Quake Champions: The game nobody wants to talk about

[Ebisu]

Ayy there everybody. I ain't showed up in a good period of time. Been been busy with life and various creative projects and what-not. I've been meaning to get this off my chest and I didn't see an existing thread about it (if there's some super sekrit rule that says we're not allowed to talk about Quake Champions or something' somebody let me know) Anyway, a little bit of a disclaimer before I start: I ain't trying to start a flame war or nothing. The following has nothing to do with anyone here because honestly I have no idea what the general consensus is on this site so don't take it personally and hopefully we can have a constructive discussion.

Anyway, Quake Champions. This game has been lingering in my mind,the past few days especially and it's really pissing me off to dangerous degrees. Not only the game itself, but the fact people have been defending it despite obvious chicanery afoot. The example I wish to cite that got me all riled up in the first place is Total "I'm dying from cancer so you have to be nice to me and adopt everything I say as fact while I continue to eat reuban sandwiches which further deteriorates my health which I display as a sacred cow" Biscuit's awful video on the game. You know, the guy who cringe-worthily commentated on a few Quake Live videos and pretends he knows everything about Quake? The guy that thinks that Quake 3 Arena is the only past representation of the franchise that matters? Yes, that guy. Anyway this post isn't meant to be an attack on the guy, I have more important things to do (which I will proceed to outline right now)

Quake Champions is a disgrace to the name it bears. Quake is an arena shooter that stands the test of time. With an incredibly high skill ceiling and barrels upon barrels of mods, it's no wonder that there are many people (myself included) that still care about it today. While most people here lean towards Quake 1 (another reason why I'm here as well) it's still safe to say that we have an appreciation for the other counterparts to some degree. Quake Champions is very obviously inspired by Quake 3 Arena (which is uncontestedly the most popular game in the series.) It would be fine if they were going to just make Quake Live all over again with more features. However, that's not what they are doing.
No, it's much more sinister.

They're turning it into a stupid Overwatch ripoff (which is what everything is doing now-a-days) It's also kind of ironic to see Quake spawn Team Fortress, have Overwatch rip off Team Fortress, and have Quake rip off Overwatch. However, things going full circle like this isn't necessarily an evolution. On the contrary, it's a regression. Team Fortress started as a mod that was trying to very much be it's own thing. So much so that it eventually spawned it's own standalone games. Regardless of dumb memes, hats, F2Ps, pastel colored horses, and constantly suffering yourself to see this little shit in every other chat message: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° ) Team Fortress 2 is a very good game and has decades of thought put into it (and was once upon a time actually balanced well, before phrases like "Demoman takes skill" and "random crits are fair and balanced" came into common usage.) Due to it's popularity eventually there would have to be clones of it, and that's where Overwatch comes in.

Blizzard noticed that WoW was finally declining. They needed a new cash cow, and being Blizzard it's not very hard to make one. They copied Team Fortress 2 and acquired a large player-base. Other companies seeing this completely scrapped the idea of copying TF2 and tried to copy Overwatch (because TF2 is a 10 year old game.) This makes every Overwatch clone even MORE uninspired than Overwatch itself is. Overwatch copied a great game and did so very poorly by taking a few great things and throwing it into a blender filled with a bunch of left-field ideas with very little purpose from a game design perspective. Then they mass market it with dumbed down gameplay (the game literally aims for you) and slap on soulless, uninspired characters (half of which only exist to fill a diversity quota) that are appealing to your average horny 12 year old that is just entering puberty.

There is one thing that people copying Overwatch doesn't realize, and is the key reason of why these games always fail: Blizzard fans love eating shit. They are loyalists who will eat anything that Blizzard shits onto a plate. That's why they've been able to maintain a sizable player-base on WoW for the past 13 years. It's why they've managed to get an entire country so addicted to Starcraft 2 that they die in internet cafes and have to play the game with a different meta since all o South Korea's internet is practically a LAN connection. It's why they've been able to use Diablo 3 to run a legal gambling ring/independent economy (which might I add Valve is also guilty of doing, and hilariously despite the ludicrous amount of money laundering both companies do to get away with these things, both examples are more legitimate than the entire US economy given the way the Federal Reserve works but that's it's own irrepairable shitheap.) When you're another comapny and you try to capitalize on a Blizzard formula alone, it will fail every time because the formula is shit, and most consumers don't want to eat shit. Blizzard has monopolized the ENTIRE market of shit-eaters.

