? Or mainly the active abilities? I personally enjoy the difference in speed, stack and movement types.
I have to say something. Quake Champions: Doom Edition is the Quake Champions that, at the very least, was what I expected from a complete experience. I finished the PVE Deathmatch Campaign mode yesterday and liked what I saw. I'm following the development of Quake Champions Classic too
I've played since 2017 and deleted the game last week with my active battle pass. From start it was suspicious that we had no mapbuilders (I created a lot of maps in GKTRadiant) and no modes (we all begged for CTF and it turned out shit).. no callvote no records for those GLORIOUS frag-movies that could have cattupullted the game. And yes, I agree that game became ridicilously focused around PRO scene that could not evolve in new era of abilities - do you remember Rapha strugling to get top 3 first years? Or how cooler looked cooked after the game with claws??? New blood had a chance with those abilities.. oh.. to much crap to talk about.. I must say thank you as well to all the community managers and all the team to do this game, at the end I am a quake fan. Hopefully new will be home-grow-TEXAS-baddass-shooter we all love. AND QUAKE AS A HORROR SINGLE PLAYER GAME ??? DEFINETLY YES
QC is CPMA. I was never a CPMA player. This game is focused on movement. The fights feel hectic and chaotic like fights feel in CPMA. Also you have to be quick around the map and position well. Also the champions. Instead of that every player has everything and can use everything, players are stripped down to a subset of possibilities and thus are forced to play in a certain way and thus are forced to figure out which champion is the best for which map. This is like another layer of gate keeping on the way to mastering a map. In the end, there are those 1, 2 or 3 champions that work for a map. You have to figure them out at first. Also the health/armor. To little stack. Players are afraid to attack and if you attack most of the time it needs to be a killing blow. They wanted it to make more noob friendly through that. But that did not work at all. Noobs are still owned by players who time items and have a larger stack. Also special abilities. Still another resource which you have to manage and which does not add to the game but it subtracts. It subtracts because players have to play around the opponent abilities. They cannot attack as long as the ability is available for the opponent. If the ability was used hopefully without much impact, then normal attack is possible, for a small amount of time, until the ability is available again. Of course the engine is pure shit. Also there were no competition supporting features like bronze, silver, gold, and so on ladders, how every competitive game offers. I as someone who I guess played like 5000 hours of Q3/QL could not be bothered to play QC. QC for me had the wrong focus on movement and I was never a CPMA or trick jump player. I do not want to learn champions since I was never fascinated by DOTA. Also they tried to make it noob friendly by reducing health/armor (and other measurements) which made the gameplay more shallow. And I do not want to play around abilities which feel like they are from a different genre of game and which destroy the normal game flow. Also I do not want to play a game with a shit engine.
I play Quake since they came out, and stuck with Quake 3 (mostly Excessive plus mod) for the past 20 years or so off and on without really having interest in any other FPS games, I even rejected Quake Live after trying it, as Q3 felt better, Qlive was Browserbased when I first tried it and dismissed it but it still feels rougher to me upon trying it again. Everything else feels like garbage to me, I cant stand slow clunky goldeneye walking through mud movement, its just gross to me. I came to QC late mostly due to lack of a modern PC, I hadnt seriously gamed in a while, and didnt require much of a PC to run Q3 at a decent frame rate. I love QC for the most part, the only issues I have are latency related, which might be my still underpowered RTX3050ti laptop (yeah, I f'd up there, I didnt know much about modern gaming PCs) as I find theres delay sometimes for instant hit weapons, (rail, MG's, SGs) firing in general sometimes feels delayed and can be a bit frustrating. Other than that, movement is great and feels like Q3 although a bit slower, its still great. I really wish there was a bigger playerbase, as there are so few players that most game modes are dead, its mostly TDM surviving at this point, and most of the players queing are very very high level skilled players, so the imbalances are ridiculous. Theres also a cheater problem, I want to say its just one individual constantly cheating at matches daily, as I usually encounter this player, they have multiple accounts that are all named very similar, they are easy to detect and most of the high level players usually agree its a cheater and leave matches, making everyone wait for loading matches even more than the game already does. I've reported the cheater numerous times, including capturing the cheater streaming themselves cheating (complete with wallhack and cheats on display, heavily) and uploaded that VOD to my youtube, I then linked the VOD to the QC Discord and to Sync directly, saying this player has been a cancer on the community in NA for well over a year, not only cheating under multiple accounts, some of which have been banned, this user also stream snipes (I stream to rewatch my vods without filling my harddrive) and follows players to other servers including the UK when I tested if they'd follow over to other game modes and server selections, they did. Sync didnt reply, and other players in the discord rejected my suggestion of adding /Callvote Kick, to allow players to kick cheaters instead of everyone leaving and reloading hoping the cheater didnt follow, which they do. Their argument was that many good players will be callvote kicked for being too good and accused of cheating by the rest of a lobby, I found that are somewhat flawed response as the command worked great in the Quake Excessive Plus community and good real players were known and respected for the most part, although adding spectator mode would also allow players to check for cheating, as well as gather better evidence for reporting cheaters, something Bethesda services requires when they follow up reporting a cheater, (Not sure what footage they are expecting to get other than your own VOD from your POV of the cheater, maybe showcasing a ridiculous win margin or highlighting the cheaters stats). I even suggested in the discord to move the player search bar, as when you try to type a cheaters name into the search it covers the player name list from the match, and cheaters often have names like lIlIlIlIlIl or other random character names that are difficult to memorize or decypher, making looking up and reporting post match more difficult (you can report them easier ingame from the ingame menu, but sometimes a match ends before you decide or remember to report). I would say alot of whats killing QC would be a complete disregard for quality of life improvements in the UI, anti cheat system, the match making system when server lists would be just plain better, it worked for many decades now and Qlive even still uses it with a similar playerbase size despite age differences of the game. Thanks for making this video, I wish somthing Quake would happen soon, until then I'll still be playing whenever I can.
Loved how QC felt at launch, odd it felt worse and worse with the early updates. Few things could've really helped this game take off and separate itself from the pack. Remove Heroes and add a few perks you can sub in/out if you really need Customization prematch. Remove varying hitbox sizes, speeds, health differences between skins (what were heroes). Add more players per match, with slightly larger map layouts to help out newer players get into the game. 4v4 is too brutal for new players.
I don't recall any serious performace issues with the game. Some very early version was sending packets to the server PER FRAME (which is nuts) and that caused lag on high fps. Later on they fixed it or limited it and I've never played a game where the netcode feels as smooth as it is now. I had no idea about the game engine issues, to me the game seemed to run well but clearly not on the same engine as Doom 2016. I've always thought the biggest killer of this game was the lack of promotion. The second thing is that they never got out of early access, which ties directly to what you uncovered in this video. Very few people want to buy a new iteration of a game that's in early access, when quake live is free to play and many oldschool players have already experienced Quake 3 arena. Without a singleplayer campaign or some coop content draw players in, the game just doesn't sell. Especially when everybody knows how hard it is to get into Quake multiplayer in the first place. What we really need is a proper Quake singleplayer game that teaches the multiplayer gameplay mechanics little by little throughout the campaign. Doom Eternal has a lot of movement mechanics and that clearly hasn't worsened the sales of the game. I'm confident that Quake will revive once ID Software makes the next Quake singleplayer campaign game WITH multiplayer. The IDtech engine is just too OP, they will literally mop the floor with all the Unreal 5 slop that everyone is sick and tired of.
