should have posted it as a movie so I could give it a 10

Well, he's dead right. To some extent I'm even less harsh, the visuals didn't seem all that bad, but the engine stuff and the lazy outsourcing to a company that is clearly, clearly not capable of making a game that needs perfect smoothness, that's inexcusable at this point.

The idea that the genre is for sure so dead that nobody will ever want to play it and we know this despite all the games being messes is in my mind silly. Look at RTS and SC2. If Quake was made by valve, it wouldn't be overwatch, but it could be something like sc2-sized.

Visuals are not bad at all! There were some amazing designs, be it the champions themselfes, the initial maps, the art direction, the later added gibs.

But it is all naught in an online multiplayer fps if performance is not up to par.

First, the many many graphics performance issues. Then the continuous game-breaking bugs like:

game not playable at all: memory leaks, continuous crashing all the time, server offline means no game, game would not load after update

Netcode fucked: desyncs, rubber banding, broken backwards reconciliation, high ping players degrade the game for EVERYONE on server, shooting delayed

FPS: crappy fps for said graphics, unexplainable fps drops, too CPU heavy making no use of power of modern graphics cards

Then straight incompetency: Linking fps and netcode AGAIN in an unnatural, broken abomination. rockets doing no damage, rockets doing way too much damage (very inconsistent splash), invisible ledges and spots that stop the player, getting stuck in places, falling out the map but not dying

I absolutely agree. It's clear as day that you can't release a Quake game with such technical issues, and they trusted a small developer with no such experience to.

Wildy over designed weapons and completely generic characters?

I had some of my own gripes with them and I'm not saying they were good, though at least the map textures seemed pretty to me, but all of these problems were, in my mind, insignificant compared to the way the game ran.

i am pretty sure that its not even doable, think about it, all the people who are good at quake, have you ever seen them making good maps or other content, quake is so demanding that people who create content are always behind people who consume it, how do you find negotiation line with that,

someone at id makes a map, gets destroyed by pros playing with them, gets frustrated, adds some bs game mechanics to compensate for his butt-hurt ego, destroying the game in process, cycle repeats.

unless id is willing to go hand in hand with people who make content for the game, they will always fall flat, because apparently id is horrible at managing their own loyal fan community,which is why they keep making sp games instead,

id gave birth to a game that became greater than themselves, they can not handle the legacy because it was just a coincidence, think about it, all three quake games were made from 96 to 99 and than it was over, and it was also just 92-95 for wolf3d to doom2? so that is less than a decade of good performance, and it just was riding a wave of success at that time.

i am just saying it was simply is a coincidence that a game like quake was made at a studio like id, were they simply experiment with 3d engines and ship as soon as the game is "fun".

pretty sure you can make sure an engine works okay without being a top tier player, and you can always consult people. It's not some hyper difficult demand. There might be some difficulty with maps or balance, but people with different skillsets coordinate and use eachothers input fruitfully in all kinds of endeavours all the time.

hm, yes except again 3 years of shipping good quake games. doom 3 and up is not even competitive in engine licensing compared to unreal engine.

Making it with unreal engine is a better call than shipping it off to Saber.

10/10 looking forward to part 2 in few months after db dies, another shit game

ye lmao

diabotical might even be worse than qc in several aspects

I wouldn't go that far but I'd say that the main difference between 2gd and syncerror is that 2gd thinks he knows what he's doing.

you should join our discord and read latest discussion on diabotical, its really fucking bad

Ye bogOtac you totally should join godservants discord!

u are really bad if you did not manage to get in the top fps gaming discord

Quake player numbers have been steadily declining since the late 90s. Can't blame Q3 for that. Can't blame QL for that. (Can blame Q4 for that, but that was rightfully forgotten as soon as it arrived.) And can't blame QC for that - even though it has its technical and design flaws, it's still Quake, and produces great matches on a more regular basis than ever.