So 6 paragraphs later you might be asking how any of this is related to Quake Champions. It's quite simple. It doesn't matter how big Zenimax is. The stupid first-person MOBA bullshit formula is god-awful and does not belong in Quake whatsoever. You're literally mixing the highest skill ceiling in all of gaming with the most bottom-of-the-barrel trash you can possibly achieve in a digital format. They are perverting everythign we know and love with mass-marketed flavor-of-the-month bullshit that everyone's going to drop like a baby in an abortion clinic.

The next argument that will be presented is the same shit I always hear from people every time something I love is given a obviously shallow reboot for a new audience (the same shit TotalBuiscit said): "Nah man you just want it to be exactly like Quake 3 Arena because that's the only thing you people play all day! Everyone else wants something fresh and exciting!"
That's how the marketers use ordinary people to make questioning a shitty product taboo in the original community. They want you to buy into their bullshit too so they can make even MORE money by you accepting it as well. This is commonly achieved by hiring marketers to shill on other websites posing as ordinary users hoping that they can sway public opinion.

Well you know what, I'm not doing it. Screw Quake Champions. On top of all the shallow MOBA bullshit there are plenty of other reasons to hate Quake Champions and is going to cause it to quickly fade into obscurity outside of a small group of Quake fans who will hold onto it with dear life:

No custom maps/mod support
Not Open Source (when every other game in the series is)
No dedicated servers
No LAN
No love put into the game whatsoever. Pure corporate trash.

The lack of these things is going to significantly hurt the game. TF2 was used as an example earlier and look at it. Despite the irrefutably cancerous community it has and all the silly things that have happpened to it over the years, it is STILL relevant 10 years later and is constantly getting new content from the fans. You have derivative work like TF2C, insanely popular custom maps that have mad their way into the official game, and all sorts of popular custom game modes like Saxton Hale and the like.
Quake Champions will get none of this. QC will not have interesting mods like Quake 1 did. It will spawn nothing of value.

As Quake fans we should be PISSED. The very game we love and adore with all our hearts is being turned into another corporate whore. All the people I've seen defending this game are not even Quake fans. They have either never played Quake before or they played Quake Live for 5 minutes after they ruined the entire game with loadouts and shit.

I have been playing Quake for years.
I have been modding Quake for years.
I have participated in active discussion in various Quake communities/IRCs/boards.

I am a Quake player. Fuck this game.

What are your thoughts fellas?

[Baker]

The videos look like Quake 3. If Quake 3 or Quake Live is your thing ...

Quake became irrelevant because id Software did not see the beauty and possibilities.

Valve licensed the engine, created an entire universe of a community and supported it and made things like Steam. They built a modding community around goldsrc (Half-Life 1 engine) and the Source Engine. Evolved the community, invested the tools like Hammer --- which they bought and was originally the Quake editor Worldcraft. Evolved the engines, evolved the Steam experience. Evolved the tools, the multiplayer, etc.

Blizzard, like Valve, knows how to make a deep and robust community. It is arguable that World of Warcraft is the most successful game in history and that's just one thing they've made.

I've never seen evidence that id Software ever knew how to do any of that.

Guess that is why Gabe Newell who runs Valve has a net worth of $4.1 billion and John Carmack, a mere $40 million.

John Carmack originated everything -- he just didn't have the imagination to see how it could blossom into an empire.

[Ebisu]

This is quite an agreeable post.

Although, I would like to say that one of the biggest reasons Quake is still relevant today is the fact that it is now Free Software (something Carmack insisted upon doing.)

Now we have all sorts of flavors of sourceports and tools to work with to make the game bigger and better. Look at how impressive Xonotic is, and that's considering that that's still on the weaker side of what is possible to do with these engines.
Regardless, you don't need a small loan of a million dollars to apply these principles to a game. It's a fairly simple concept.

[Lucifex]

Completely agreed. You really hit the nail on the head, especially the Totalbiscuit guy - fuck him. And anyone else that just sits here and accepts it - that Rocket Jump Ninja guy included too (guy turned into a shill like most Youtubers).

