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Changing the Rules of a 15-Year-Old Game: Quake Live Update Causes Controversy
An anonymous reader writes: As id Software aims for a larger, more mainstream audience for its free-to-play shooter Quake Live (based on 1998's Quake III Arena) on Steam, big changes are afoot. A new update was pushed out last week which adds some new, more beginner-friendly features to the game. These include weapon loadouts, which grant players a weapon of their choice when they spawn, timer icons, which indicate when the all-important powerup items will spawn, and an automatic bunny-hop to gain extra speed. The changes have been met with hostility from longtime players who prefer the "purist" rules of old and the duel format. As the writer points out, however, if the update helps attract more elite players to the gamer, it could breathe new life into a very old game.
TFC was the game. :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Or better yet, making a new game that people will buy rather than still trying to cash in on a 1998 game which is 16 years old.
Kaizen bitch
... that when I originally heard it I thought they were going to basically make the 'real' sequel to quake 3, and redo all the graphics/models /w modern tech, but it's just Q3A with a web interface and less mods/flexibility of the original.
It's the same thing that's taken down games like World of Warcraft. They kept making it easier and easier, hoping to gain more players. After a while, the game is just too simple and repetitive to interest anyone. The whole thing just collapses.
Yeah, WoW is technically still around, but the players have been dropping out so badly that they have to consolidate realms now, instead of bringing out new ones. Even so, it's alarmingly vacant.
They are adding the new while making the previous behavior accessible. FTA:
Classic Quake Live isn't being abandoned
While these changes are part of the new default Quake Live ruleset, the majority of them can be avoided by opting for Classic ruleset games. All the public Duel servers will run in Classic mode, and Create Match will let subscribers pick from Quake Live, Classic and Turbo rulesets. That's another thing – PQL (Promode Quake Live) is now called Turbo. As the Quake Live team explain it: "We hope that running our FFA [Free For All] and Teamplay servers with these new, fun, and accessible mechanics that we can begin to build a larger base of players who could then try their luck at the Classic Duel experience."
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
They are experimenting in gameplay on an already paid for codebase, for a free game. I'm not complaining.
Yeah, because I'm LOVING the latest SimCity, and totally don't wish they stuck to the SC2k/SC3k format
"if the update helps attract more elite players to the gamer, it could breathe new life into a very old game." Makes no sense either way, they fucked up on this.
Just like the NGE for Star Wars Galaxy, any 'major shift' to the game in order to attract a new audience alienates your current audience. You're basically saying 'screw you guys, we want some else.'
If that's the truth, then go for it. If the current audience is insufficient to proceed, then go for it. If you'd like to keep the people you have...you'd better not do it.
It's possible the maintainers of Quake Live are simply done with the project. Rather than shut the doors while there are still people playing, they need to chase everyone away first. That would make a whole lot more sense than trying to attract people to a 15-year-old game by changing it. The only people who are going to play a 15-year-old game are the ones who are trying to relive the 'glory days.' If you change it, they are no longer the 'glory days.'
the rest I could not care about, bunny hopping is for moron noobs that cant make it 5 feet without getting their asses shot off
its even dumber in other games, like when you see a team of nazi's bunny hopping cross the battlefield
[OA player here]
They allowed bunny hopping to do the same as strafe-jumping? seriously?
Bye bye defrag...
If they require all these cheats (let's call them what they are) to play, how in the name of Hell are they "more elite"?
Are they somehow empowered to greater delusions of grandeur?
Or are they chasing players who're monetizing their game streaming?
In which case FUCK them.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yes, they're down to a paltry 7,000,000 subscribers as of August 2014.
Why not tell us how many subscribers YOUR kewl game has? Since you obviously know so much more than those dumb Blizzard people.
Man that brings back memories...
...Picture this: A bright young student with plans to take over the (animation) world, follows the "hip kids" word of Quake II-Lithium (until then I had no clue what the Quake games where all about)...it's like Barney Gumble from the Simpsons, he was a decent guy and a heck of a helicopter pilot before he met the brown bottles with ice cold Duff. That's me and Quake. I bought the darned CD, put it in - and was lost forever...
