Hello,

Does anyone know if Quake Champions will have Demo or Replay support?

I have been a Quake player since 2005 and have played every version of Quake (1,2,3,4 and live). One of the best features that these games have, is the ability to record and play back demos/replays of previous matches. This helped me in the beginning to understand the game better, by watching the demos of skilled players and emulating their style/movement.

Over the years, I have collected a lot of these demos from different LAN- and online-tournaments (almost 50 GB of demos). Its nice to be able to instantly watch demos from 1998 to 2017 with mods and at a high resolution and high fps. Its also a good way to analyse your own playing style and identify mistakes, the same way some Starcraft pro players do for example.

Also there are a lot of movie makers, that love to make cool frag videos from multiple demos. Something that will make QuakeChampions more appealing to new players. Just look on YouTube how these frag videos managed to attract a lot of views. Its almost like a form of art but very entertaining and also makes you want to play.

I know that we are now in a new age of streaming and that people kind of forgot about in-game replays. They are more comfortable to search on YT or Twitch, but often the videos are 720p at 30 to 60 fps, often on medium to low in-game quality settings and are highly compressed so that you can see artifacts. But with a demo you can view it in your game, at your settings and 120+ fps, with no buffering or artifacts.

We do have Nvidias Shadowplay and similar software, that lets you record the last 10 to 20 minutes of your game or lets you save a specific frag highlight and upload it directly to something like YT. But its not the same as a demo, because I for example like to play on everything set to low, so that I can achieve 144+ fps. I would have to upload a frag highlight at the worst possible settings, but if I where to go back and load the last demo, I could record it on the highest possible quality and bit-rate, at 60 fps. The video will look much better, and if its also shows some wonderful/exciting gameplay, then it will attract more views and players.

Like I said, I have a good collections of demos, from all Quakes and different tournaments, ranging from a size of a few 100 KBs to 6 MBs. From a historical standpoint, its awesome that I can store these and watch them now and in the future. But If we where to have only streams, then we would have to store these stream-videos in other to "preserve" or store future QC tournaments.

The movie making community was/is very important for Quake, so please provide them with a demo or replay support. They will make awesome frag videos, that will attract a lot of players to this game. Frag videos where one of the main reasons, that kept bringing me back to Quake. Frag videos will simply not be great, if the only option will be to mash stream-videos together, with different Quality settings (both in-game and varying video compressions).

I am concerned that the developer somehow forgot about demos, but I still hope that the support will be implemented. I mean there is a "Camera" icon on the top left side in the Quake Champions main-menu, so I hope that it will be a demo-player like we have in QuakeLive/3 :)

Hopefully some of you agree with me.

PS. Sorry for the wall of text! :))