Remove the stupid 1-shot abilities and dumb hitbox bullshit, and the game would be playable.

Reminds me of Runequake, add in a bunch of chaotic crap so noobs can get kills. Try playing an FFA where almost everyone is Nyx. Can't get any kills because goes invis immediately (and is invulnerable while doing so). Galera's ability is the death spot from Runequake with a much bigger radius. Scalebearer's 1-shot ability is bullshit too. Incredibly frustrating. That and the "weapons do more damage while zoomed" thing. Dumb artificial difficulty that also encourages players to camp with their abilities (Runequake?)

Something tells me this will be popular (just like Runequake). PC gaming isn't as much of a niche thing anymore, and devs have to appeal to the masses more and more. Sad days.

I could rant for awhile on this abomination of a game, but I won't. Props to the post man.

[Dutch]

Quake Champions will be different than Quake because it HAS to be. The reason behind this is the sign of the times.

Why was Quake1 wildly popular? As was said above, the open source, the mods, the simplistic multiplayer. Let's take a look at these in detail:

Open source is dangerous territory these days because the market revolves around consumerism. We may love Quake because it never really dies, but developers hate this when they're out to earn a buck. The sooner they can push a sequel and make the prior game obsolete, the better. Look at Call of Duty and it's ridculously long list of sequels, each about the same as the last. If a game goes open source, the mods come out, people stay latched on, no one buys the next game.

Mod support is dead, for the reason of lack of simplicity. Making a mod for Quake is a big job, but is totally do-able, even 1 guy alone can pull it off. Aside from modifying and tweaking some things here and there, does your average gamer have the skill to produce a Quoth or Arcane Dimensions style mod for a modern game? Hell no, the amount of artwork and code would be enormous.

The simplistic multiplayer worked back in 1996 because it was revolutionary, new, and fresh back then. The average gamer expects more nowadays: a level playing field, classes, rewards, stats, achievements, recognition...being the winner is no longer the top priority. On top of that, online gaming has been taken over by punk-ass 12 year olds. Add to that the anonomity the internet provides, and you're dealing with a nightmare.

The modern gaming climate in 2017 prevents Quake1 from ever happening again, at least at the scale it was in 1996. Anyone still playing Quake hasn't 'evolved', so to speak. I don't mean this in a bad way. I very much agree with most of what's been said in this thread. This new generation of games can go to hell. I'm just trying to offer an explanation as to why Quake Champions cannot - and never will - be like Quake1.

However, I reserve my final verdict until I've played the game. The character abilities supposedly can be turned off server-side. Maybe this will be a decent shooter. But I do have my doubts.

[Ebisu]

Quake Champions will be different than Quake because it HAS to be. The reason behind this is the sign of the times.

If it wants t be different that's fine. It can be relevant without making flat out ridiculous game design decisions.

Mod support is dead, for the reason of lack of simplicity. Making a mod for Quake is a big job, but is totally do-able, even 1 guy alone can pull it off. Aside from modifying and tweaking some things here and there, does your average gamer have the skill to produce a Quoth or Arcane Dimensions style mod for a modern game? Hell no, the amount of artwork and code would be enormous.

Regardless of how feasible it would be or not, they could easily release the SDK but they refuse not to. More importantly, just because you have a modern engine does not mean your mod has to meet modern standards. Have you seen all the TF2 maps with that generic orange valve texture? If they even gave us the ability to make custom maps everything would be so much better off than it currently is.

The simplistic multiplayer worked back in 1996 because it was revolutionary, new, and fresh back then. The average gamer expects more nowadays: a level playing field, classes, rewards, stats, achievements, recognition...being the winner is no longer the top priority. On top of that, online gaming has been taken over by punk-ass 12 year olds. Add to that the anonomity the internet provides, and you're dealing with a nightmare.

That's because they're so used to playing casual mediocre garbage. A game doesn't need these things to succeed. If a game is good enough and has any kind of marketing campaign whatsoever it will succeed. The shittiest games sell millions because they have marketing campaigns.

The real reason why you won't see mods, maps, and an overall good game is not because it wouldn't sell. It's because ZeniMax is a publicly traded company.

A DISCLAIMER: Being political is 100% not my intention, as this is certainly not the place for it. The following paragraphs are sticking SOLELY to economic theory.

