Hmm-hmm, okay, I just realized that I don’t know how to do intros. Let’s get down to business. Today we’ll see if Quake Champions is still alive. I’ll say in advance that I’m not going to touch on the gameplay features. This is not a review!
P.s. This is my first blog. I would like to see more criticism in the comments.
Game support
Let’s look at how the game is supported by the developers.
Updates? Well, there seem to be, but so rarely that they don’t exist. In fact, they hammered such a big bolt into the game. Now updates are coming out mainly due to the fact that a couple of new skins need to be put into the battle pass. Sometimes I start to think that Id Software and Saber Interactive are simply imitating the way they work on a game. Sometimes they will deliver, for example, an invisible nerf. Let me give you an example. There is a character called Dez Knight and his ability throws fire at opponents. The fire used to burn for 10 seconds and if you don’t take the first aid kit, you will definitely die. This fall, the burning duration was reduced to 7 seconds, but even so, weak heroes will easily die, and fatter ones will remain at low HP. I don’t yet take into account the fact that most likely the player will be shot at.
Somewhere the last players still manage to shout to the creators. For example, the doom slayer’s auto-targeting attack was removed when he had an ability. True, now the ability is completely useless and you can only run away with it, but that’s okay. Although sometimes it’s funny to watch how an evil executioner in berserker mode runs away from the battlefield.
Another added bonus is that the game is already 5 years old, but it is still in early access. I’m not kidding! Steam page still says early access. Take a look for yourself!
I think the game is kept in this form, because with the addition of heroes the developers simply cannot make a normal balance.
It is also worth mentioning advertising. The entire Internet is littered with advertisements. For example, casinos, bookmakers, Yandex, Warface, tanks and ships. Now I’ll ask you one simple question. When was the last time you saw an ad for Quake Champions?? Mostly now the game is mentioned at QuakeCon (I don’t think it’s worth explaining why). The game may be in early access, but even so I haven’t heard anything about the game. Previously, it was shown at least at E3 and the like. It feels like Id Software itself is tired of the game and is trying to quietly kill it.
Oh! I completely forgot! There’s another problem. Connection problems. If you live in the CIS, then the situation is generally sad. The servers in the game are already in trouble, but we’re starting a teleport circus. For example, before the game I turn off everything that can use the Internet, so that later I don’t have a ping greater than the number of kilometers between the earth and the moon
What do we end up with from the developers side?? The game seems to be alive, but it seems like everyone has already given up on it. You could say she’s half dead.
In the community
Now let’s look at the game from the perspective of fans and ordinary players.
From the very beginning, the old people didn’t like the heroes, the rendering of some moments, partial changes in physics, the disappearance of a grenade launcher and a bunch of other moments. After this, controversy and anger ensued. The oldies went to Quake Live, pulling people along with them. As a result, some players have already been scared away.
The genre itself contributed to oblivion. Arena shooter is no longer so popular and there are not many newcomers. It doesn’t even help that the game is free. This also led to scaring people away.
The worst thing is that the game doesn’t even have a proper modding community. If in Quake Live you could just go to the workshop on Steam and easily install a new mode or community map, now fuck you. Be content with 17 cards or however many there are now?
So only a small group of players remained in the game, who more or less know how to play and destroy any newcomer who dared to appear in battle with real players. As a result, we only have 500 – 700 people on an average evening.
It turns out the community is almost dead too.
The situation is very sad. Newcomers are afraid of the high barrier to entry, and old-timers are spitting at innovations. Online is really very low. If in a standard team death match it’s even more or less, then the same people sit in duels.
The game has potential, but no https://casinoswift.uk/bonus/ one wants to reveal it. Looks like Id Software and Saber Interactive just lost their way. I hope the game will get better and many new people will come there who will pull it out of the current swamp. The game really needs this.
Result: the game is half dead
Have a nice day everyone.
Best comments
I noticed your blog in the news and had to register to respond to your post)
In your article you somehow missed an important thing – the publisher and his money. It depended on the gazebo exactly how the game would develop. And the publisher decided to develop the game towards monetization. Each champion had 3-4 skins, several decorations and a dozen skins, which were supplemented from time to time with new champions, new decorations and new models for guns. During the first 2 years, bugs were fixed at least in the slightest degree, performance was improved, netcode was corrected and maps with modes were added.
