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Carmack Talks Quake Live

Posted by Soulskill on from the air-rox-want-to-be-free dept.

CVG spoke with John Carmack about the in-development browser-based version of Quake III Arena called Quake Live. He discusses the development team's reasons for the new project and mentions that current mods will not work. However, he adds, "We're in no way shutting down the original Q3A scene, so anybody who wants to build things with the open-source code is still more than free to do so. That may even become a proving ground for moving things into Quake Live." Carmack also says Quake Live will be fully ad-supported to start, but "it's not out of the question that eventually we'll have some kind of a premium service. But we don't know what it's going to be yet, and we're certainly going out with the completely free-to-play model." We've looked at video clips from Quake Live in the past.

6 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Bad summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    in-development browser-based version...

    There's a difference between launching a game from a web browser and running inside one. Anyway, what are they using; flash, Java or .TRAP?

    1. Re:Bad summary by bonehead · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yep, totally pointless. After all, everyone knows that OSX and Windows, together, have practically no installed base whatsoever....

    2. Re:Bad summary by sir_montag · · Score: 2, Informative

      Being a Quakecon attendee, I got in as a beta tester for Quake Live, and it's a plugin for firefox. It's basically Q3A running inside a browser.

      I haven't played it much though, as it crashes my computer halfway through most matches.

  2. Then YouTube isn't browser based either by tepples · · Score: 2, Interesting

    [Q3A in a browser] would be impossible anyway without a plugin of some sort (which I don't consider to be "browser based" at that point because a plugin is no different than any other native install).

    Then YouTube isn't browser based either because it uses a separately installed SWF player to play FLVs. Do I understand you right?

    1. Re:Then YouTube isn't browser based either by nog_lorp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Read the interview, the point is for it be like "youtube for fps" kind of, so there is absolutely no barrier to entry. You just make a login and click a button, instead of paying for the game, installing, installing mods, finding servers.

      I like the idea. It will help preven the "game age death" that happens with so many games I love.

  3. I hope this catches on for enemy territory's sake by Sark666 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I used to play quake 1/2/3 but my interest started to wane by the time q3 was out. But I still play enemy territory which I think would really benefit from unified stats so it could play matchmaker and put the more experienced players together. Of course not just looking at kill/death ratio but focusing the stats on how often the person follows the obj.

    They'd have to massage (and change what's tracked in) the stat data to get stuff like that, but for a game like ET it would be worth it (in that it's more important with this game to match appropriately than q3), and would then probably have a better chance at forming a good online community then quake 3 has.

    So I hope q3 does good enough to green-light doing it with ET, and carmack even mentions ET always had a bigger community than q3.

    But no one seems to know, what does this use? A custom plugin? Cross-platform? He mentioned mac in a video last year but nothing since. Hoping there is a linux client down the road.