WHY BEING PUBLIC ADVERSELY AFFECTS AAA GAMES:

In the United States we have a god-awful system where if a private company makes too much money they are forced to go public. When you go public you are subject to every decision being made to please investors, even if it means losing a shitload of money. Investors will require you to make more money each fiscal cycle than you did the last, or they will desert you and leave you to die. If your investors leave you, no matter how much money you made does not matter. You could be a god-damned billionaire and your business will still fail. Companies have to constantly find a way to make MORE an MORE money so that they can keep existing, and each year game companies get MORE and MORE greedy. They're not even personally greedy o remotely evil most of the time, it's just that they must do these things to keep afloat. You get more micro-transactions, more on-disc DLC; the games get less and less finished to meet ever so shrinking deadlines and the developers get abused and degraded by their overlords who pay them less and less money while requiring them to work MORE and MORE overtime hours (without pay might I add.) Too big to fail only applies to banks. Any publishing company, major or minor is constantly struggling to still be able to exist due to the nature of investment politics.

The problem is that investors are IDIOTS. They are morons, buffoons, fools. Investors don't like video games. Hell most of them are 60 year old men from New York City. They've never played a game in their goddamn lives. Your average company goes to meetings and presents to their clueless investors a candy-coated sideshow with a bunch of fancy colors and Web 3.0 tier websites written by an Indian man in Adobe Dreamweaver (whom they paid 3 dollars an hour to make. Poor soul he is.) This pleases them.

They'll be told about how their customers "will be seamlessly integrated into a cutting edge matchmaking system, and assigned global ranking statistics for maximum customer satisfaction and personal investment in the game's community marketplace." Words like this please them. They are nothing more than monkeys in suits. You can't sell them on "We made a really good game that people will like a lot and probably tell their friends about!" That drives them away like flies. You know how you go drive in a city and a swarm of cars comes jetting out of a lane and you sit there in awe thinking about the sheer magnitude of gas powered metal machines that are passing by? It's a similar effect. Your company is deserted.

Because of this, while in theory is is possible to make a shit-load more money, companies that are publicly traded must often settle for LESS money in order to concoct a means to please the moronic mauraders of the financial realm. To make up for lost profits companies must cut costs in every possible way. This is included but not limited to laying off a ton of developers, rushing unfinished games, outsourcing as much work as possible to foreign lands full of people that can't speak the same language as those trying to lead a project, mark up the costs of the game to ludicrous amounts (remember kids, never pay more than 20 dollars for a computer game!) and bleed their customers for all the DLC/cosmetics/faux marketplace transactions as possible. On top of that you have to find a way to impot a bunch of cash from a private slush fund into your company to seem like legitimate consumer traffic.

The only companies who can get away with full creative control are private companies like Valve who do a LUDICROUS amount of money laundering so that they can STAY private (ala International Dota tournaments, letting kids participate in gambling, lottery without lottery licenses, charities etc.) and rarely will you find someone with such a skilled legal team. You have to break a LOT of laws to keep your business from getting fucked over in the US. If you want to make good video games you will have to go through the same loopholes, and those loopholes are only exploitable by those with a brainiac mind for business. Usually these two camps do not overlap due to the personality traits of both camps being polar opposites to each other.

These things did not use to be a problem. Anyone could make what was then considered to be a AAA title. However, as technology got better the standards for games got bigger and bigger, as so did the budgets of these games. Before long the only people who could afford to make AAA games were with publisher money from publicly traded companies. This is why video games have been progressively getting worse since around 2007~ and I mean significantly so. It seems like things get worse and worse every year and this is explainable by the above paragraphs.

[Baker]

Quake Champions will be different than Quake because it HAS to be. The reason behind this is the sign of the times.

Why was Quake1 wildly popular? As was said above, the open source, the mods, the simplistic multiplayer. Let's take a look at these in detail:

Open source is dangerous territory these days because the market revolves around consumerism.

The Quake 1 engine code was open sourced 10 days before the year 2000, a few days after the release of Quake 3.

Quake 1 had been off the radar for a very, very long time. None of the source code releases were done until years later. The source code for Quake 3, for example, was released in 2005 -- getting close to 6 years after the release of Quake 3.