But I’m talking about the publisher and this is where things get interesting. At E3 2017 they showed a trailer for the game update and announced a tournament at Quakecon with a prize of $1 million in two modes. Do you think the gazebo somehow advertised or promoted its tournament?? No, there were no advertisements, videos, news related to the event. And so it passed almost unnoticed by anyone. But the publisher in this case lost almost nothing (except for the respect of the players, how could they waste a million so stupidly), the money for the tournament came from AMD. Their collaboration included the addition of the Ruby skin to the game for the Nyx character, which could be obtained by purchasing AMD products, as well as the addition of Vulkan to the game.
Vulkan. Studio head Tim Willits praised Vulkan at almost every stream with developers, that they were testing and everything was working just fine. Then the conversations died down, and then they said that there would be no volcano due to some technical problems. There are rumors that there were no problems with it, and the reason for the cancellation of the volcano was some disagreement between the publisher and AMD. This was also indicated by the fact that the volcano worked perfectly in the next game from Saber – World War Z. What is it, that Quake Champions work on the same engine. WWZ has really advanced a little technically when compared with QC, although their development proceeded in parallel, according to the information on the developers’ pages on linkedin.
Now Saber. Many of the players still have a negative attitude towards this studio, although they have not been involved in Quake Champions for a long time, because.To. their contract with bethesda has long expired – around the end of 2018. And at the same time, at the end of December, a patch was released that killed the game for half of the players – crashes, crashes, severe FPS drawdowns. At this moment, the game and the developers probably received the most negativity from the players. My guess is that saber did not have time to finish work on the update (besides, this is the last patch they worked on) and debug its work, and the publisher deliberately pushed to release it as is. Otherwise, it’s not clear how testers at saber and id could have missed such problems. And with this problem, id is now left 1 on 1, who don’t really know how to work with the game engine. The only solution they found to somehow return the game performance was to kill all the graphics in the game. Since that moment (beginning of January 2019), the game on Low quality textures looks simply terrible and the game still does not produce as many FPS as it did before, even when compared with the start of the beta. And before these two patches, the game on low looked like if we now set the quality to medium. But thanks to the gazebo for the battlepass, it was added in that ill-fated December update, in which the monetization and progression system were reworked.
The distribution model was unclear in this game. Let me start with the fact that at first there was a closed beta, when you had to leave your email and wait for the wave with the coveted activation code in the bethesda launcher – this is ok. Then in August 2017, during quakecon, the game was released in early access on steam, but to play it was necessary to purchase the Champions pack for $15 (price for the CIS) or continue to play through the gazebo launcher, but without access to a custom game and with closed champions, which could be purchased for in-game currency. Also, from time to time, keys were distributed on various sites with the basic version of the game (with a closed custom game and champions) for steam. So it came to E3 2018, where they showed a rather weak trailer and instead of constant f2p they announced a limited free period. Within 2 weeks you could enter the game and continue playing after this period. But the rest who didn’t have time would only have to buy the Champions pack. And only 2 months later the game finally switched to f2p, when it had already lost even that little bit of attention that it received during E3.
I won’t dwell too much on the old monetization, I’ll just say that it consisted of three types of in-game currency – fame, which was farmed for matches; shards received for duplicates when opening loot boxes; and platinum – donation currency for the in-game store. With the patch containing a change in progression and the addition of a battlepass, glory was removed, and loot boxes went into the background, from them you can now only get old content added before the bp. I will say that the battlepass is now almost the only reason the game exists. According to the developer, all income from the battlepass remains in the game’s budget and is mainly spent on maintaining the servers and releasing at least some patches. From people who don’t really understand how the engine works.
