According to the NDA (non-disclosure agreement), I (unfortunately) cannot discuss anything about the game with readers at all. Seeing as how I still want to be part of the closed beta, I’ll keep it that way until it expires (no idea when the NDA will expire though).
I will tell you this: it’s great thus far.
For those of you who don’t know, Quake Live was originally named Quake Zero when it was first announced back in 2007 by John Carmack. It’s basic code is going to be that of Quake 3, id Software’s game that was released to much fanfare all the way back in December of 1999, almost 10 years ago now. Yet, Quake 3 has undoubtedly got to be my most favourite game of all time. For some reason, even 10 years after its introduction, no other developer has bothered to emulate the style of gameplay that games like Quake 3 and even Unreal Tournament first created back in the day. The only game that came close thus far was Painkiller, an extremely underrated game with an amazing multiplayer component. Unfortunately, so few people play that game now.
Sure, after Quake 3, Raven Software released both Quake 4 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and both those games Sucked with a capital S. Quake 4′s multiplayer component was so lackluster and boring as compared to Quake 3 that only its single player campaign was worth playing at all. While Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was so different from traditional games in the franchise that it didn’t feel like a Quake game at all. Rather it seemed to be trying to be a Battlefield clone, with large scale battles and such.
Quake has never (prior to the 4th version) been about large scale battles. They’ve been about what’s most imporatnt in shooters. Fast paced action that requires split second timing. And when I say split second timing, I mean it. A single second in Quake feels like such a long time, a person hanging in the air for half a second 20 feet away is more than enough time for you to switch to your railgun and put him out of his misery. The first Unreal Tournament captured this feel perfectly as well, which was why I loved it so much. Unfortunately, since then, the UT series has seem to gone the way of ET: QW, moving towards large scale battles and such.
There are many reasons why John Carmack and id Software chose to use Quake 3 as the base code for this new version of Quake. First of all, being a 10 year old game, it’s a great game to “distribute” through the web for free, because most likely practically anyone can run the game no matter how old their computer is (that is unless you’re still cooped up in your basement with a Pentium 2, but even then I suspect the game might still run pretty well).
Second of all, it’s a darn good game. John Carmack has specifically stated himself that it’s his favourite id Software game, while Fatal1ty (probably the most popular professional electronic sports player and an avid FPS gamer) places Quake 3 as his second favourite FPS game of all time (interestingly enough, Painkiller is his first). Having personally watched him win the now defunct CPL championships in Singapore 2 years ago where he was playing Painkiller, it’s not hard to understand why he loves the game so much. As I said before, Painkiller’s multiplayer component is highly underrated, it’s probably the best multiplayer FPS game besides Quake 3, though Quake does it better for me.
Anyway, back to Quake Live. It’s going to be a free game which will be released to everyone who has an internet connection when it’s done. The great thing about it is that besides being of such high quality, this game is going to be a “browser based” game to a certain extent. When I was chatting with another gamer in-game about how I wondered how they actually managed to make it fit in a browser, he remarked how every game should be like this. And rightfully so. Such a method of distributing the game removes the hassle of having to download hundreds of megabytes and then installing them, opening up a new program just to play it and all. It will definitely help introduce more casual gamers to the game of Quake with it being so easy to install and all, though I pity the new guy who comes in and starts getting owned by everyone else who’s been playing Quake 3 for almost a decade by now (literally).
With what I’m playing thus far, the game seems pretty stable even in closed beta, and that’s not surprising considering how they used an even earlier version of the game as a tournament game back in QuakeCon ’08 in August. You can even watch the entire 1V1 finals with commentary here.
If anyone were to ask me when I think Quake Live is going to be out, I honestly don’t know. There’re a few bugs to fix, but a lot of work is put into balancing both the maps and the weapons with a lot of changes being made and newer versions introduced. They’re going to test the servers soon to see how well they can handle the load and etc. So much work still needs to be done that even the developers themselves aren’t really sure when it’s going to be released, sticking to the age old line of “it’s done when it’s done”. But judging by how stable and fast the game currently is (I can run it at 100 FPS on average on a mid-range laptop), I wouldn’t be surprised if it had a 2009 release date.
Still, I hope it’s released ASAP, so that more people will finally realise what a true gem Quake 3 was, and still is to this day.
Small note: I edited the original Quake Live logo at the top, adding the red background and cleaning it up a bit.