This is the best video I've seen on the subject. I am dying to see arena shooters make a comeback. Peoole dont think they can but they easily could wirh the right team, engine, and innovations. We just need the stars to align once. I'm so tired of every game having 1-2 guns. I want to fly around with 9 totally different weapons and outskill people rather than corner peek or press an ultimate ability. Tactical shooters and hero shooters are stale. I want doom eternal but PvP
Regarding ultimate abilities feeling weak, they used to be more powerful than that but most quake players didn't like the power dynamics attached to ultimates. Some ults like doom guy blazko and death knight would just mow down the entire server with little counterplay while others were severely underwhelming.
One question I have to ask is: how big is the Quake-style competitive shooter audience? Truly, how big is it? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that to be insulting, I'm trying to get some grounding here on what the upper limit of this game's audience could be in the first place. So let's look at some selling points for Quake Champions: The first is nostalgia for the Doom and Quake franchises. This gets your foot in the door, but I don't think this gets you millions of players. If you played Quake 1 when you were a teenager, you're in your 40's now. If you played Quake 3 when you were a teenager, you're in your 30's now. A grown adult with a career still likes video games, but your time for games is limited, is Quake Champions one of the lucky few games you get to play? Lots of people discover Doom for the first time each year (I've seen lots of indie Vtubers try it out) but they're interested in the story modes, not joining the PvP. The second is fans of Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch (we're still talking Overwatch 1 circa 2017). This was before the big TF2 hiatus and while Overwatch was still riding high. Did Quake Champions really have what it takes to turn heads? Third is the e-sports scene and e-sports wannabees. But lots of games claim to want an e-sports scene only to wind up with a tiny audience that can't sustain it, Lawbreakers springs to mind. It's not impossible for an established franchise to put out a new experiment that catches on with a new, young, widespread audience. Fortnite was originally an Unreal project. But Quake Champions just really doesn't have that casual vibe to it. I don't say any of this to be insulting. I could be way off in my assessment. But I still fear Quake Champions might have actually reached all of its target audience, only to discover that "all" turned out to be a small number
I admit I had some fun with Quake Champions. What killed it for me was the absurdly long wait times between matches. And the fact that you are disconnected from the server and have to find a new server in between every single match, which only makes the wait between matches even longer. When playing Quake Champions, I spent FAR MORE time waiting than I spent actually playing the goddamn game. F*ck that nonsense.
For me it just didn't feel like Quake. Its hard to explain exactly, but noting felt like quake, the asymmetric heroes, the movement, the sound. It just wasn't Quake.
It has gotten quite a bit better. Long wait times have been a thing of the past for several years at this point. I encourage you to log on and play a few matches 👍
Yeah, it would've been pretty easy to make you able to tag in FFA while waiting for a game, for example
Exactly the reason I stopped playing too.
lol.. the guy who probably one shot every single player he came across complains about load times of all things. Yeah dude, that was definitely the problem.
Despite all of that, game is still getting updates, its still playable and they even have end of life plan so it will remain playable forever. This is commendable, as usually games get shut down very quickly and end of life plans just dont exist.
True tbh
What's the end of life plan?
@@abhinandanil7775 no concrete info, but something like QL with server browser and server binaries being released
@@abhinandanil7775 Meow meow
and it still plays well tbh, I've never understood the complaints about the actual gameplay, the movement & gunplay is solid... this still feels better to play than a lot of more recent shooters
I would love to see a Quake 3 Arena remaster with the graphics of Quake Champions.
No hero abilities bullshit. Offline singleplayer. Map editor. Modding support. Defrag.
I'm down for that.
offline singleplayer quake 3? 😂
playing the same detahmatch arena with bots over and over?
sounds like fun for about 2 houra and ask for a refund.
what a joke.
@@etceterax144 You know Quake 3 had a singleplayer campaign, alongside the ability to play online multiplayer... right? I have great memories playing through the base game up to final fight with Xaero. Sorry if you don't share that memory. Quake 3 Remaster would still be dope.
@@Nikolaos34 If you consider playing deathmatch arenas with bots as a campaign, then I am truly sorry for you lol
But on the upside, if that's your jam, you should be very easily impressed with modern games and their... uh... "deep and immersive" stories.
don't forget C P M AAAAA!
The lack of Id tech engine meant QC was corrupted at its foundation, it never had a chance.
Yay...Doom Eternals bugs in a competitive game.
@@Robertkopp84yeah not like that could've been fixed if competitive multiplayer would've been a priority 🙄
Quake with a single player combining eldritch horrors and alien robots combined together would go so hard fr
Instead id Software just went with another DOOM Game, set in "Middle Ages" setting. Cash-Grab Sucks!
I'd be inclined to settle for some cookie-cutter mini campaigns with the various champions already introduced.
Perhaps it could work as an appetizer for the fans, and while devs gain experience to tackle a main line quake entry again.
Honestly yeah mixing of quake maps and vibe with the strogg stuff of 2 and 4 would be cool
@@yutro213They could do Quake, its just DooM just have bigger brand than Quake...
@@yutro213 the last 2 doom games were great but this next one looks like a cash grab
Tim Willits was that cockroach you sell with the house. For a while he thought he owned it.
And Sync is the roach that never left
The moral of the story, Tim Willits shouldn’t be trusted with Quake
I love the awkward silence after he announces Quake Champions on stage 🤣 This guy shouldn't be in the industry at all, but they let him have the company's greatest franchise.
He killed the original id software team
@@devilmyeyes9450 Nah, that's on John Romero...
That way Tim is the Snake
That's a BrainDead take if you are not trolling.
I was literally the only person I knew who played this game. Near the end of my play time, I was spending upwards of 16 minutes in the queues. I just couldn't do it anymore. I'll always love my memories of sliding around the arenas at lightning speed on my roller skates, but I can't spend a quarter of an hour looking for a game.
I never even played Quake beyond 3. I liked the original Quake, Quake 2 (yes! TWO!) and 3. And Quakeworld. And that's where the franchise ended, if anyone asks me. Do they? No. Whatever.
Time to play was always an issue in QC. From the very beginning, even when the queuing was relatively quick, it took several minutes of various menu loading just to get to the matchmaking menu.