I ended up using all my school money on investing in an ISDN Line (that was the *SHIT* back then when everyone else where on 14.4K dialup), found out that it still lagged more than a donkeys behind sunday mornings so I Invested in a DUAL ISDN line (that's a 64 x 2 = 128k line) and pinged the bejeezus outta the competition. That stuff cost 700$ a month + lost childhood + no school buddies + no school basically (see what it did to me? I have to write stuff like + in between words to substitute for bad grammar and such).
So kids! Let that be a lesson for you, stay in SCHOOL! And don't let the QUAKE get you!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
The way I see it, id Software's new owners are evil because they even tried to frivolously sue John Carmack, who invented all their games and technology.
They're trying to keep this old game alive and with a community. I think the initial release of Quake Live, or this move, has little to do with cashing in and very much to do with love of the game.
Moreover, "making it more fun" is pretty much what they are attempting. It's been a known problem for a long time that a new player will get completely owned when they first try, it's just such a brutally skill-based game and a small pool of players makes large skill differences more likely in matchmaking. Few people enjoy total domination by their opponent.
Quake 3/Quake Live used to be a living esport, now most of the big tournaments are gone. The game is beautiful, especially when played at a professional level. I'm all for any attempts to revitalize this genre so that the FPS duel might still be a thing in esports in the future. Of course the risk here is that the game becomes unrecognizeable.
"Beginner friendly" means driving away the elite players who do not need nerfs.. not getting them to start playing.
I've never liked Quake 3. To be honest, aside from the singleplayer modes of Quakes 2 and 4, I've never much enjoyed the Quake series. Admired them as technological accomplishments? Sure. Enjoyed other games built on the engines? Absolutely. But liked the games? No. Compared with their contemporary competitors such as Duke Nukem 3d, Unreal, Half-Life and so on, they've always felt very shallow and conservative.
But hey, I am not the final arbiter of gaming taste. A lot of people do like the series. But by and large, they like it because it is so conservative. Quake 3/Quake Live's players are basically the people who have looked at everything in modern gaming and said "no thanks". To an extent, I sympathise. There are aspects of some modern shooters, such as 2-weapon limits, modern military settings, regenerating health systems and corridor-levels that I'm also bored to death of (though not everything is like that). But this is an audience that defines itself pretty much by its resistance to change.
So why bother pushing changes like this? Your existing players are not only going to hate it, but they are going to compete with each other to see who can shout that they hate it the loudest (proving yourself more "hardcore" and "oldschool" than anybody else is a big part of how you navigate the social pecking order around niche games like this). And new players? It's still, under those minor changes, the same old game it always once and still both feels and looks like a legacy from another era. Counter-Strike edged out Quake 3 as the main competitive fps for good reasons. Plus it's a legacy from another era with a really, really hostile-to-beginners culture to go with it.
If all of the above sounds hostile... it's not really meant to be. It's absolutely a good thing that there are niche games like this out there. But by and large, the absolute worst thing the developers of those long-standing niche games can do is to try to take them "mainstream". It usually just alienates the old audience without attracting a new one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This is basically the new player experience in Quake...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A dog turd on the sidewalk had at least that many flies hovering around. It has to be good you know.
WoW isn't even a game anymore. It's something between a social sandbox, interactive tv show, and carefully crafted behavioral/visual drug.
That's down from 16,000,000 a couple years ago. So yes, that's a major loss.
"If you don't like it go and write your own game..."
Quake 2 was responsible for me getting such a bad result in my Computer Science degree. I didn't need to worry about dial up speed as there were plenty of LAN players happy to play.
I didn't like Quake 3 - With quake 2 you gradually learned all the tricks like double jumps, rocket jumps etc but in quake 3 you just had these jump points which meant that in most maps people were just flying about the place and the respawn rate was much higher.
I found some Quake 2 servers still around back in 2006 or so and still managed to do really good - I'm well into my 30s now so if there are still servers running now I doubt I'll play good because of reaction times etc. It is weird how you still remember all the tricks and the map layouts though.
7 million subscriptions =/= 7 million players.
