I sometimes long for the golden era of rocket jumps and jump pads, but technically those days never ended. Epic are still making a game called Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 persists as Quake Live [official site], a remake-with-bells-on released in 2010 which came to Steam last year. Now it's switched from free-to-play to a one-time payment model and those bells have been joined by whistles, as it's been updated with Steamworks support.
]]>Quake Live launches on Steam later today. At the time of writing, it's fewer than 12 hours until the free-to-play variation of Quake 3 makes its way onto the service, after four years running via its own site. Bethesda have released a lovely 'launch' trailer to mark the occasion, which acts as a fine reminder of everything that's great about the game.
]]>I learned to strafe-jump the hard way back when games were games, my keyboard made of broken glass, and my mouse an actual mouse biting my fingers as I clicked. I still welcome Quake Live adding an automated slower substitute. Everyone should get the experience the joys of zipping around like a rubber ball. Though exploiting wacky movement physics bugs is central to Quake in my heart, some have been less keen on it.
Even John Carmack, the chap who inadvertently created all those glitches, once tried removing strafe-jumping from Quake 3. "I hate having players bouncing around all the time," he said.
]]>18 is a difficult age, especially for a child prodigy. Even in its game-womb, Quake was praised as the greatest FPS ever. As a baby, all came to coo over it. But by the time it hit high school, people had already turned on poor little Quake. "You used to be cool," they'd sneer, "what happened to you?" Quake's early teens were difficult. But then! 18 years old! The series can drink and smoke and go to university and a new city and pretend it's whoever it wants to be! They'll like it now!
The latest Quake Live update has added starting weapon loadouts, auto-bunnyhopping, unified ammo packs, and timers for item respawns. You'll like it now.
]]>Every few months I find a reason to play Quake Live. I used to mainline Quake III for all waking hours as a younger man, and I still enjoy my time with a railgun. The problem with Quake Live, of course, is the general inflexibility. No premium account means certain maps are off limits. However, that's now changing, with the premium accounts simply giving you access to all the maps, all the time. The Quake Live team explains: "As announced in our recent QUAKE LIVE Premium Pak 13 news, we will be now be cycling the Standard arena pool on the first Monday of each month. Rather than only having access to the same standard arenas day in and day out, each month we will now feature 21 arenas selected as playable for Standard-level matches." That means that my favourite Quake III map, Spider Crossings, is available to all this month.
]]>I entirely forgot about Quake Live, which is a strange to do. There's often lamention around these parts that id's Quakes and Dooms haven't been entirely well-treated in recent years, and yet there is browser-based Quake III re-release Quake Live alive and well and I believe relatively popular. And free to play. If you've held off exploring the not-free elements until now, you have a chance to nose at it without cracking open that much-abused wallet. From now until May 6 2012, which by my maths is 312 years, 4 months and five days away, you can sample all the 'premium' bits, bobs, modes and maps for no-pennies. If you're already paying for premium or pro and God now I'm really confused subscriptions, you'll get a code for one or two free weeks of free sub to apologise for the great unwashed hordes getting all up in your fancy-pants paid grill.
]]>You might just recollect my rantings about my favourite Quake III map, Q3WCP9, back in the mists of time. I had sort of resigned myself to the idea that it would never appear on Quake Live. Until now! The Quake Live Christmas premium update has it! Depressingly this means that the maps were only available to free players for a week, a week which ends today. I am sad. It is, however, just enough to push me into taking out a premium account for the hols. Man, I hope I can get some decent CP9 games. I'll report back.
]]>Id bossman Todd Hollenshead has explained to VG247 what the "failure" of the in-game advertising model means for Quake Live. He stated that the closure of ad firm Massive - which MS shut down earlier this year - has caused Id to rethink: "I mean, smarter people than me were making these estimations. Look at Microsoft. They spent, like, $200 million on the Massive acquisition, and they basically shuttered that division in February. So that had ramifications for us, because we used Massive. And if that was more successful, that’d have had a significant impact on what Quake Live is."
]]>Bethesda Blog announces a bunch of updates for Quake Live, the most important of which includes new maps for their premium service. Good news for those premium subscribers, I suppose, but I can't help wondering how successful Quake Live has actually been for Id. I play games on there every couple of weeks, and there's almost always a decent EU capture the flag game to be had. That's great, because it means the community is ticking over, but even as a semi-regular user I don't see much reason to pay for a premium account. The competition for this relaunched classic must be particularly tough when the range of free shooters is now so enormous, from the hardcore precision of Warsow, to the Facebooked ease of Uberstrike, to the more mature corporately packaged experience of BFP4F. It can't be easy out there.
]]>Oops, I almost forgot to post about this: Quake Live are doing a push on their paid-for premium service, which is apparently free for a month if you sign up before the 26th. But what good is that unless you have enough people to shoot? That is the question I have been asking myself. Shall we meet up for a game then, RPS people who like a bit of Quake? (You can still play for free on the default maps, even without signing up for this trial thing.) Say next Sunday night? I'll probably be on the CTF servers UK evening time, for that is where I lurk with railgun and rocket launcher.
