Funny how Blizzard won’t make a new Starcraft or Warcraft and this old game comes out of nowhere having a 80k+ tournament with 50k+ viewers and probably even more concurrent players as the latest Starcraft 2.
The aoe2 community is amazing. The game was on life support, well behind major esports, barely kept alive by random arbalet events and the like. They started developing mods, somehow convinced Microsoft to take over and now there's a series of AoE games and AoE2 expansions. Superb stuff.
And this is despite the game being, as cool as it is, not adapted for esports, with drawn out earlygames where very little happens and the like.
I see some similarities to Quake here. Old classic game. In a niche which requires skill. No professional support left. Owned by Microsoft. Still a loving and never retreating community.
We could easily develop new or q3 mods. Many games were made though and they didn't particularly attract attention, and people don't tend to fully agree on why, so it's hard to see that as likely to work.
I guess what's truly different is we can't make new content, new expansions the way AoE folks as long as we're sticking to the perfect abstraction of no classes, same abilities for every player. We're probably too bitter and stuck in our ways to do that.
I still think Quake could much bigger than it is, but it's much more likely with a developer that has some clout. If Valve did a good Quake game, it'd be at least sc2 sized imo.
I met someone who wanted to make a QC mod for QL. I explained to him that it’s not possible, only possible for Q3. Then he was not interested in doing so anymore. My guess is that he does not want to base his mod on a game which is not played. That is the bad part about it. The Q3 standard is QL which is closed source.
It's based on the Excessive Mod which kind of tried to offer an alternative to QL. But all it could do was to create another sub community, not replacing QL. I guess Q3plus will only achieve the same. As is wrote in the other thread, QL will not be replaced through a mod, not even an exact QL mod, that is pretty sure.
I will try this later. However, the problem is.. what about cheaters?
In Steam at least as far as I know it's harder to cheat, however anyone can run some dll cheats on legacy Q3 and there isn't any anti cheat software going on. An anti cheat is so basic that im not sure if I should bother tbh.
I haven't played this game in ages but it seems to be the same game. Im not sure what they have added compared to AoE2 The Conquerors days but it seems more or less the same.
Further proof that what is required is a standard and Quake 3 OSP is the standard as I have explained in my thread. Movement wise, aesthetics and so on, this is it. Then you would need improved netcode.
Basically make QL have OSP movement speed and improve graphics without ruining the engine (Q4, QC) so you can have both people with shitty PCs and modern PCs enjoying it.
Age of Empires II
September 30, 1999
Quake III
December 2, 1999
No excuses. AoE2 has proven what a gold standard is. The community is comming back strong. Just look at the amount of views it gets on YouTube:
I actually often get impressed how many people know what Quake is. Even people who don't even play games at all. This title has the biggest ratio of people who know what it is to people who actually play it :).
You should visit some Doom 2016 discord to see what they actually know about Quake. ;)
It's more about awareness about the franchise but most people do not know anything about Quake, they got perception of mindless fragging or some shooter with ugly graphics ;)
A lot of people my age and older who don't even play online games recognize quake because there was this guy in a dorm who started playing qw/q2/q3 all day and botched getting his degree. Not even kidding, heard this story so many times from ppl you'd expect to know nothing about gaming...
Joe Rogan gets millions of views and he often talks about Quake, that's a big number of people learning about it.
Btw I would love to see rapha on the JRE. He is a great talker and would be a nice publicity for Quake, even tho they would probably talk about QC more than Q3 unfortunately.
Edited by LOLatRoflexTimers at 09:22 CDT, 10 May 2021
I know your list is incomplete, would be interesting to have a full list what ppl play nowadays to have a better overview. Ofc it depends on a region.
In EU:
In ql tdm/ctf pickups are played, also ffa seems at least as popular as ca atm. duels not so much anymore.
In q3 I know that freeze tag is quite popular, also a little ctf/tdm/ffa/duel. I bet they still play instagib in 1.16. defrag too I guess?
In diabotical last time I checked it was mostly wipeout/aim arena (ca) and a bit of duels.
A few months I decided to try Quake 3's Linux client. Hadn't done so in almost 20 years. Still loads instantly, just like I remember. It was almost shocking that there are people who still play it. I had to ask them if they are people and spend some time observing them to confirm after they said "yes, we're human lol". It was a freeze tag server. Even found a few OSP duel servers.