As someone who played EverQuest back in the day, playing 6 accounts by yourself to run through the Plane of Hate was rateer easy to do.
If they made Quake too easy, let's all play XPilot!
http://www.xpilot.org/
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
they never broke 13 mill and they still have slightly less than the end of vanilla.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Third world problems...
I agree that adding an anthropomorphic rabbit would be humorously apropos, but it might attract parts of the furry fandom that Idthesda might not be interested in serving.
The changes sound like a good idea. I picked up a copy of Q3 a week or two too late and was never able to compete in multiplayer as I would be fragged into oblivion in the first .03 nanoseconds after connecting to a server. I quickly gave up and went to a different genre completely where new players were not punished so severely for not having camped out the night before release at Best Buy to be the first to own a copy (or for not playing 23 hours a day on a steady drip of red bull).
Now, this won't really bring me to the game as my life is different now than it was 15 years ago, but I do think the changes are a good idea.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You know how they could attract more players? Make the damn thing work in Linux like it used to. I was a huge Quake player back in the day and I never wanted to stop but when everything migrated to Live I had to stop playing because Linux isn't supported.
Of course this is going to piss off the old school players, but then again they ar eproblably still playing the original versions off of their own servers. Then again, how many new players are going to be interested in playing quake? It's been years since it was relevant.
You were actually about 3 years and two weeks late then because almost all of the top q3 players were holdouts from quake1/quakeworld that would not play the steaming pile of shit that was quake2. It was there that they got so good. It was there that almost all the big money tournament winners came from.
It's still the highest skill cap, fastest playing fps ever, it's a shame almost nobody plays it anymore... quakeworld that is.
I'm a Quake Live Pro subscriber (got a year as part of a QuakeCon package) and I've been playing Quake 3, then Quake Live, since 1999 when it was released.
I'm sure the hardest of the hardcore players will find something to complain about but really, the changes are fine. If the changes attract a lot of new players at the expense of the old guard then fine, the game will be better for it in the long run. The real test will be when the game hits Steam soon and a critical mass of people will have access to it. And like even the article points out - there's still a way to play the old way, and the most popular mode - duels - is unchanged.
And really, the original Quake 3 game has been open source for nine years now, if the old guard really wants to all you would need to do is make a version that uses Quake 3's assets but adds a matchmaking system or a server browser that's up to 2014 standards. To some extent that's what the original goal of Quake Live was, whether or not it ever achieved that is debatable but I know I can fire up QL and be in a game I like in less than a minute. If you think you can do better, go for it.
And as I write that it occurs to me that this is to some extent what the OpenArena project was supposed to be about but nine years in all we have is a dodgy 0.8 release and a core group of developers who are reportedly representative of the absolute worst qualities of the open source movement (slow to release, hostile to newcomers, actively sabotaging any FOSS ports that aren't Linux, etc.). So to some extent people who did think they could do better (albeit slightly different aims - OA wants to not rely on Q3 assets) have tried and not really gotten much of anywhere with it.
Schnapple
Actually Barney didn't learn to fly an helicopter until after he started to drink.
It was a gift from Homer, right before Barney went into sobriety, however short it was.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
Not even a 1st world problem.
And it's the same detail as Planeshift and a number of other *QUOTE* 'open source projects'. It's assets produced by artists who aren't really into the open-source thing. They just found a way to utilize open source to make their sub par art seem important, but to hell with anyone else.
It's one of the large problems with open source that is SLOWLY being remedied, but at a glacial pace compared to code. Asset designers tend to thing their creations are special compared to everyone elses, even if they themselves steal ideal, whole creative works, etc from others. It's the same sickness as the copyright industry as a whole. Our ideas are special, but those ideals we created ours off should be free. Just look at Disney for the shining controlling example. There's plenty of others as well.
I'd give you change, but all I've got is 2 cents.
news at 11.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
so I Invested in a DUAL ISDN line (that's a 64 x 2 = 128k line) and pinged the bejeezus outta the competition
Why didn't you just download and use cheats? Paying $700 a month for something that will give you an automatic advantage over most players is pretty much the same thing in spirit, no?