Quake 3 and Half-Life with Counter-Strike and Team Fortress Classic were the "cool games" at the time.

Quake was a ground-breaking game and quite a technical achievement, but it was also viewed as 256 shades of brown, compared to very colorful Doom. It is little surprise that Quake 3 was loaded with bright neon and colors.

Quake 1 benefited from being nearly the only online game in existence and the only full 3D first person shooter in existence. There were no other full 3D first person shooters.

[Ebisu]

The Quake 1 engine code was open sourced 10 days before the year 2000, a few days after the release of Quake 3.

Quake 1 had been off the radar for a very, very long time. None of the source code releases were done until years later. The source code for Quake 3, for example, was released in 2005 -- getting close to 6 years after the release of Quake 3.

You are correct. My implications are that the release of Quake as Free Software even a few years later exponentially helped the game. I am coming at this from the angle that implies that ZeniMax/Id will never release the source code for this game, thereby denying QC from reaping the benefits of it's predecessors.
---
Also, I feel I should speak on behalf of the harsh tone presented in this thread. Yes, I know that a lot of this is coming off as ranty but I only do it because god damn I love Quake so much. It kills me to see this happen to something I've held so dear to me for so long. I have friendships I've built from playing this game, I've had so many memorable LANs, I've had so much fun modding/making maps for these games. Hell, one of my closest friends is someone from this site who just so happened to live in the same city as me. Please understand, as I mean no malice here.

[Baker]

It kills me to see this happen to something I've held so dear to me for so long.

Last night at 2 AM:

986 New Doom (2016 release) players
252 Quake Live players

...

Meanwhile ...

1794 players for "Gary's Mod". Some Half-Life mod made in 2004.
9522 players for Unturned, a 3d zombie survival game made by a 16 year old that uses the Unity engine.

So Quake Live and the "New" Doom are nowhere near player competitive against the ^^ above. And that's not the popular games.

Meanwhile

36000 players for Team Fortress 2. Yes, the game released 10 years ago.
7300 for Counter Strike. Like the 1998 Half-Life 1 Counter-Strike.
169,000 playing Counter Strike CSGO.

Meanwhile ...

There were probably 1.5 million playing Minecraft.
And probably 3 million playing League of Legends. A couple of years ago, that game had 100,000,000 concurrent players.

I don't know that a Quake 3 style game is viable in 2017.

[Rampage]

The issue persists in that there are WAAAAY too many games on the market now, and the shelf life is extremely short. They need to squeeze what they can out of players, easy learning curve, special abilities, paid DLCs, and the like.

That being said, I believe there are two things that hurt the Quake community:

1. Not capitalizing on the game's amazing run during the early 2000's when the most popular players went head to head and there were no games on the market more exciting to watch from a fan perspective.

2. The competition.. I see guys in our Quake chan on Discord playing games like 'PUBG' or 'H1Z1'.

__________________________________________________ ______________________________

Most games now are actually only half a version of the full game on release, and then you just pay for DLCs throughout to get the full thing.

I've enjoyed BF1, but the lack of community in PS4 console games is just brutal.. some games are a bit better (like I have friends who are in clans in games like Destiny or Overwatch).

Nevertheless, this is a special place, the guys still play Q1 on discord through the community and it's a real niche thing, and I don't think that can ever be duplicated in future games as well.

Communities are too large, players are mostly anonymous and from all over the globe.

There is real nostalgia to certain older games now.. games like WoW are among them as Baker noted.

Edit:

To the point above from Baker about gamer populations for various games. A big part of that which I think you may have forgotten to mention is the eSports scene.

For example SC2 has been around since 2010, it was in steady decline because the game itself was weak. However, the latest expansion 'Legacy of the void' managed to get it right and capture some of what made Broodwar special.. I've kept up with the SC2 Reddit threads and they've had consistent player growth since the expansion came out; many older players coming back to play it. Moreover, the eSports scene in Korea for SC2 has also ramped up.. I watch the GSL and SSL tournaments weekly in Korea with English casting (the casters are hilarious and people love to come back and listen to them - they're expats well known in Korea for SC - SC2 commentating who go by the name of Tasteless and Artosis - they even have a combined name 'Tastosis' for their symbiosis and humor while casting.. why is this important? Well they have identifiable faces, guys can relate as a community and come back to see their favorite guys.. those guys also come and join up the reddit threads and chat about the game..