This interview is a good demonstration that even industry insiders just don't get it. The main reason behind Quake's lack of success is that people and society function in such a way that hardcore gaming will just not be popular. I mean, that's what "hard core" means to begin with - that only the fewest will enjoy it and succeed in it.
Quake started E-Sports. THAT is the reason it stood out in the 90s. But tons of games in the genre, most of which are more attractive to the average person, have been released since. So there's your reason for Quake's declining player numbers, especially vs other games.
(Apart from the general dumbing down of the masses via cheap and easy entertainment on electronic devices; but let's not concentrate on that for now.)

Using CS as an example why Quake should be popular today is stupid and baseless as well. CS's easy accessability, elimination of singler player skill via slow basic movement and inaccurate weapons, and elimination of intricate strategy via a short round based system made it THE game that introduced E-Sports to the average, less capable person.
CS and Quake are polar opposites, and just because they were around at the same time 20 years ago doesn't mean they should have evolved the same.

Quake Champions could have been made better from a technical aspect, from a design aspect, it could have been marketed better, and it would still not have appealed to the masses and would still be a niche game.

Actually, props to Bethesda for NOT dumbing down Quake to appeal to the masses. The champion abilities probably were intended as more of a marketing move and to give beginners another tool to succeed with, but they sure don't work that way - they introduce yet another variable you have to be aware of and make fragging / winning harder in the end.
But Bethesda have kept Quake more or less confined to its hardest, most individual skill-oriented mode, 1on1, and have moved away from a round based system, which means right now QC, as shown via the QPL, is just raw, proper, oldschool, hardcore Quake that requires lots of mechanical skill as well as intelligence to succeed in.
RA/CA, the lame, brainless gamemode that ruined Q3 by stealing away the playerbase from 1on1 and TDM, has been introduced in QC, but it doesn't seem to get any support via special maps or even tournaments, and as such is kept insignificant and non-disruptive. So that's great.

You could actually argue that competitive Quake is at its peak right now. Thanks to the QPL, we have top players from the Q3 and QL days, and plenty of new top players, competing against each other, on a much more regular basis than in previous Quakes.
So yes, mistakes have been made on the game, but at least it is still being supported via constant tournament action.

On a final note, Cooller has stated in his recent (April 2020) interview at b100 that he prefers Quake Champions over Quake Live. That guy has probably the most significant history of any Quake player, and if he says that, it should count for something.

Still, a niche game with 10k concurrent players would be better than a niche game with less than 1k. I'd like to think that could still be possible.

Maybe you're right. Then again, would the things that bother us like sound, netcode, champion balance, lack of cfging (at least the possibility for brightskins) etc bother a beginner?
Seems to me that the complaints come from people that already played the previous Quakes, the oldschool hardcore gamers.
Would more new players enter the game if it was technically more perfect? Are CS, Dota, Apex etc. technically perfect?

I'd guess what bothers a new player most is long waiting times and getting repeatedly stomped at a time when they haven't yet learnt how to get enjoyment from the mechanics alone.

I tried QC once, a couple of months ago, and had zero problems of finding games. Your second point is valid, but you have to take into account that the game is years old by now.. not many newbies left.

Probably what was required for QC to take off a little bit more was that everything was smooth, bug free, and just very easily accessible / playable from the start. From what I gather (I wasn't around at the time) that wasn't the case. Seems like nothing that can be helped now though, or what do you think?

Most of the players are in EU and NA, so getting games there isn't too hard---a few minutes waiting at most usually---but in other regions, it can be much slower or impossible. Perhaps if the game was in its current state (or better) back when it had its 17k player peak in 2018, it would have retained more players.

Retaining players would have meant closer skill in matchmaking and less stomping, which would in turn feed back into retaining players.

https://steamcharts.com/app/611500#All

Didn't realize QC ever had more than 2000 concurrent players. I wonder what caused the spike that occured sometime around May 2018. Big advertising campaign?

It would be interesting to know what those numbers were for Q3 back in the day. Retail sales were a couple hundred thousand, and since it was a pure MP game you'd expect to encounter somewhere along those numbers on online servers. From what I gathered back in the day though from watching the server browsers the number of concurrent players online were at least an order of magnitude below that. So even back in those days, the sales numbers really didn't convert to a consistent playerbase. In fact, servers started to get significantly less busy within months, but certainly within the first 1, 2 years of release.