Quake III was the pinnacle of Quake multiplayer, you can't get any better than that game. Quake Champions suffers from the same issue other more recent games do, where a studio/company is making a new entry to a franchise, couldn't figure out how to advance the franchise and genre as it already peaked, so their way of advancing things is mixing and stuffing in elements of different genres, examples being Asassin's Creed adding RPG elements and so on in the later entries and every racing franchise now having all of these open world elements. So with Quake Champions, their way of "advancing" the franchise was adding champions into the game. The game ended up being a mixture of stuff that turns off both arena shooter fans and hero shooter fans. If they wanted to make a champion based Quake game, they would have been better off making this game a successor to Team Arena with champions, AKA a team focused game with team-based game modes and maps.
Being on Steam and add micro transaction to the lot and no more dedicated servers no more mod friendly = CRAP
Quake world is a better tdm game, but q3 is a better duel game.
@@VACatholic Quakeworld generally is better in any mod where you have to deal with multiple opponents. In Q3 there's lot of depth in 1v1 decision making and choosing the right weapon for every situation, but it all falls on it's face in deathmatch and that makes it feel like a random slugfest. Q2 is bit wonky on deathmatch too, but at least you don't get reverse-spawn raped by 2 machine guns while having full gear and quad lol. I think machinegun as a spawn weapon is literally the worst thing to happen to deathmatch.
@@GroinMischief It's a combination. For TDM, the max armor pickups, strong rl/lg, and super strong powerups make controlling armor/weapons/powerups separately powerful and TB3 somehow are balanced in that it's generally hard to full lock and maintain control, but is very rewarding if you can get there.
For duel, though, having RL be so easily accessible and armors so powerful and the maps so bad means it's just camp fest snooze games.
In Q3 the cessiness due to the relative strength of the mg in conjunction with way, way weaker armor (25s spawn + only 50/100 + tickdown over 100) means that it's just aimfest nonsense in team games, but in duel games there's a functional cap on how much control you can have and most maps are setup such that you can get back control if you're patient.
My Highschool teacher was more excited for this than the "new" Doom game, which was Doom 2016 at the time.
Sounds like a cool teacher.
I totally agree
so basically quake champions is a glorified fan mod and I'm still waiting for Quake 5.
Hey atleast quake is still somewhat talked about. Look at what epic games did to my boy unreal smh.
UT being axed because of Fortnite will never stop being funny(in a depressing sense) to me.
the worst part is that the probably best game in the series was never played by the vast majority of its fanbase. unreal championship 2 is a goddamn masterpiece and it's locked in the stupid xbox console with no re-releases anywhere else.
i loved ut99 and played it to death for years, but it didn't scale very well with low latency internet. it played much better with 200ms ping. for that reason alone i think uc2 aged better.
@@GraveUypo oh trust me I got it on Xbox and I think it’s better than og halo
Ultra low competence netcode to the point of seeing non-cheating players run through walls. At one point they tried to fix it by fiddling with hit boxes, utterly misunderstanding the real issues. They need to go back and read papers on netcode from the HL1 era and earlier. How many videos even mention this? Did they not notice? Stunning.
Kinda ironic that Quake Champions died alongside Unreal Tournament....
unreal died before quake champions because of fortnite which is sad. I was a huge unreal fan and epic just decided to kill the franchise because of a horrible game
unreal tournament was murdered it didn't die naturally
@@OlafPawbelt didn't UT3 perished due to Call of Duty 4 MW1 release and people leaving arena FPS for more modern, sorta realistic settings but not too realistic gameplay? Both in 2007 that was PACKED with big games - sadly UT3 was the weaker one. Great music, but bloom was awful trend at the time.
@SpecShadow ut 2003 started bad, ut 2004 was the one who became popular, ut 2007 was horrible from start to end so people went back to ut 1999 and ut 2004.
@@OlafPawbeltstop blaming Fortnite for that sorry excuse of a UT game's failure. Even if Fortnite didn't exist it would still be dead.
As a long time Q1/Q2/Q3A/QL player the change from typical arena to hero-based I think alienated a large group of the original players.
No one is going to make a game catering to 60 year old virgins. The way to keep Quake alive is to draw in new players and appeal to large gaming pool.
Same. It just wasn't my thing as an old Quake fan.
it doesn't run well either, it's continuously frame-dropping, and then there is input lag.
Turn off vertical sync (always, in every game) and woooooow, no input lag never again. Magic, innit?
I've only played QC a bit during the first year or so, but I remember the technical side being all over the place. I've always been pretty good at instagib. Yet I was constantly missing the easiest flicks in QC, that I knew were spot on. Then on a whim I double the mouse polling rate to 800 and half the mouse sensitivity, and suddenly my accuracy improves by at least a factor of 1.5. It wasn't a fluke, either. I've spent several days switching back and forth and the effect was there every time.
Thank you for that great piece of content about one of the biggest disappointments in my life! I used to play Q3 a lot, but then I took a 16-year break due to life (I'm 42 now). Four years ago, I came back to gaming with Quake Champions, and it’s the only game I play.
The level of emotion, stress, and everything else that Quake gives me is unmatched by any other game. For me, it’s more than just a game-it’s my church, my therapist, and my friend. (Fun fact: I even met one of my real-life friends through Quake!)
Give me a real single player sequel to Q1 in the same universe and all will be forgiven.
This could have been avoided if they added Orb.
Great video and I also was very pleased to see I wasn’t the only one who instantly thought “How is DOOM the Dark Ages not just Quake 5?!”
Haha well, I feel like Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal are more Quake than Doom in gameplay anyway. If it needs a Doom skin to sell then I'm all for it, but in my heart I know they're just Quake games because how they play and the levels. Think about Doom Eterenals Map layouts - spawning arenas with jump pads etc. - If that isn't just Quake then what is?
@ I never really thought about the jump pad and swing mechanics but you’re right. I was thinking visually, but Eternal especially feels like Quake Arena style mechanics in a solo game. Im all for whatever is fun, Ive just always connected more with the weird gothic style Quake feel and miss it 😢
At least you still have your IP existing. (cries in Unreal Tournament tears)
Just making quake live with good graphics is never gonna sell. What will you add without making the fans mad and new players confused how to play?
you can simplify it and add more teamplay. also a different artstyle because my good qc looks so cluttered
@@dkskcjfjswwwwwws413 you could just tell them to freaking shit on the game instead, it would have the same effect
They did that with Diabotical, it's exactly what Totalbuiscuit said "people clamoring for a new Q3A or Arena shooter are just farming likes, if they get it, they'll touch the game for a week and then shelve it out of boredom because it's the same shit from 20 years ago".
There's nothing else they can do. Quake fans are simply too picky to please and they will just shit on anything the developers put out, so they've decided to not give them anything as the community deserves it at this point. Q1 players still shit on Q2 for being too slow paced, and Q2 players to this day still shit on Q3 for having dumbed down movement and item timing. I knew Q3 players who nitpicked or straight up refused to play QL because of minor netcode issues as they preferred the jankier dial up focused netcode of Q3.