Most of the older games you see surviving (aside from TF2) have a real strong community but also have an eSports scene to aspire to and watch (CS GO for example).

Quake used to be the hub for eSports, Quake 3 was THE most popular game at one point in the early 2000's when Fatality and Zero4 were going at it. Instead of ramping that up to the next level, they made a mistake by botching Quake 4 badly and not have it resemble Quake 3 properly. That's where things started to derail.

People used to make amazing Q3 RJ videos, highlight compilations of the top guys from Europe playing at LANs for big prizes, and the game was booming... they didn't handle the decline properly and now it's playing catch up ever since.. problem is the community is sparse and guys have moved on from gaming (I know myself and many quakers who now have families or have gotten married and moved away from gaming entirely, so this is in large part why Quake is having a hard time capturing that audience and needs to appeal to a new younger demographic to catch them).

[ghostboy1225]

I Do find the core concept of the passives rather interesting such as the different movement systems from prior games passive and differing HP/hitboxes i am skeptical of though. do find the old movement system reminding me of Generations:Arena (there was classes that functioned like a WOLF3D movement Doom 1/2 Quake 1 and then another for quake 2 then default Q3 movement)

Also they do want to support modding in some fashion after launch
and i agree that id needs to start open sourcing there games again

there hasn't been a answer on a level editor yet

This you should look at though as it might help explain there thoughts https://bethesda.net/community/topic...answers?page=1

also ebsuir i find that opensourcing the MP F2P game wouldnt have a effect on the games life unless cheating is rampant and uncontrolled though that could be mitigated by community anticheat or not opensourcing the anti cheat though that may be incredibly difficult if it isnt designed properly

[Phenom]

How I feel playing Quake Champions.

I was actually interviewed by Glixel for my input on Quake Champions and while my experience was a complete mixed bag of "hard candy from grandma to king sized snickers bars" My over all experience with Quake Champions was they are trying to hard to essentially make a hybrid COD shooter out of something that shouldn't be that.

This is another instance where Quake's never ending list of horrible continuations doesn't disappoint in the "We hate our original story" category.

Is it fun? meh I guess? I could get basically the same experience from playing another fast paced FPS.

Will I continue playing this until the cows come home ala Quake 1 from 1996 and be intrigued by bending the "QuakeC code to my will? No.

This was also my impression of a beta but unless some really big things change I can't help but feel this way.

They never could match the aiming, movement and physics from Quake 1 so don't expect a trip down memory lane if you do decide to pick it up once in stores.

[ArrrCee]

I'll just start out by saying that I agree with the way a lot of you are feeling about this new game, but I can also see why ID is doing what they're doing with the new Quake entry.

I have played an absolute ton of Overwatch and I really love the game. I played a fair amount of Team Fortress 2 as well and I really like that game too. However, if you actually played Overwatch, you would realize how much of an evolution Overwatch is for class based shooters. The other thing i will say is that any big company wants to make money and when they have a game like Wow not making as much money, why wouldn't they make a new game to keep making money? The point is to stay in business. That's why Team Fortress 2 has unlockable hats and also has....*gasp* microtransactions for cosmetics. And you know what? Valve made a ton of cash on that too, and then made Dota 2 which is "coincidentally" ripped off from a warcraft 3 mod. Everyone in the industry is constantly taking ideas and trying to improve upon them. It's always been that way.

However, in the time I have played the Quake Champions beta over the last few weeks, I can tell you that it is not like Overwatch. Just because the game has abilities and loot boxes, doesn't mean it's Overwatch. It may be trying to steal a few things from Overwatch because it is the most popular FPS right now, but lots of games right now have microtransaction loot boxes with abilities in the gameplay. They're really just keeping up with the jones's at this point. And if they are in fact trying to be Overwatch, they're failing hard at it and have a long way to go.

Quake Champions is faster than Overwatch and really is all about fragging. You do have to be quick, you have to predict and you have to be in the right place at the right time. Take it form me, I suck at it! Just because the characters have abilities, honestly, it doesn't change a whole hell of a lot about the game. What does feel weird is that every character has different health, armor and speed amounts.