I wonder what would have happened if QC was what we'd consider perfect when that player spike in 2018 happened. But yeah, I suppose it could have only went better. From 17k to 1k within 6 months should be considered a worst case scenario.

I wonder what caused the spike that occured sometime around May 2018.

Something in the lead up to E3, if I'm not mistaken.

If a third of that 17k had stayed with the game, that would have been quite a good outcome in my book.

nobody would want to stay at broken lagfest

it's true, q4, ql, q3a just weren't technically good titles ...
I would even say q3a was a half-assed title that was just carried by the great legacy of the previous two one ...
only original game is qc, but with all the technical engine problems, the long time to develop the features ... I mean what good is it you only get a decent title after two years release ... the post q2 id, all of bethesda, should all be thrown in a pit with some fiends ... or a gulag ...
they fucking destroyed quake those fuckers ...

Q3A, especially in the OSP variant, is the greatest first person arena shooter, almost perfect in every aspect, and will most likely only ever be surpassed by a non keyboard and mouse based (VR) game of similar calibre - if even that.

Q3A is Quake without spice ... no movement abilities like in the previous quakes ... on top of that bad maps out of the box ... took several years to get rid of them

Were brightskins carry over from qw?

yeah, in qw there there were skins for better visibility, not sure if they were green yet, I think they were red / blue / white, but in solid color, not anymore like a texture

Quake 1 didn't have bright skins. Though it was possible to change the colours of 3 segments (legs, body, and head IIRC) to a small set of predefined colours (red / blue / white) as cyronix already mentioned.

promode master race then - keel/pm

no, in quake 1 (qw) you most definitely had bright skins and you were able to add custom skins to the game, leading to all clans having some kind of awesome skin, which you downloaded at the start of the game. (believe it was .pcx format).

On top of the clanskins you had some really funny skins going around as well.

Not that it mattered, because EVERYONE used bright skins. Also, you were able to change models in .paks to have bright armor, bright models, different LG, different xhairs, different sounds, and so on.

Highly moddable!

To this day I'm not exactly sure what q1 vs qw is. But it was implied that it wouldn't be in vanilla q1, because they never put them in vanilla anything. I was asking which community spawned it via its respective mod. And I wouldn't count extra models as such, I'm interested in the first in-mod implementation via cvar. Did qw have anything like cg_enemymodel keel/pm?

You had the initial quake release which had bad netcode for online gaming but became a huge hit as it was frankly an astonishing thing to be able to multiplay in a fully 3d world. Carmack was not happy with the netcode and launched quakeworld, a client/mod with a lot of improvements which made online gaming with high pings feasible. At that moment vanilla quake was dubbed nq for normal quake. QW eventually took over but NQ was still a big thing in the US for a while.

NQ really felt like gaming on ice skates, QW to day is still the smoothest experience ever.

You had a cvar to set your skin but what people typically did was replace the base.pcx in their quake folder and simply left the skin cvar on 'base' and disabled other player skins with a cvar so it defaulted to base. There was also a cvar to set the team skin.

Core game, without mods, did not have bright skins. Same could be said about Q2 and Q3, and Q4, of course.

You can always mod a game to add whatever the game itself did not have bright skins out of the box.

Talk about nostalgia goggles.

OSP was clearly better than the vanilla experience but I think best Q3 experience was CPMA vq3.

Playing Q3 OSP with 50 ping was NOTHING like LAN. I know because until 2005 it was almost impossible to play with people outside our little country.

Sure, you could pay an ISP for a better routing but it was incredibly expensive. I really envied all those Swedish LPBs. I mean, I am still envious now but for completely different (almost exclusively societal) reasons as opposed to caring for their internet connections lol

"only original game is qc"

This seems too extreme even to be bait. The game made as a desperate, cheap and low budget copy of Overwatch, with crappy cringeful champions, is the only original quake. Sounds about right.