Ultimately FPS games as a whole moved away from fantasy settings as realistic graphics became good enough to present a believable "realistic" looking world with realistic looking guns, and fantasy games switched to other genres like MOBAs. The games with slower movement and console based aiming mechanics was significantly more popular for games like Halo and Call of Duty arena FPSes never adopted that either.
@@dkskcjfjswwwwwws413 then what's the point of calling it quake? Modern audiences don't giva a single fuck about IP, and old fans will shit on you for "simplifing and adding more team play."
Q3A & QL were my favorite games of all time, I use to play it almost every day until I was 28 hoping to go pro. I missed them and just discovered QC existed 2hr ago, I couldn't believe this thing existed and I didn't know. The team constantly makes bad decisions which slowly pushed me away many years ago. You hit the nail on its head... great breakdown TBH. I do sincerely hope they redo the game with ID or UE engine and the core gameplay we all loved. i don't mind them incorporating skins and other stuff to purchase in games like rocketleage, fortnite, etc. it keeps players coming back. The core gameplay must return, no character should be more special than the other, the players competing is what determines whos special with their skills. I wanted to introduce my kids to the most competitive game I grew up playing and thoroughly enjoy... it hurts my heart I may not be able to as the experience has been diminished and it may not exist years from now! 😔
I love QC. It's sad that it never got the love I believe it deserved. I miss watching the QPL every week.
Those games need dedicated casual servers and game modes to bridge the downtime gaps between competitive matches and to give the casual and new players a non stop playground.
No joke i think if we could mod and do stuff like defrag, QC would actually offer something alternative to the sweatfest that typically is quake.
I just think that QC doesn't offer a motivating way to stay in the game long enough.
Man, what could have been. Thanks of showing off QC:DE btw! I've been working on new from-scratch graphics for every champion to make it more "full game" than "mod", I'm glad to see praise for DE.
Game de developers really want to develop games for competition even before establishing the player base. It is like a builder that starts building a house from the roof.
Promoting the game to streamers that cant even figure out strafejumping was a bad idea, but also says alot about how noob many of these cs and fortnite players are.
Cs and quake are completely different games, it doesn’t say anything if you’re really good at one and not immediately good at the other.
strafejumping is an exploit not a real gameplay mechanic though.
@@lbo87 It is essential for fps games. Why do you want to move slow? Fast is fun. When you jump you are more predictable and its harder for you to aim. So it has strategy element to it aswell.
Yep praying on exploits is pathetic show how low skilled quake champion playerz really are😂😂😂
@ Strafe Jumping is more about expolting an engine glitch to move fast, it's not part of the gameplay.
Willits was a very good mapper - just look at his work on Q1 and Q2 as evidence.
For game design, however, he just didn't get it, and was quite obviously trying to play at a few levels above his actual ability. He doesn't deserve all of the blame for Rage, but that doesn't excuse him of responsibility for his part in it. QC and Rage 2 are his though, and his mark is all over them.
Saber interactive is kind of a cursed studio. They either make games with cult following that get worked on and supported forever but whose mechanics and gamplay underappreciated until they copy the same game and reskin it with a much more popular skin (space marine) 2, support other studios doing good work but then taking fault when players don't like stuff they didn't even work on for that game, make niche vehicle games that get a cult following and are made to do generic franchise/movie tie in slop where they still somehow do great work
They fucked up QC and the Ghostbusters Remaster. They're dead in my book.
As someone who started to play Quake since Quake 2 back in 90s, then played Quake 3 and OSP, took a huge break until QC and played QC for 3500 hours - I like QC. I like it for being something newer than just yet another copy of Quake 3. I played Q3-OSP a ton, I played it at PC clubs, I played it at home, I played it at LAN tournaments (nothing huge), I'm honestly fed up with that. Hence why I skipped QL.
Quake Champions offers different physics in movement from all the Quake games and perhaps something completely new. It was incredibly fun to slide with Slash - something that I never did before in Quake.
We played custom games in TDM, SAC, duels, 2x2, ranked as well. I've met a lot of good people that I never knew before but they are still enthusiastic about Quake and it's remarkable honestly.
QC unites people from all over the world again, we had Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, French, Swedish, Israelis and many others. Even if the community is small, I think it was nice to play with all of them. Of course there were a few damn weird people who'd flame or ruin the games on purpose but it happens in every single competitive game and Quake is very competitive even if you are not a Pro League tier player.
The game was outsourced to Saber Interactive, a studio that wasn't prepared for such a complex FPS game. They are doing good now with Space Marines and the other projects and I'm happy for them. But back then during the QC beta phase, it was messy.
It was also obvious that Bethesda had no clue how to manage it properly and rushed it a lot, their first big LAN tournament used a barely functional version of the game, lots of technical issues took a long time to be fixed, marketing campaign and sustainable model with the in-game store were poorly implemented. I guess it was also not easy to operate with 2 split offices - one is Bethesda/id software and another one is Saber in another country. Eventually the contract with Saber was terminated, Tim Willits quit as well. And that was the end of QC's development.
Since it relied on the heroes/champions' model, it could be only sustained with the addition of new champions but it was obvious that there's no money for that. And since then there was not a single new champion added into the game.
Yes, SyncError was making and adding some maps into the game, they even had some budget for Quake Pro League for a while. But without the MAIN REASON why regular players would play this game and return to it - new playable champions, the game is practically dead and would bleed the remaining players.
Oh and of course there was no mod or community support. Like...NONE AT ALL. ZERO. NOTHING. Can you imagine it in Quake that has a very loyal fanbase, it has a lot of fan-made modes like OSP, CPMA, Defrag (unique and entirely different scene with its own players, tournaments, map-makers, etc). Nobody but Sync could make any maps in QC. Nobody could try and make a mod that would balance the things and perhaps become a new standard for competitive scene. Nothing of it was allowed or introduced in QC. A huge shame and that's coming from Bethesda that relies on fans for ages to fix their damn buggy games since like Morrowind. Pushing out the community was a HUGE MISTAKE.
All in all, I enjoyed played it and I played it quite a lot. Visuals, animations, sound, movement styles, the speed - it is something unique that I could find only in QC. I couldn't enjoy the other FPS games after QC, they just don't have the same Quake vibes.
I started playing quake champs seriously 1 year ago (im 26y), played Q3 and QL occasionally when i was younger (beated all Q3 nightmare mod hehe) , I got 1000hour on the game now and i'm addicted to it, i learn so many things and i still learning things. If you want to learn how the world of quake work, QC is the best because its slower than QL for example, it's better to understand how things work. This game builds perseverance and mental/dopamine control , I think i help me in my life on this point, it learn that defeat is not a sad purpose
I like your style. I believe that QC is a small project and was expected to have a very low chance of success. It's still a legendary game to me just because there isn't anything better than it or QL so far. Also at 6:25 DOOM Mp run much worse than QC right now. 9:50 you are a genius! :D This video must have taken a lot of time to make. Good stuff! I'd add that maps are completely static (unlike Elder from QL), maps are missing a lot of cool trickjumps and different surface physics like SLICK surfaces in QL/Q3. And invisible wall clips are unprecise af. I hope Sync sees this vid and have a grin :D
Your prologue got you my sub. Congrats and well done :)
We had LAN party now and we played a lot of quake live.