Nobody is dumbing down chess to make it more "accessible." Still, you can promote the development of new chess players. If the game is worth promoting, devote some real thought into its promotion.
I got into Q3 a few years late. I was so interested in the game that I decided to learn it instead of quitting it. It took time and dedication that only a grad student without kids can muster, but I gradually saw myself climb in the deathmatch ladders. I've never reached the upper echelons of eliteness but managed to be a pretty efficient player. The problem is that as in every other sport or game, it takes lots of practice to be good. You can't be good at tennis or chess on your first game.
Perhaps what Q3 lacked the most was a way to rank and match players. Instead I just found a server with a nice community who helped me be my best.
Confidence is a preference for the habitual player
Of what is known as
(Quake Live)
And giblet soup can't be avoided
If you take a route straight through what is known as
(Quake Live)
John's got Mountain Dew he gets intimidated
By the dirty players, they love to blow him up
(Quake Live)
Who's that basement dweller slouching?
You should cut down on your quarklife mate, get some exercise
All the people
So many people
They all go hand in hand
Hand in hand through their Quake Live
Know what I mean?
You can't be good at tennis or chess on your first game.
Very true, but it's awfully difficult to learn tennis when you can only play against people who are in the ranks of Djokovic and Federer. Quake, all of its derivatives, and most of its contemporary clones generally had that kind of learning curve for new players. It did make the best players really exceptionally good (because they were always playing against other exceptionally good players) but it never gave anyone else a prayer of getting good.
Instead I just found a server with a nice community who helped me be my best.
Perhaps if I had been able to find such a community I would be looking back fondly upon Quake.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I see a lot of /. users offering a lot of supposition about how the changes affect the game. Play it!
The new heavy machine gun rocks. The loadout option is nice because the Machine Gun was pretty much useless except as a last resort. The loadouts help vets (Those of you sniping with the RG all the time!) and the newbs (Those of you spamming with the RL all the time!) equally. As a constant FFA player I _love_ a chaotic death-filled game. The timers for the QD and the like are nice simply because it gives everyone the same advantages those who knew the timings had. There's a warning when it's about to regen, and everyone heads for it. The battle that ensues surrounding the QD is a blast.
The big change no one's really mentioned is that an Ammo box is now universal. It reloads any gun you're holding. The "real world how" that might work aside, this means you're much less likely to run out of ammo for any weapon you love. This increases the ammo available to the spammers and leads to more death... which means more fun in my book!
I've been a Teir 3/4 FFA/TDM guy for awhile now... years. I pay 'cause I don't want it to die as I love this game. I think the changes they've made increase the fun. Isn't that the goal?
To put this comment in context I remember when Doom went 0-day on the warez BBS's and I got to play Q2 against the devs in the loft at John Carmack's plano house in '97. They WOOPED my ass. Spawn-die just over and over. I get that frustration but don't feel the changes increase that, at all... they skill match the games. If you're clicking on something orange or red... well yeah you're going to get fragged.
I liked the pr0n mod... *MONEYSHOT*
Requiem for the American Dream
Sounds very familiar. Did you by any chance go into Computer Science in Lisbon?
I added a new saying to my list.
Random bans for no reason yet the game is rampant with trolls and grievers. The company who manages the game is useless.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
"update helps attract more elite players to the game"
because how do you attract elite players to your game? oh yeah, dumb it down and make it noob-friendly. makes sense.
Why do they call it a browser game!
He is crazy if you think about it; I am not.
Eonn, is that you?
This is what you get from "going all in" with the cloud. While services like Steam are widely popular and provide access to games at a reasonably low price it comes with a new set of rules. And those rules include that the service and software provided can change at any time or go away entirely. If you don't like that then go an buy the original version of the game and play that. Alternatively, get organized and stop playing the new version of the game reminding EA every single day why you do that. Maybe they change their mind or maybe they offer both versions, but more likely they will just send your well meant messages to device null.
Please note: If you don't let the CD autorun, hunt down to the directory with the installer of the actual game, this game still runs perfectly on any NVIDIA / Intel PC. Enjoy!
The purpose of existence is to make money.
And ... so?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"