Now, is it Quake 3? No. Does it match the speed of Quake 3? To me it doesn't feel like it. Will I continue playing it? I'm really not sure at this point, but I'm leaning more towards no because I'm not that great at online shooters to begin with, but if Id and Sabre are able to turn a few things around and improve some things, I might. With that said, I could go play it right now...and I'm not.

I'm not trying to offend anyone here because I like it here and I love the series. However, I have to say that I agree with what most people are saying in that this game really isn't for a lot of the Quake community. Many people in the community play Quake and that's all they play. That's it. Many people in the community aren't even willing to give many new games and consoles a chance. Which by the way is totally fine! Play what you want when you want, I don't care! But you should really give things a chance before slogging them. ID and Sabre so far have had 8 weeks of beta weekends for the community to play and voice their opinion on the game and they are trying to tweak things. So, at least they are trying.

I actually agree with most of the things you said in the article Phenom. I agree that the weapons do not feel powerful and I don't really care for the sound design myself. I also think the new Sacrifice mode leaves a lot to be desired when you compare it to how good capture the flag feels in Q2 and Q3. I also dislike a fair about of the voiced stuff in the game along with the characters lines. I also think the unlocks in QC are pretty meaningless. When you open a pack, a lot times you get a shader that doesn't seem to change much of your characters look, or you get to add an extra knee pad or elbow pad to your character...big deal.

Here's the thing though, I'm not offended by this game. As much as we all might like Q1 or 2 or 3...whichever is your favorite... Quake has always been a series without a core identity. That's what makes it the most interesting game series around. The first game is all brown with medieval/lovecraftian stuff in it. Quake 2 is very metallic and takes place in space with cyborgs. Quake 3 is an arena shooter with a mortal kombat-esque story and very much geared toward competition from the start. If you had to pick an identity for the series, you'd almost have to go with the Quake 2 storyline because it's had the most games in that universe. I know...blasphemy! But it's true.

I recently reviewed the game Yooka-Laylee on my youtube channel and my thoughts on it are it needs to be a lot more than a 20 year old game to be great. I thought I would love a game that was made to be just like a game I loved from 20 years ago, but it turns out that ignoring 20 years of game design evolution is a bad idea. Do you have to adopt everything? No, but you should adopt what works for your game to improve it.

Regardless, I hope you all have a great day! Play what you'd like to play and enjoy.

[nahuel]

The company just slapped a famous name on it

bethesda did the same with quake and prey

[ArrrCee]

Thanks for replying Siger, I think you make some good points!

I wouldn't call Overwatch an evolution of the genre. I wouldn't call it a rip-off of Team Fortress 2 either. The game has nothing to do with classes or class-based tactics, therefore it evolves none of these things. Overwatch is a hero shooter. If you want to oversimplify things, then you can say that Overwatch is a first-person rip-off of DotA.

Overwatch is certainly an evolution of a class based shooter. Heroes are just a fancy term for playing a class. If Team Fortress characters had names instead of job descriptions, they would be called heroes too. And Overwatch does a lot of things really well, you should try it if you haven't played it yet. it's an evolution because it makes a a more complicated genre more accessible to people while still keeping the strategy there for more advanced players and it's a lot of fun. That's not a bad thing.

Dota 2 isn't a rip-off of the WarCraft III mod. The original DotA is a collaborative effort of many people. Hell, the history of DotA and the MOBA genre as a whole started with just a map for StarCraft. Valve simply hired IceFrog, the last remaining developer of the DotA Allstars mod, the one that was accepted by the community as the best one. The mod never had anything to do with WarCraft III other than being a mod for it. Yes, the characters still used the same models as before and had the same voice lines but by changing their names the mod implied that they are not the characters from WarCraft. Blizzard tried to sue Valve when they announced that they're working on Dota 2. And as everyone knows Blizzard have lost because there is nothing related to WarCraft in Dota 2.

I guess I'm having trouble following what everyone considers a ripoff and this gets really sticky. I don't understand the comparison to Dota with Overwatch at all. Dota wasn't the first game to have abilities and Overwatch won't be the last. Overwatch is all about player versus player. There are no creeps, there are no real powerups to pick up and there are certainly no ancients to slay on the other side of the map. It's much more in the vain of Team Fortress.