There is no hope in waiting for some global changes or improvements in the game. The publisher had previously treated the game with disdain – no promotion of the game, no advertising. Absolute disregard for the game. When was the last time you could hear anything at all about the game from the gazebo?? Even 95% of the time at QUAKEcon is spent sucking on any other games, but 0 attention to Quake. Videos for game updates have not been released for more than 2 years. There are literally a couple of people working on the game, and sometimes they get assigned to other projects. It’s easier for a publisher to completely ignore the existence of a project than to again pour a lot of money into it to rework and fix problems, and then hope that in a year it will be able to attract attention and recoup the costs. From the player’s side this is, of course, all great, but from the business side it’s a dead number
I will add to the comment above that at the moment QC will be supported until the new quake is released. Recent leaks hint at this. The new game will be on the native id tech engine, there will be both single-player mode and multiplayer. The main character will be a heroine, yes… a woman. This will be a new story in the universe (or rather, the multiverse) Quake The team from MachineGames will also take part in the development. At the moment (end of 2021) development is already in full swing. The leaks were from famous people from Microsoft and some journalists who are always aware of all the developments in Microsoft. Phil Spesner himself admitted at the 25th anniversary of Quake that they will revive and always support the old legendary series of games
Thanks for the criticism and addition
I’m talking about something else. As far as I remember, all servers in the game are on the developer’s side, and a client-client connection cannot be created. This means someone pays for the servers, and someone still works there – someone releases patches and balance changes. And this is money. And here you are saying that you don’t pay developers anything. So how does this game even survive with this kind of online??
Everything plays fine there and the community is alive. Mostly on discord. Duels are being sought. Ping reasonable from St. Petersburg 5-50 depends on the provider. But there are many examples of playing across the ocean with reasonable results.
The game just requires mastery and an eSports approach. At 60 fps 60Hz it will be difficult, at 144 it’s already better. But many play on 240Hz monitors and more fps.
In general, it’s strange that they remembered about Saber.
The map is planned to be quite good, and the latest ones imported are also ok (deep embrace and exile).
The balance of champions is also ok. There were some distortions, but they were adjusted and rechecked so many times that it became adequate.
In short, the game is made at an amazingly high quality level with t.h. graphics. It’s nice and interesting to play if you’ve played something like this before. There are almost 0 readers. They hardly stay there and if they quickly reach 2k elo, they are beaten there)
Communities are grown-up guys, the shkololo is minimal, because the majority played as teenagers 20 years ago, and now they are 30-40. And believe me, many people are doing well in life.
So the game lives for 500-1000 people online, and they are doing well.
Discord on CC: Hells Gate hello to all the inhabitants there)
By the way, the WC is the very arena that is so awaited in Tarkov – without cheaters, with 0 stuffiness, without lags, out of sync, pingbuz. With maximally pumped guns, 0 recoil and 100 ergonomics. Added grenade launchers (tri-bolt). And in such ideal conditions, even Maza ended up with 500 elo in duels)) (but this was on the 1st day)
By the way, in CC there is not 440 hardcore HP, but about 300 with control, and about 200 without control of class 6 armor (heavy) and stimulant (mega). There are no headshots, that is, they will finish you off, and not one-shot you from an unknown corner.
Overall a great game, just a little difficult to learn, but fun))
So the game lives for 500-1000 people online, and they are doing well.
I hope you invest very well in paid skins, otherwise who is paying for this banquet and why?.
Yes, it came out with very long loading times and brakes. At a time when even after 3 years the average player cannot afford hardware for a normal game. Modding was also not delivered. Or they could have taken the same model as Steam. Release cases from the community
I’ll say more. For some, the game ends when loading. I invited friends to play. For a couple, the game loaded stupidly and that’s it. One download for 2 hours. In the end they didn’t play
I tried to play it at the start, but I didn’t really like it, to be honest. And considering that now a rather vigorous Halo multiplayer has finally been released, which is right up my alley, I don’t see any point in remembering about it.
I didn’t have enough statistics on the blog: what it was like at the start, when something went wrong, when online fell and other similar analysis.
Oh, a couple of years ago I was stuck in it around the clock. Then I somehow gave up, but now I played for an hour, realized that they didn’t bring anything new and went back to work in BO:CW 
I’ve been playing QC since the very launch… 0 money spent, as a result, at the moment I have all the skins (rare and legendary) for Persians and guns (everything is 95% open, the only ones that are not open are accessories that are not needed). In general, by playing often and completing daily challenges, you can earn a lot of platinum so as not to invest..
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