Like, can't yall just be honest, for once? Instead of pretending some technological or gameplay marvel for quake champions... just admit it. Say it. Be honest: "i love quake champions because i like the sexy dominatrix females, i find their cliche remarks sexy and badass, and i love pressing F to cum over people or shoot big laserz bada bing bada boom. I also spend more time personalizing the characters' gay pride outfits than actually playing, and i've spent tens of dollars to have all the coolest spandex and bunny ears accessory."

That's it. You don't have to make it so complicated and insincere.

The character designers have done an excellent job on Nyx, indeed :P. I'd still prefer generic enemy models and brightskins though.

simp detected

You don't really understand what that term means, do you?

He's a retard don't worry.

Thanks for saving me the time.

you are both retards aswell

Well since you're the authority on retardation ...

I am Ph.D In psychology and brain science.

I know everything about the mental health of a dumb monkeys like you.

"Ph.D" = Pathological, hateful Dickhead?

Predictable dumb monkey

You will get raped by 3rd tier quake player ingame

Consider suicide.

With your lack of brain quality, you are technically already dead.

Crazyal upvoted Sanchez

confirmed simping

D O O M B R I N G E R

What's that xD

How can you call yourself a TRUE QUAKE FAN and not know about
D O O M B R I N G E R?

That character was a major part of the game sucking. Who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to have a free escape from dying button :|

Quake champions is pretty cool because of the different movement abilities, balanced champions,
and many good maps, ruins of sarnath, blood covenant, awoken, corrupted keep, molten speak for themselves ... but it took to long to get there ... engine is still not greath though ... if it came out with valorant graphics and engine, and with the features and balance it has right now it would easily be a 10k concurrent players game ...
they should just concentrate on TDM and improve that mode even more ... ctf will never be a thing ...

I can't emphasize as well how good the QC 1on1 maps are. Awoken is fucking awesome. Keep is fucking awesome. Ruins and Falls I don't like quite as much, but they're still very good. Dm6 and Ztn have received decent conversions, which do work. Vale is okay.
The map pool rivals the quality of early Q3 with t2, (p-)t4, p-dm6, ztn, and 1 or 2 of the hub maps, and certainly makes QW, Q2, QL, Q4 look like a joke in comparison.

The champions, which I thought of as a useless gimmick at first, do work as well, after getting to know them and watching countless matches.

I don't know how well TDM would work with 8 different champions on the map. I somehow doubt it could be coherent. But I haven't watched any matches yet, so I'll reserve judgement.

t2, t4 are a joke, ztn was not part of original maps ...
cant compare that to q1 dm2, dm4, dm6 or q2 dm1, dm2, dm3

Champions as said are really good because of their movements and hp stack/model size, and abilities tend not to be overpowered

about TDM ... it is not about watching, it is also about actually playing the game ...
and with the powerups there is definitely a strategy needed beyond just shooting around!

Tbh. even though DOTA/LOL have so many watchers I highly doubt people can really follow what is going on there in a 5vs5 match, maybe they are just there because they like the game in general, want to feel somehow connected to the best players in the tournament of they're favorite game, and then just get entertained by commentators and twitch chat ...

Do not agree one bit.

Quake 3 Arena came up with a set of good FFA/TDM/CTF maps as opposed to the garbage that is q2dm2/3/etc. The only duel Quake 2 maps that are any good are ztn2dm2/3. Amazing maps. id should've hired this guy.

1. failing to target the class based team game genre, and instead creating a shitty mishmash of characters and abilities with quake item pickups. 20 neckbeards playing sacrifice and 2v2 for money doesn't actually mean you've made a good team game.

2. terrible casual game. there was nothing to do for months other than play trashy modes like tdm, ffa, and sacrifice. zero casual appeal for this game, hence why pubg and fortnite outgrew it. some guy on reddit said it best: fortnite is for children, quake champions is for overgrown children.

3. boring ugly characters with zero cultural relevance.

4. no console release and no crossplay. this is just a shitty meme by the developers. what's the point of having every trashy dead game be pc only? when you can harness the console playerbase by working with sony and microsoft to enable crossplay, and add a little aim assist for gamepad players. fortnite was the first game to have success with this, and now even activision is making it a standard for all of the new call of duty games. hence why modern warfare sold over 30 million copies, has more pc players than ever before, and is also raking in 3 million dollars a day through microtransactions.