There's something sacrilegious about using Quake 4's black hole gun as a rocket launcher.
First of all Bethesda should take notes from this, second, thank you sync error for keeping this game alive.
I liked the fact that there used to be more variance in map balance/design in older Quakes. You had maps with two mega healths, maps with no red armor, maps where items were stupid close to each other and generally there just used to be more stuff that was little bit inconvenient. Maps had unique character and you had to approach them differently. Now everything's too fleshed out, everything is too "fair" and it's catering to pretty much just one standard. It makes all maps feel the same. Quakes used to have lots of more bullshit, but it was fun bullshit.
Traps, elevators, moving platforms and even secret rooms used to be a thing in Quake1-3. Those stopped to be a thing when Quake became a try-hard esport game. Also, I could swear the hovering platform above the drop-hole in Lockbox used to move in some version in the early access, I'm half confident that I didn't imagine it.
First of all, cool video about history and great point of view. As somebody, who was tryharding QC in 2017 i can clearly say, that Willits, community managers and saber have been problem since the early access. The game was most playable in April 2017, except 0dmg rockets, parkinson lg, clutch's shield and insane pummel dmg. With each update (and ofc all of them came very late) the game most more difficult for PCs and became more and more unplayable. I thought since start, that dev streams are such a huge plus, but since they have been caring about skin commens only and not gameplay, i knew, that this was a start of crushing QC future, as any other game. Ignoring pro scene, main bugs, being able to make server listing again.. I mean, i downloaded the game like 20 times and always uninstalled, because even in 2022 i had startup resolution bug, joining the game with broken sounds even knowing that somebody using LG behind my back and I am already -200hp, after that time being able to find out after many years, that enemy can hear you when you are low HP, just because it is set up in your settings.. Some things shouldn't even exist in that game and yet still happening. Not gonna cry more about this one and looking forward for Q6 if devs didn't just make fun of us :) Happy fragging everyone
Praying Quake comes back properly one day 🙏
1997.... what a good time to be alive miss that times - LAN Parties endless MP fights - then online via analog, then isdn 😂😂😂😂
Quake was originally more RPG Adventure than FPS, but FPS what was Id knew. So give us Skyrim with Guns for the next Quake. Just imagine a massive open world with Quake's movement and eldritch horrors to hunt down.
So... Halo Infinite, but Quake?
@@AlphaGargQuakefield
@@sneauxday7002 ETQW but Quake 1 instead of Quake 2?
About the strafing - didn't they make it a hero special ability? Sorlag has "CPMA movement" in it's description card. Sarge has reduced self damage for rocket jumping. The punk on hoverboard also has CPMA movement.
I have 1.3k hours in Quake Champions and I played almost exclusively Sorlag for that satisfying movement
I'm so annoyed because CPMA is just about almost perfect for me. I just can't move at all without sideways/diagonal aircontrol. CPMA aircontrol feels like trying to walk with forward key only. They added literally every Quake movement from the franchise, except the original. What were they thinking?
This documentary is so well written and edited! 🧑🍳👌
I played Champions at first but when I saw those "special abilities" and such a small character rooster while the others were behind a paywall I gave up and never touched it since and after seeing this video I'm glad a did.
Pacat. Jocul e extrem de satisfăcător
As someone who always enjoyed Quake Champions but was disappointed that there were so few people online and it took so long to find a match, I can appreciate this documentary-style video.
What happened? The narcissm of Tim Willits happened.
It could have been perfect, but nope.
Thanks to Tim Willits Quake Champions existed at all. IF depended on Bethesda, there would be no Quake at all. Tim's failure was not to secure personnel on id Software to solely on Quake Champions with id Tech 6 finished.
Why the fuck only Tim, really man. The intention of id was to flush QUAKE to 3rd party developers. 3RD PARTY DEVELOPERS FOR QUAKE. FOR QUAKE.
I suppose to think that Tim, being as cool game/level designer back in a day did a lot to make at LEAST this level game from the situation they had. OFC its easier to blame him as a figure you see.
FINALLY - actually good video about QC, that addresses The Important Issues. Like / share / etc.
I was about to make a video like this myself, but i'm so frustrated with this game, i don't even want to bother, at least for now...
P.S. There's a Quake 3 Champions mod called Blood Run, it's developed by russians and supported by a private "pro"-league called RESP.
if the whiteboard is to be believed and not a joke, Machine Games might be working on Quake 5, this holds up since they made expansions for the remasters of 1 and 2, with Indiana Jones done i do think it'll be their next project.
Can't wait for QV in 2047.
You'll be disappointed bc it was a joke
After what happened to Wolfenstein. I'm not really hyped at MG taking the helm for a Quake game. They're great at making expansion packs, so at least they could have that.
@@hugostiglitz491 Well, RIP then! might be interesting if it gets handed off to another developer, lot to choose from whose made very high quality boomer shooters.
@@CatsOverdrive A good point, but maybe with the right director it could come out good. Though im not sure the director and writer even works there anymore who did the Wolfen games, the guy who did Indiana Jones is someone else
Guys, It's esports ready.
It actually is, because the Quake Pro League ran for about 7-8 years.
A classic arena shooter is about fairness, with skill deciding who wins (with a touch of luck, usually based on spawn points).
The problem with Quake Champions is that they decided to take a formula that worked i.e. Everyone has the same abilities, and thus the game is fair, and added special abilities, making things uneven.
Each character having unique abilities means you have to develop a sense for every character, learn every character, to be able to counteract the other players character choice.
Which still results in non equal fairness and gameplay.
They should not have tried to be like overwatch, and should have tried to be (ironically) quake.
Pfff, zoomers... The main problem with QC is the focus on the "formula". How to reward with cosmetics, what balance, what progress. Let me remind that Q3 became popular thanks to computer clubs and communication between real people at tournaments. Autism to skill quickly gets boring, people want to chat. When playing QC you don’t experience any communication. It feels like you're playing with bots.
People still play CS16 and CSS (on pirate servers like CSS ClientMod) despite CS2 just for the communication. The gameplay there is also outdated, but people don’t care because they talking and having fun. So it's not about politics, but about the atmosphere for communication.
I also heard the opinion that Saber and ID are connected by one person in the management of ID, so the project was outsourced due to nepotism.
I wish Quake could make a comeback. I tried Q3 when I was a kid because I heard it was the Super Smash Bros Melee of computer games and God they were right.
I'd love to see q3a with champions graphics, that's it...
Would die in a week.
Quake Battle Royale is scheduled for 2028, just in time for the battle royale craze.