]]>After eighteen months or so of beta, Quake Live has finally announced its subscription plans. You can still play for free, but you can also sign up for $1.99 a month, or $3.99 a month options (although these are "billed annually"), which give different levels of access the clan management systems, freeze tag, match stats, and so on. The full details are below the cut. In some ways I wish I still had enough time for Quake III for this to be attractive to me, but my monthly hour with the railgun doesn't really justify it. And, while it's interesting to see such an old game repackaged and sold like this, much of what made the original so attractive to me - IRC pickup games, specific maps (Spider Crossings!) and mods - hasn't made an appearance here.
]]>Quake Live is one year old. Officially, anyway, because it had a big old beta before then. And years and years of being a commercially released game before that. So it's really very old, but sporting a new haircut and trendy jeans. Anyway, Id are celebrating that anniversary with some kind of event, and with a new map. Still no Spider Crossings on the CTF roster though, which is the only birthday present I care about. I still play on here fairly regularly too, those red and blue flags are in my blood. Sigh.
]]>Id's free Quake III service, Quake Live, has today launched a temporary holiday update. The QL team say:
]]>Ten years. Ten piggin' years. And still no-one's topped Quake III: Arena in terms of raw, pure deathmatch FPS solidity and grace. Id's last great game turned a full decade old yesterday - even though it was born into an era of Voodoo 2s and 15" CRT monitors, it's fearsomely alive to this day. Frankly, it's not going anywhere any time soon - it lives on both in its original form and as the free-to-play, browser-based Quake Live. And also in an endless legion of mods, modders, maps and lifelong gamers, all inspired by the precise majesty of its high-speed bloodshed. Gentlethings and ladycreatures, yesterday was our Thanksgiving.
]]>Could it be a premium service with the capacity to create private matches? Id's Marty Stratton talks about the possibilities in this extensive interview on Bethesda Blog.
]]>But which maps? And will they ultimately disappoint? The first isn't too inspiring, it's Hidden Fortress from the Dreamcast version of Quake III. Not a bad map, it seems, but still not one of the classics. Will one of the new maps be my ultimate CTF dream date, Spider Crossings? What would you choose, readers? (Link 'em for classic Q3 download if you can be bothered.)
]]>Playing Quake Live is a troubling experience. It feels like a kind of monetised nostalgia. A browser-based themepark, or a visit to a mummified stately home. It's wonderful to find servers heaving with people again after all this time - even though finding a game was seldom a problem - at least for a quick and dirty free-for-all. I still adore Quake 3, and my install has not left my hard-drive in a decade. But playing it like this made me realise what a mutant creature I actually fell in love with in the earliest years of this decade. What's missing, particularly for an obsessed capture-the-flagite like me, is one particular map: Spider Crossings, or Q3WCP9. Without it, Quake Live cannot earn my love.
]]>Carmack was talking up Quake Live today over on Gamasutra. "A lot of this project was about doing something that the PC was going to be better at than the consoles," he told the big G. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Carmack's comments is that he wants to see some of the web functionality from things like social networking sites to find their way into the browser-based game platform. ""For years, I've often thought about the fact that a lot of people spend vastly more time on websites and forums about the games that they're playing than they actually spend playing the games themselves. We hope to have some aspect of that here."
]]>Actually the queues have subsided to just a couple of minutes now, but last night they were swollen with tens of thousands of people trying to log on to the new service. Apart from being over-subscribed and the verification emails taking a while to turn up, the browser-launched Quake 3 is looking good. The front end system, with its rankings and insta-matching systems, appears remarkably solid and easy to navigate. Why not go and have a look? It's completely free, after all.
]]>It looks like all those folks who didn't get into the closed beta will finally be able to taste the latest version of the finest deathmatch game of them all time. Via ESReality: "We're opening QUAKE LIVE to the general public as an open beta the evening of Tuesday, February 24th." The teaser splash page at the Quake Live site confirms it.
]]>If there's one area within gaming that I'm genuinely inclined to be unreasonable to the point irrationality, it's in the FPS deathmatch games - the Quake III / UT axis. For me Quake III was almost the only game worth playing. Quakeworld was a little too fast, UT too fat and feature-obese, and so on. Quake III was minimalist wonder, and what Id started was finished by the modders who worked on things like OSP, Threewave, and Rocket Arena 3. It's that last bit that has me the most concerned about Quake Live: Id made a fine game, but it was their community that completed it and honed it to the point of perfection. The browser-based system seems to make that community contribution rather more complex, as everything will have to be mediated by Id.
]]>You can sign up for the Quake-in-a-browser beta testing sessions, just here. It's your standard beta testing deal: the game is finished and now needs tweaking. Hopefully they won't have to keep patching for five years or whatever it was on the original game... It's not an open beta, so get those email addresses in the slot quick smart.
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