5. targetting the failed 1v1 fps model after everything fell apart. 20 neckbeards getting contracted to play for 2 cents and shutting up about the game doesn't actually mean it's good. and playing the shittiest game with the smallest playerbase for the lowest prize doesn't make them good either. they're just misguided fools who are letting life pass them by for something that doesn't feel good to play or even pay that well. or they live in countries ruined by dictators and oligarchs where there's barely any private economy (russia, ukraine, belarus).

i've stopped caring about saber and outsourcing and all of this bs, as it doesn't really explain anything. pubg ran like absolute shit on release, even worse than quake champions, had an even worse artstyle, more bugs, more issues with netcode, more of a hacker problem than qc. still sold 42 million copies on pc, more than any other paid pc game. still more successful than qc and many other games out there.

So the next Quake needs to be a casual class based team game with characters that have "cultural relevance", playable on console with aim assist.

I can't wait! :D

the next quake needs to be a game that is played by more than 500 neckbeards, or it needs to abandon multiplayer entirely and stick to singleplayer. waiting 11 years after q4 to release a fake esports title, with no gen z appeal is the fastest way to make your game series irrelevant.

and last time i checked, most quake players were ran out of overwatch for lack of skill, and came to qc for an easy time. only winz and akm were the exceptions.

In my experience, Quake players (not neckbeards) who are at least mid-skill do relatively quite well in other games, provided those are actual first person shooters. I've heard many people say that once they got a taste for Quake's speed, other games just didn't scratch that itch.

Lots of people were quite upset about QC being different from previous Quake games. The game you seem to be suggesting is an even greater departure from traditional Quake. At that point, you may as well just call it something else (nothing wrong with creating a new IP instead of leeching from the name of a classic), or stick to single-player, as you said.

I tried and played many other games, but it seems that QC is still the best choice by far, even with all its problems. Also, even though it is too late now, most of its annoying initial problems are solved or improved.

- dominating champs (not any more)
- round based duels (gone)
- game changing abilities (gone)
- awfully balanced weapons (op rockets, parkison lg etc)

the last thing that was annoying me and was solved after I quited, was the round based duels. And it wasn't so because I hated that format, but because of the length of the games. I mean if you had 1 hour to play, if you count, the loading times, searching time and the time needing for playing a close game with a +backer (3-2 score x 5 mins = 25mins without counting overtimes), you could easily end up playing just 1 fucking game.

- round based duels (gone)

Round based duels was the worst thing QC had in mind, nobody asked for it, nobody wanted it. the only person that want round duels to come back is.... sib.

Go to reddit, they have a good QC community

Lmfao Slasher

Let it die

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63NiS3uZaTA

All those complaints and ends it with But I still watch it.

Like a battered wife.

John carmack still has id logins.
Purposely breaks qc

Wait. Wasn't there, here on ESR, an admin called Slasher that in the first months of QC release was going full retard trying to censor any negative opinion because he had a job at id, or am i mistaking him for someone else with a similar name?

Circumstances change

So it was him? It's that Slasher?! Sic transit gloria mundi! Id gave him the boot and he's now trashing the game he so relentlessly defended? Lmao!

He was never at id Software, it took me like 12 seconds to find https://www.linkedin.com/in/slasher/ as well.

I don't think anyone with any stronger ESR connection ever worked there (some people were paid for maps for QL (contracted), I don't know if you count them as having "job at id", I wouldn't)

He was still defending Quake Champions like his life depended on it.

Which makes it likely that he was expecting some kind of compensation, maybe the opportunity to be hired as some side something in the future.
Or maybe he was simply paid to shill. Since years all the gaming (and non gaming) companies understand that the moneys best spent are the ones that go in the pockets of opinion spinners and shills and moderators of all kinds on gaming forums.

One can take a look at the QC's subreddit and it's clear they were still investing there until recently at least.

So fuck slasher, his censoring power trips and his sob stories after they discarded him like a cheap whore.

