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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.
It broke the linux game, seemingly for everyone who is using the free-version, because when the ad finishes, the game crashes. No comment from id yet, 3 days later... http://www.quakelive.com/forum/showthread.php?57-Firefox-closes-when-joining-a-game-(Linux)
Yes, they really do advertise it as "$1.99 per month, billed annually". http://bethblog.com/index.php/2010/08/06/id-introduces-two-quake-live-subcription-packages/ So 12 months or nothing, buster.
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. hmmm
Quake 3 and ID software thrived on mods and modifications to their engine and changing the source code. I was never that great at quake 3 but I would love to play freeze tag. For those who don't know, freeze tag is a team mod of quake 3 where everyone has only a modified railgun. Shooting an opponent freezes him so he cant participate in the round, you can unfreeze teammates by standing next to them for 2 seconds causing them to respawn immediately. Freezing the entire team earns your team one point and causes everyone to respawn. It was a superb game mode that i enjoyed a lot more than the regular game.
Problems with Quake Live compared to Quake 3 Arena:
1. No ability to mod or create/use new maps.
2. No ability to host your own servers or use unofficial servers.
3. Common free user mods now require a subscription.
4. The subscription is between 2 and 5 times what Quake 3 Arena costs, but for that price you only get 1 years' worth of gameplay instead of a lifetime's worth.
Quake 3 Arena is an awesome game that, in terms of sheer gameplay, still has no equal. If Id just re-made Quake 3 Arena with updated graphics, but the same gameplay, same customizability, same map-making and mod-ability, it would be a smash hit. The only reason people stopped playing it is because at some point it crossed the psychological boundary between "new" and "old." Tournaments stopped using it, and it faded into obscurity. But when no game has topped the visceral, breakneck pace, strategy and balance of the game, Id has a surefire hit on their hands just simply making the game look new and re-releasing it. Why they wasted all this time trying to monetize the old version is beyond me.
I'm fine with the free version, and I think the free version is a great idea. But when they start to charge for anything, it's incomprehensible why they're wasting their time trying to re-sell a dated game at a higher cost and lower value than the original.
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.
Thanks for doing the mental legwork, but if people just used _specific numbers and units_ instead of three SUV trunks to the gallon of football fields, I would feel less like smacking someone.
Rant over.
"Remaking the game on fresh technology would be expensive; even with the current console generation... ...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."
I don't really care about consoles--hand controllers will probably never compete with PCs in terms of raw playability compared to a mouse and keyboard. As to the expense, we're talking about massive savings using the existing game design. A graphical upgrade wouldn't be cheap, but I doubt it would be prohibitively expensive. Compare it to developing new games, or (more relevantly) developing and adapting an 11 year old game and paying for all the infrastructure to centralize the servers, etc in Quake Live.
People's "tastes" are not confined to one variety of gameplay. The games you listed are the current wave of mostly-console hit FPSes. They are slower games with heavier physics and a multiplayer emphasis on team strategy. They work best on a console because the slower, more cautious gameplay suits the less agile controls better. A PC with better controls fits best with a different type of FPS experience, and currently, I see no example that beats Quake 3 for that type of controls.
"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."
I really just don't understand this. Quake 3 Arena was seen as a resounding success and essentially set the standard for a multiplayer FPS to beat for many many years. I don't think it caused Id to lose "their leadership in the fps market," except for the fact that, as I would agree, they didn't update it fast enough and eventually people were wooed by the "new" games. In my experience, the community was large, easily accessible, and persistent. For years I played sporadically, and saw hundreds of servers each time I looked for a game. I almost never saw the same people, unless I frequented a particular server, and then only sporadically.
I also don't understand why "multiplayer focus" is an irreducible problem with the game. Just because people are playing single player console games now doesn't mean that is a superior game type. Quake 3 Arena simply is not Quake 3 Arena when you turn it into Gears of War or Halo 3.
"It's not really age that killed the game off from the tournament scene, but rather the fact that the audience shrank relatively quickly."
Quake 3 had an active, reliable, and large audience online for an extremely long time. It was released in 1999, and there were still many major tournaments with a broad and high level of players in 2006. I don't understand how that translates to "relatively quickly."
I am among those with the "Waiting In Line" achievement (or whatever it was called) and was playing from the early days on. IMO it lacks in some pretty basic things:
1) The matching system doesn't work for casual players (like myself)
I'm around for long enough to have played Wolf 3D when it came out, so I know rocket jumping, bunny hopping and so on. Yet I'm thrown into games with "matched" difficulty where I don't stand the lightest chance. I don't think I've ever completed a "matched" match ranking higher than last or second-to-last. This persists; no matter how many times I end up being last, my skill assessment isn't changed. Ever.
Yeah, I could spend weeks practicing, but if they announce they know my skill, they better know it. But they don't. You can guess how much 'fun' it is to play that way.
2) No voice chat
This one is a deal breaker really. At 35, I find Quake Live to be at the limit of what I can take reaction-wise, and typing stuff to communicate is simply out of the question. I'm a fast typist, but you're thrown back into the game in moments and I won't stand around and get my ass handed to me even to type "lol nice shot" or something.
OTOH, when I play the casual game of Counter-Strike: Source, no matter on which public server I play, no matter if I know the people playing there, there's voice chatting going on, people having a good time, commenting on the game, talking about whatsoever. It feels like being with other people, not like sitting around alone shooting bots. It's a bit like a night at the pub with the guys, only we're also playing a game.
Gaming is a social thing (at least for me), and QL just doesn't support that.
3) Stupid account management
So I registered waaaaay back when all you needed to login was a nickname and a password. I don't play regularly (because it just isn't fun) but check back every few weeks/months to see whether something changed for the better. When I showed QL to a friend who might like it better, I noticed that logging in now needs an email address and a PW. So I fired up my FF (which was still logged in because it still held the cookie) and wanted to add an email address to my profile so that I could login from another computer or when my cookie expired.
Guess what? There was no way of adding an email address to the profile. Now guess again. Yes, the cookie is expired by now and no, I cannot login any more.
I don't feel like starting everything from scratch again, so I simply abandoned QL. After all, CS:S might be old hat, but it's fun to just drop in, play some games, joke around with the guys, show and see some funny and/or awesome moves - all in a friendly atmosphere. The same goes for DoD:S, TF2, you name it.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?