3:00 Yes it is in this case, all they had to do was not do the hero/class thing and it would've done so much better. Quake is not Overwatch, it's a 1v1/TDM/Free for all game centered around skill and aim with evenly matched characters, not a team and objective based shooter with characters that have different abilities and health pools. A graphically upgraded or remastered QL would have done better than Champions.
Quake single-player game, taking inspiration from Romero's og vision. Like Ranger fragging across the eldritch Dream Lands and multiverse, building a hammer around the dire orb to permanently kill and or sever Elder Gods/Dream Land connection to realities. Dare I say, old-school fps with rpg elements (but not overbearing)?
Love all the section intros, quality work!
18:50
Quake is a long-running series with a hardcore fanbase. These people have expectations and they are very vocal when displeased. This group hated even the basic idea of champions. Imagine how they would shit up social media if the active abilities were as powerful as ultimates in OW or something. I understand that for the casuals abilities feel neutered. Ideally every multiplayer game would have two balancing branches - one for casuals and one for competitive players, but it doesn't seem to be economically feasible for most companies. :/
24:15
This is purely an issue of matchmaking. It doesn't matter how high the skill floor is as long as both players are equally good/bad.
Quake deserves the reboot treatment doom got
No, just no
cod players who only sat in corners and didn't do anything more than corner camp since they were to afraid to fight like a quake player, and the sweaty spawn killers who knew exactly where people spawned and killed them before they could even give a fight self. Plus the nerf of some weapons such as railgun and other things
Chasing trends rarely works out unfortunately.
What made matches interesting were the battles for shields and powerups.
Champions being paid also hurt this game alot, it doesn't matter if your game is balanced so well around pure skill, with only Ranger being free any new player would consider a big red flag scrolling through different Champions and see that some of them have bigger health pools than yours, again QC is not P2W but it was just a barrier that i encounter while trying to get people to play this game with me.
it is pay2win, actually. During that period, to master this game you have to learn all characters to play Duels, since they are asymmetrical. If they were the same, as in Q3 but just locked, then it is not pay2win model.
That's a fair point, unlocking individual characters makes sense in a game like League where there are 100+ characters to play. It does actually help new players a lot, otherwise it is overwhelming to play against a bunch of new champions every game, you are doomed to be utterly confused for the first hundreds of hours in the game. For 16 characters each with a single active ability though that's weird. I was lucky that they made every champion free when i started playing QC
I stopped playing regularly when they slowed down Slash. Warfrok in clan arean is where I am getting my speed fix now.
Quake is the Master of all Egoshoote5s - SP and MP and Mods
My 2 cents, in QC maps were a bit too large compared to quake live, which made the game feel slower. QL had a simple matchmaking mechanism which divided players into 4 tiers, if you did well in deathmatches you advanced to the next one, if you could not find yourself there you was downgraded. Simple as it was, it created a safe place for new players. Quake has this advantage that fragging lower skilled players does not gives you way less satisfaction, so there were not many smurfs back then. To have a decent matchmaking you have to have large player pool, without that you have infinite queue times, which will kill the game.
11:15 I still do that from time to time!😂 i knew about the game since 2017, played Quakelive, but only started to play Champions in 2021 when i got a PC that would play it!😅
The original concept for Quake was to focus on first-person melee. If ranged weapons were to be implemented. These would need to have long reload animations. Short munition travel distances. Slow munition travel speeds.
An implementation of a fatigue system for people that never walk and never stop smashing the attack buttons. People will adapt their approach to encounters when their forced to do so.
If you want speed and non-stop shooting without needing to reload. We already have Doom.
the original concept for quake was a million ideas daydreamed by romero that could never form a cohesive game. thats why quake ended up being so disjointed even after everyone decided to make it a fully 3d doom
@dkskcjfjswwwwwws413 I am going based on what Sandy Peterson said. He said that idea was scrapped during development, and the developers focused on the gunplay of Doom. That impacted his design work because of the atmosphere found in the level design. It reflected a period of time when melee weapons were more predominant. The atheistic of the enemies had a better fit within the environment. What certainly doesn't fit is firearms in a medieval setting.
i remember after titanfall and CODs with wallrides and tricky jumps and the great DooM 2016 i tought well people needs a revival of arena shooters. Quake Champions and Unreal Tournament 4 appeared... but then the battle royale boom buried the genre forever
Its hard to get folk into arena shooters cos they are seen as old outdated and simple. I think you could revive them if you waited long enough for folk to forget they exist as a genre. About 15 years to 20 years i'd say from now they could make a come back.
Guys! Check out Doom: QCV Edition (basically, Quake Champions in Doom):
* Better netcode
* More maps and characters
* It's FREE!
* Mode mods
* More skins
* Worse graphics but it''s still charming! And you will have 10x of the FPS ;-)
25:48 - And... here it comes!
Biggest problem with Quake Champions was the hero characters. Easily.
the biggest problem is definitely the skill gap. unless there is actual full sbmm, getting stomped by vets in quake is a whole different level of torture than getting stomped by vets in a game like cod lol. it's just flashing lights, things zip zapping around and you're wondering why haven't you spawned yet when you already died 4 times lol.
They put hero shooter elements in a game series with a fanbase that doesn't play hero shooters but kept a lot of the original fanbase's favorite mechanics that hero shooter fans would hate. They literally built a game _nobody_ in either audience could love.
The heroes are great, they add lota of deptg
@@desibrate3244 We had skins as heroes for crying out loud!!! Wtf is a hero anyway?
@@abdou.the.heretic The thing that a "hero" has that a "skin" doesn't have is a sweaty fanbase making pour'n of them on SFM and blender and stuff...
@@delphicdescant nopeee raven team leader
Reminded me of an interview I read back in 2008, from a developer of Battlezone 2. They thought they had something in the bag when they were developing an FPS-RTS hybrid game, thinking it would net the two demographic. It turned out, it didn't really meshed well with either camps because; "RTS players don't want to deal with the FPS stuff, and the FPS players don't want to deal with the RTS stuff. It's just two camps, seeing the worst of the other genres and rejecting it." At best, the only playerbase they got was the people who already like those two genres anyway, and it's (un?)surprisingly small.
I feel like arena fps games aren't really popular in general. The skill ceiling is higher than other subgenres, leading to players quickly falling off. The ones that remain are better, which further contributes to the issue. That, on top of all the other issues the game has. It was doomed from the start. A new Fortnite player can join a match, and win by luck. Or at least get very far. Instant gratification.
You need stuff to level the playing field if you want to retain a large audience.
Great video mate. Very well put together, thank you.
I love all quake games and quake champions and it such a shame that it panned out the way it did with quake champs.
I even updated my PC to play quake champions... Guess what I got? I can't connect to servers... Yep, PhD to start is my story too, but except that it's just a big mess, where you don't understand how and with what they kill you.. how do they do some stuff about movement?... And it feels like I played with pros, cause no one plays this sh*t anymore only PhD users left... 😂😂😂
Good video, bro!