I mean, if you want to break it down even more, Team Fortress is pretty much the original first person MOBA then, before MOBA was even a thing. If Overwatch is ripping off both TF2 and Dota, yet Overwatch plays a lot like TF just with more classes. You can break most games down to their cores if you want to argue that way.

It's a very convoluted journey for any game and genre's aren't exclusive to their originators. It's not like Wolfenstein was the first first person game. ID Software just took the ball, ran with it and scored several touchdowns.

I wouldn't bring money in this discussion. What's the point of discussing the quality of the product if it just sells nonetheless? And let's be honest, the majority of people tend to have low standards when it comes to the media they consume, be that music, films, video games or anything else, and they most certainly don't care about all the harmful practices the company might use. They buy a thing, enjoy it for some time and move on to something else. Discussions such as this are generated by people with passion, the fans. These people are simply tired of this constant stream of mediocrity. They want a game they can be passionate about. Right now people on this site are more than just interested in Quake and everything around it. But can anyone be sure this will still be the case another 20 years later? I don't think so. But where to go, what's the alternative? There is no modding support in Overwatch, Doom (2016) or Quake: Champions. The only thing you can do with this games to show your passion is to draw some fan-art or play a bit in the pile of shit that is SnapMap. Companies don't want to make platforms for communities. They want to make a game, get some money off of it and move on just like your typical consumer. And when they do try to make some kind of a platform, they "sanitize" it to the absurd, removing all the things that makes the whole thing fun under the pretense of making a "safe space". As a result, not a single one of the modern games will live as long as Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake or Half-Life.

I brought money up because Ebisu talked about Blizzard needing a new IP to make money in his original post. I just wanted to make the point that every game dev is out to create the next big game and to make money. Do they want to make a good game? Sure, but they also want to keep the lights on.

I get the sense (and some people are pretty blunt about it) that people really don't like Blizzard on this forum. It's interesting to me considering they've created some really great games over the years. Valve and Id Software have too. We don't have to pick sides you know, we can enjoy all the games.

I think most people are not offended by the game itself either. Fans of Quake are perfectly aware that this game has nothing to do with the series. The company just slapped a famous name on it and used a bunch of characters from the games that have no story. You can argue that it's still Quake because it's developed by id Software, but who the fuck works in the modern id Software? Definitely not John Carmack, not Adrian Carmack, not Tom Hall and not Romero, not McGee or anyone else responsible for the games we love. Once again, it's just the same cover but the book is completely different. But I'm getting off the road here... What I wanted to say is that people aren't mad about the game but about the reaction of the general public. If you read this thread, you should notice people mentioning TotalBiscuit and his rant. The guy basically took a shit all over the Quake community for no reason whatsoever. And he's not the only one. Go to Reddit (I know, you should never go to Reddit) and check the posts. But these are just users. The problem are all these self-identified "reviewers" or just people with big audiences who look down on the fans of any game, not just Quake, and think that they are better than anyone just because they're not attached to anything and try to humiliate these communities in front of their audiences. Yes, I know that no sane person gives a singe fuck about what these people have to say because in the end of the day they're ignorant, they don't play these games anyway, but you have to agree that it's quite hard to stay calm when someone basically spits in your face.

Ha! I like that. Yea, I'm probably not going to read anything on reddit. I have a hard time identifying Quake in the first place. Besides the fact that people consider it a fast, online shooter, which game actually defines it? I guess in those terms it would be Q3? Would it be the game that most people played? I really don't know.

I think that what you bring up about TB is true, but I also think that people in the quake community are mad about the game in general. I haven't read too many positive things about it on any Quake forum I visit, I know that.

I understand the frustration with guys like TB being the mouthpiece for Quakers, that I don't agree with because we're a strong bunch. However, while I didn't listen to his whole rant, what he said in the beginning of the video is true. This really isn't a game for the old school Quake community. I think that's pretty apparent by most peoples reactions to the game. And to be honest, most of the Quake 1 junkies are just going to keep playing and modding Quake 1. Like I said before, there is nothing wrong with that because i still love to play the game myself. However, I think people need to be more honest that they weren't willing to give Quake Champions a chance in the first place. Even if it was a dynamo game, people would still be talking crap about it without even trying it, which is what I see a lot here with Overwatch.