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Quake Live Beta Ends, Optional Subscription Plans Added
An anonymous reader sends news that the beta tag has come off of id's Quake Live, and they've added two subscription plans to monetize the game. The announcement asserts early and often that the game's current "Standard" play options will remain free-to-play. The lower subscription tier gets extra maps, a new Freeze Tag game mode, and clan creation abilities, among other things, for $2 per month. The higher plan, which is twice as expensive, grants players those benefits plus the capability to create their own private servers.
All this for a game that you could find the bargain bin for 10 dollars...3 years ago.
Pretty sure I can do ALL of that with the copy I bought over a decade ago, and of course, I and many others did.
They did, it's called Quake 4. But I agree, this Quake Live think looks like a completely terrible thing that shouldn't even exist, but sadly it gets many new players or returning old players. I mean, pay 2 bucks per month for Freeze Tag, that I've been playing on the regular Q3A for free since forever? I'm glad id has found a new cash cow to support Carmack's space hobby, but fuck this.
I disagree that a full-blown remake of Quake 3 would be a good commercial proposition. Remaking the game on fresh technology would be expensive; even with the current console generation (which defines the technical limits for most games, with a few rare exceptions like Crysis) edging up towards 5 years old, development costs remain far higher than they were when Quake 3 came out. The successful bits of the industry can absorb these costs because there are far more gamers than there were a decade ago. However, I think the appeal of a Quake 3 remake to most newer games is almost non-existent.
Even at the time, despite the strong support it gets from part of the fanbase, Quake 3 perhaps had less impact as a game (as opposed to its engine, which powered umpteen other games over the next few years) than had been expected. With its multiplayer-only focus, its emphasis on the "pro-gamer" market and its lack of new ideas, it really marked the point where id lost their leadership in the fps market. It's not really age that killed the game off from the tournament scene, but rather the fact that the audience shrank relatively quickly. If age had been the factor, then Counter-Strike (which ran on technology long-since obsolete by the time of Quake 3's launch) wouldn't have outlasted it for so long. In the era of Quake and Quake 2, if you played fpses online, you basically played one of those two games or one of their mods. Quake 3 was never more than one competitor among many.
Quake 4 achieved some reasonable sales success, but the fact that it vanished almost immediately from the mainstream online scene indicates that the singleplayer campaign was probably what most people bought it for. With the current online gaming scene dominated by Modern Warfare, Gears of War and Halo 3, it's pretty clear that tastes have moved away from the "bouncy deathmatch" model of the Quake series.
Quake 4 shares very little with Q3A physics and gameplay, it just has the "so called similar weapons" but it's a different game.
Quake Live is a modified Q3A but most of it is actually the same as Q3A, physics are tweaked but nearly the same, and so on
1. no unsanctioned user content
2. no 3rd party independent servers.
3. it's a stupid browser dll. why? just have the javascript call quake3.exe with the params...
4. the stock q3 maps were not much to rave about. only a few were serviceable during q3's lifetime (q3dm6,q3dm7,q3dm13, q3dm16, and everyone lived q3dm17 for some reason). the rest were rarely if ever played. the meat and potatoes were the maps that came with the various large mod projects that came later.
5. the rest of the 'premium' content is just the team arena maps. big deal. paying for map packs = lame bullshit.
6. sure it has a 'community' but then so did q3. q3's community is/was far superior in many ways. many were active producers of content and the consumers played active roles in testing prereleases. many of them cared.. that makes a BIG difference in the intrinsic value of something like a game community. people paying subscriptions have a completely different attitude.
7. no blood, censored language chat in game and in the forums.. really? since when was quake rated PG? the quake I remember was full of piss and vinegar and attitude, game and players both. that was its charm. pantywaists with thin skin need not apply.
(if there are dupes to this post, I'm sorry, but slashdots' scripts are buggin out again).