That would actually be coherent with ESR's history. Sujoy and co. have always had a magic hand in selecting the most self-absorbed, incompetent dickheads for the job.

That's too true, unfortunately

http://esreality.com/?a=users&user_id=15200

Exactly the same level of "admin" as me. Which is: not an admin. He can nuke posts though, so technically, you can be right, and I can't see deleted stuff (because: not an admin), so I can't prove you wrong... But still - [citation needed].

Just by reading that history you can tell he was super excited for a new Quake game, and WE ALL (you included) believed: 1. the performance issues of the closed beta would be fixed before QuakeCon 2017 (not fixed as of July 2020); 2. there would be a classic mode (there's no classic mode as of July 2020), 3. there would be regular releases of both new and old maps (hey, there will be a new map in the next update, first one since 2018, progress, eh? Still absolute zero of CTF maps in this game with 3 or 4 CTF-based modes, but I'm straight so I've never played CTF that much).

Seriously, we all wanted this crap to succeed, and in the beginning (before QuakeCon 2017), we were all like "this has potential". And then nothing changed, and the potential was wasted, and what was left was just the same pre-alpha quality product a young John Carmack would code over a weekend in 1995. Of course when he released qtest after like few weeks of work, it was better than QC is after what, 5 years of "development"?

Admit it, you were just as enthusiastic as Slasher was back in 2016/early 2017. We all were. And then we saw the game, and we saw a million dollars spent on a tournament played at 7 FPS with Cooller demonstrating he already knew about the Parkinson Shaft (QC still has slash rail bias, so I think that shit is still in the game, just not 360 degrees range). And then nothing improved, the best computer on the planet can't load the game under a minute, it can't guarantee <4 ms frame time (or <50 ms even), there's some built-in server lag among all the other "esport ready" features...

OK, I'm ranting again. The point is - you were excited for the prospect of a new Quake game. And Slasher was. He loves Quake just like I do, and like you do. We were all lied to by Tim. In my opinion, Slasher is absolutely consistent with what every other person on ESR went through over those years.

Tim pooped a big one on us all.

https://www.esreality.com/post/2866976/what-is-going-on-with-esr/

it wasn't just slasher.

Also, let's not forget the way Tim first presented QC around the time of its reveal, and how he marketed it specifically at old school Quakers, emphasizing their priority in making sure it would be just as responsive, perfect and smooth as Q3 was, convincing us that he "understood" our needs and that he knew what Quake was all about in this aspect, while at the same time knowingly outsourcing the engine development to the cheapest studio he could find in the yellow pages xD

Taking the conscious decision from the project's inception to make it impossible for the game to receive community-made maps & content, the LIFEBLOOD of any previous iteration of Quake xD Then assigning the dynamic duo of sync and spongebob to tweak cvars for a few years xD xD xD

All so he could make a quick buck and secure his new job position at Saber, giving literally zero fucks about the Quake franchise.

And yet there are STILL people who defend all this. Defenders of mediocrity and corporate bullshit. Absolute clowns *o* *o* *o*

Qlive noobs didn't pray to God Sanchez of Q4 that's why you got cursed with qc

defending QC in 2020...

NAH -_- :P

Forget QC, join us in Quake 4 the best quake.

We kind of need programmers and stuff to improve the game further from q4max 0.82

Go die a quick, meaningless death.

Too bad I have attained immortality

sanchez when he says he is immortal all over quake 4.

Have you tried militia?

No

funny, considering he used to delete these kind of comments on esr a couple years ago

also, ranting for 9 minutes about the downfall of quake franchise and not mentioning syncerror once, thats some impressive level of denial

He got free donuts, give him a break.

it's not even that. It's the fact that he's been around since the q3 days and still becomes invested in what this company is producing. I mean he said it himself - the product line has been a succession of disappointments and yet here he is having a moan to the 20 remaining community members. Equally pathetic was his belittling of diabotical and the team behind it.

imo syncerror and sponge were just symptoms of the managerial misdirection and incompetence. Guys like that shouldn't be doing much more than moderating the forum, or maybe testing.

what a chump