5:00 This engine now runs Warhammer: Spacemarine 2 and many other games nice and smooth. There is no problem with Saber Engine.
The real problem is the company management at that time.
So, concluding all it could have been a really fun game if it won't be so focused on esports.
and QCDE has a built in unreal tournament addon. with all the iconic weapons and character movements from U99, UT99 and UT2004.
Wow, really?
id Software using another studio’s engine for the game that created the concept of “game engines” is just so funny.
We will never replicate the glory years of quake, 98-2003.
*96-2006
Everything you said is true and well researched, my only comment would be that the death sentence for Quake as a cohesive franchise began as a cancer before the first game was even released. The development of Q2 and Q3 completely ignored the direction of the genre and the interests of the player base. Valve was smart enough to pick up TF software and run with it, then do the same with the Counter-Strike team. There was literally no reason id couldn't have done the same, no reason except for their lack of vision to do anything but repeat the same bare-bones deathmatch formula from the Doom days.
I remember seeing the announcement and being interested, but a little put-off by the champions idea - and this was back when "hero shooter" wasn't a bad label yet. It just felt that, shouldn't classic arena shooters have even starts? Aren't heroes a little antithetical to the classic design? Plus something about wise-cracking hero characters with attitude just never felt right - show don't tell, and do don't show; a character is a badass because of what you do as them in the game, not because they call people names in the results screen, not because they _tell_ you they're cool. I dunno, something didn't feel right about it. And then all I'd hear about it later was that no one was playing it, and I remember a video highlighting the disparity between the in-game characters taunting "get good" attitude clashing completely with the actual players in lobbies being inviting and welcoming to newcomers and trying to help them learn the game. It's a shame because conceptually I _was_ interested, a new arena shooter from a big name is definitely appealing, but it's the same thing as Lawbreakers, you need the entry level to be low so you can get new players interested in that high ceiling
Great video, thank you!
Lol, i just thought that i need to binge watch thru your tiberium videos. Its definitely a sign
One crucial point is missing in the video, why was QPL eventually cancelled, it was their core selling feature after all. The strategy wasn't so bad - cast professional matches, casual players drawn by a great spectator experience shower you with money buying skins. But apparently they had severe budget issues, they overspent on 2017 world championship with a prize pool of 340k while drawing 20k peak viewers, and it was only downhill from there. QPL consistently stayed below 10k, with season 4 finals having only 3800 peak viewers. It's like their marketing was just nonexistent, in a sector that is extremely competitive with a ton of big titles. They thought like the game will speak for itself, but in hindsight it wasn't nearly enough.
Also i'm pretty sure that in 2017 the game was in a pretty bad state after rushed development. Clawz, basically a new player in the scene won 100k in a tournament full of seasoned (in "classic" Quake) veterans, played for a year more, and proceeded to fuck off lmao, that's not a good look
I suppose, with arena shooters that a light sbmm could be introduced. Maybe for the first 50 hours of someone's playtime could be tracked with sbmm, and i'm 100% against any sbmm or algorithms but.. as a ut99 main for a while yeah arena shooters are fucking brutal to new players and absolute hell to new fps players you really need a specific personality to stop caring about being defeated and seeing it as learning and practicing and enjoying it. It's 100% out of some peoples control to totally not enjoy that.
I also understand that mastering the movement and memorizing map layouts is integral to the ''skill'' of quake, but i feel like making it easier to specifically make sharp turns and leave everything else up to practice would make new players quit less quickly. Simpler maps, audio ques for power ups with a map and a ping showing its location, and leave the original quake up to a custom server browser with community made mods and whatever.
Dude, I play QC every single day. The game is awesome.
it's good, but quake in form of hero shooter just doesn't do it for me...
@@lmaololovsky hey you forgot your bunny ears hahahahha
@@lmaololovskyI wanted it to have a campaign
@@hugostiglitz491 I'd be perfectly happy with q3a gameplay and qc graphics...
@@lmaololovsky just out of curiosity, do you dislike the champion system in general? Or mainly the active abilities? I personally enjoy the difference in speed, stack and movement types.
I have to say something.
Quake Champions: Doom Edition is the Quake Champions that, at the very least, was what I expected from a complete experience.
I finished the PVE Deathmatch Campaign mode yesterday and liked what I saw.
I'm following the development of Quake Champions Classic too
I've played since 2017 and deleted the game last week with my active battle pass. From start it was suspicious that we had no mapbuilders (I created a lot of maps in GKTRadiant) and no modes (we all begged for CTF and it turned out shit).. no callvote no records for those GLORIOUS frag-movies that could have cattupullted the game. And yes, I agree that game became ridicilously focused around PRO scene that could not evolve in new era of abilities - do you remember Rapha strugling to get top 3 first years? Or how cooler looked cooked after the game with claws??? New blood had a chance with those abilities.. oh.. to much crap to talk about.. I must say thank you as well to all the community managers and all the team to do this game, at the end I am a quake fan. Hopefully new will be home-grow-TEXAS-baddass-shooter we all love. AND QUAKE AS A HORROR SINGLE PLAYER GAME ??? DEFINETLY YES
QC is CPMA. I was never a CPMA player. This game is focused on movement. The fights feel hectic and chaotic like fights feel in CPMA. Also you have to be quick around the map and position well.
Also the champions. Instead of that every player has everything and can use everything, players are stripped down to a subset of possibilities and thus are forced to play in a certain way and thus are forced to figure out which champion is the best for which map. This is like another layer of gate keeping on the way to mastering a map. In the end, there are those 1, 2 or 3 champions that work for a map. You have to figure them out at first.
Also the health/armor. To little stack. Players are afraid to attack and if you attack most of the time it needs to be a killing blow. They wanted it to make more noob friendly through that. But that did not work at all. Noobs are still owned by players who time items and have a larger stack.
Also special abilities. Still another resource which you have to manage and which does not add to the game but it subtracts. It subtracts because players have to play around the opponent abilities. They cannot attack as long as the ability is available for the opponent. If the ability was used hopefully without much impact, then normal attack is possible, for a small amount of time, until the ability is available again.
Of course the engine is pure shit. Also there were no competition supporting features like bronze, silver, gold, and so on ladders, how every competitive game offers.
I as someone who I guess played like 5000 hours of Q3/QL could not be bothered to play QC. QC for me had the wrong focus on movement and I was never a CPMA or trick jump player. I do not want to learn champions since I was never fascinated by DOTA. Also they tried to make it noob friendly by reducing health/armor (and other measurements) which made the gameplay more shallow. And I do not want to play around abilities which feel like they are from a different genre of game and which destroy the normal game flow. Also I do not want to play a game with a shit engine.
Crazy amount of people just walks the maps, others plays without using abilities. Play how you want to
I play Quake since they came out, and stuck with Quake 3 (mostly Excessive plus mod) for the past 20 years or so off and on without really having interest in any other FPS games, I even rejected Quake Live after trying it, as Q3 felt better, Qlive was Browserbased when I first tried it and dismissed it but it still feels rougher to me upon trying it again. Everything else feels like garbage to me, I cant stand slow clunky goldeneye walking through mud movement, its just gross to me. I came to QC late mostly due to lack of a modern PC, I hadnt seriously gamed in a while, and didnt require much of a PC to run Q3 at a decent frame rate. I love QC for the most part, the only issues I have are latency related, which might be my still underpowered RTX3050ti laptop (yeah, I f'd up there, I didnt know much about modern gaming PCs) as I find theres delay sometimes for instant hit weapons, (rail, MG's, SGs) firing in general sometimes feels delayed and can be a bit frustrating. Other than that, movement is great and feels like Q3 although a bit slower, its still great. I really wish there was a bigger playerbase, as there are so few players that most game modes are dead, its mostly TDM surviving at this point, and most of the players queing are very very high level skilled players, so the imbalances are ridiculous.
Theres also a cheater problem, I want to say its just one individual constantly cheating at matches daily, as I usually encounter this player, they have multiple accounts that are all named very similar, they are easy to detect and most of the high level players usually agree its a cheater and leave matches, making everyone wait for loading matches even more than the game already does. I've reported the cheater numerous times, including capturing the cheater streaming themselves cheating (complete with wallhack and cheats on display, heavily) and uploaded that VOD to my youtube, I then linked the VOD to the QC Discord and to Sync directly, saying this player has been a cancer on the community in NA for well over a year, not only cheating under multiple accounts, some of which have been banned, this user also stream snipes (I stream to rewatch my vods without filling my harddrive) and follows players to other servers including the UK when I tested if they'd follow over to other game modes and server selections, they did. Sync didnt reply, and other players in the discord rejected my suggestion of adding /Callvote Kick, to allow players to kick cheaters instead of everyone leaving and reloading hoping the cheater didnt follow, which they do. Their argument was that many good players will be callvote kicked for being too good and accused of cheating by the rest of a lobby, I found that are somewhat flawed response as the command worked great in the Quake Excessive Plus community and good real players were known and respected for the most part, although adding spectator mode would also allow players to check for cheating, as well as gather better evidence for reporting cheaters, something Bethesda services requires when they follow up reporting a cheater, (Not sure what footage they are expecting to get other than your own VOD from your POV of the cheater, maybe showcasing a ridiculous win margin or highlighting the cheaters stats). I even suggested in the discord to move the player search bar, as when you try to type a cheaters name into the search it covers the player name list from the match, and cheaters often have names like lIlIlIlIlIl or other random character names that are difficult to memorize or decypher, making looking up and reporting post match more difficult (you can report them easier ingame from the ingame menu, but sometimes a match ends before you decide or remember to report).
I would say alot of whats killing QC would be a complete disregard for quality of life improvements in the UI, anti cheat system, the match making system when server lists would be just plain better, it worked for many decades now and Qlive even still uses it with a similar playerbase size despite age differences of the game.
Thanks for making this video, I wish somthing Quake would happen soon, until then I'll still be playing whenever I can.
Agreed
Absolute true
Im in live with *HUNTER* since i was 16 years old ❤
Loved how QC felt at launch, odd it felt worse and worse with the early updates. Few things could've really helped this game take off and separate itself from the pack. Remove Heroes and add a few perks you can sub in/out if you really need Customization prematch. Remove varying hitbox sizes, speeds, health differences between skins (what were heroes). Add more players per match, with slightly larger map layouts to help out newer players get into the game. 4v4 is too brutal for new players.
My thoughts exactly that a fully thought through single player quake game would go as hard as the modern DOOM games.
I don't recall any serious performace issues with the game. Some very early version was sending packets to the server PER FRAME (which is nuts) and that caused lag on high fps. Later on they fixed it or limited it and I've never played a game where the netcode feels as smooth as it is now. I had no idea about the game engine issues, to me the game seemed to run well but clearly not on the same engine as Doom 2016.
I've always thought the biggest killer of this game was the lack of promotion. The second thing is that they never got out of early access, which ties directly to what you uncovered in this video. Very few people want to buy a new iteration of a game that's in early access, when quake live is free to play and many oldschool players have already experienced Quake 3 arena. Without a singleplayer campaign or some coop content draw players in, the game just doesn't sell. Especially when everybody knows how hard it is to get into Quake multiplayer in the first place.
What we really need is a proper Quake singleplayer game that teaches the multiplayer gameplay mechanics little by little throughout the campaign. Doom Eternal has a lot of movement mechanics and that clearly hasn't worsened the sales of the game.
I'm confident that Quake will revive once ID Software makes the next Quake singleplayer campaign game WITH multiplayer. The IDtech engine is just too OP, they will literally mop the floor with all the Unreal 5 slop that everyone is sick and tired of.
Invisibility.....you have taken a lead....
This is the best video I've seen on the subject. I am dying to see arena shooters make a comeback. Peoole dont think they can but they easily could wirh the right team, engine, and innovations. We just need the stars to align once. I'm so tired of every game having 1-2 guns. I want to fly around with 9 totally different weapons and outskill people rather than corner peek or press an ultimate ability. Tactical shooters and hero shooters are stale. I want doom eternal but PvP
What a banger to stumble upon randomly. great vid
Regarding ultimate abilities feeling weak, they used to be more powerful than that but most quake players didn't like the power dynamics attached to ultimates. Some ults like doom guy blazko and death knight would just mow down the entire server with little counterplay while others were severely underwhelming.
One question I have to ask is: how big is the Quake-style competitive shooter audience? Truly, how big is it? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that to be insulting, I'm trying to get some grounding here on what the upper limit of this game's audience could be in the first place. So let's look at some selling points for Quake Champions:
The first is nostalgia for the Doom and Quake franchises. This gets your foot in the door, but I don't think this gets you millions of players. If you played Quake 1 when you were a teenager, you're in your 40's now. If you played Quake 3 when you were a teenager, you're in your 30's now. A grown adult with a career still likes video games, but your time for games is limited, is Quake Champions one of the lucky few games you get to play? Lots of people discover Doom for the first time each year (I've seen lots of indie Vtubers try it out) but they're interested in the story modes, not joining the PvP.
The second is fans of Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch (we're still talking Overwatch 1 circa 2017). This was before the big TF2 hiatus and while Overwatch was still riding high. Did Quake Champions really have what it takes to turn heads?
Third is the e-sports scene and e-sports wannabees. But lots of games claim to want an e-sports scene only to wind up with a tiny audience that can't sustain it, Lawbreakers springs to mind.
It's not impossible for an established franchise to put out a new experiment that catches on with a new, young, widespread audience. Fortnite was originally an Unreal project. But Quake Champions just really doesn't have that casual vibe to it.
I don't say any of this to be insulting. I could be way off in my assessment. But I still fear Quake Champions might have actually reached all of its target audience, only to discover that "all" turned out to be a small number