Snap Judgment – Quake Champions (Open Beta)

I don’t know how many people know this, but I used to play a lot of Quake CTF with Crayola Clan in the 1990s. Back then, “eSports” were community-run tournaments with no stakes and no prizes and barely any organization. We played mostly NetQuake, QuakeWorld, and Quake 2. We played a little bit of Quake 3 Arena but I personally never liked it and by then gaming started to get commercial with sponsors and cash prizes and it was more work than fun and it was all too stressful to deal with.

Fast forward to this past weekend, when I got my first look at Quake Champions, the newest iteration of multiplayer Quake from Bethesda. I’ve played a total of about an hour, which, when you’re playing a fast-paced shooter, feels like an eternity. I think I have a pretty good handle on what this game is and what it’s trying to do.

It’s clearly based heavily on Quake 3 Arena. Most of the sound effects and weapons are the same. You move incredibly fast and the default FOV is about 800 degrees so it feels like you’re playing in that trippy ending in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In deathmatch, your base strategy for every match is to grab the lightning gun, then grab the quad damage, then insta-gib anything you touch, just like in Q3A.

In addition to recreating that classic Q3A experience, they’ve bolted on all the useless bells and whistles of modern shooters: Match-making, levels, unlockables, lockboxes, stores, and most importantly, manly voiceovers telling you how much you suck at the game when you die.

With the match-making, you no longer browse a list of servers to play on, you simply click the giant Play button and wait for it to deposit you in a game with other people. One might assume that it would put you in a game with people of similar skill levels, but I think we all know by now that those other guys who appear to be level 1 and 2 are probably not noobs like you who just installed the game, but kids who have played in the closed beta for months, perfected their games, then made new accounts just to whup up on the noobs like you.

At least that’s how it feels. The point is, you’re going to die a lot. And everyone is probably cheating. And also get off my lawn.

Overall I found it to be a good shooter experience. It’s fast and responsive. So fast that I can’t really play for more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time.

The biggest negative I saw (besides dying constantly) is that it takes a really long time to load after you click the icon. It sits there on a loading screen for a minute or more before you can even think about getting into a match. And then there is the time to find the matches, which for me took up to another minute. That’s a long time to wait after impulsively deciding to jump into a 15-minute deathmatch.

How does it compare to Overwatch, the obvious competitor? I don’t know. I don’t have Overwatch. I can only say that I felt more at home playing Quake Champions than I did playing for that hour I played the Overwatch open beta. There is no reloading in Quake Champions, which is awesome. You start out with only one “champion” available to you and you pick up weapons from the map, which suggests that everyone has the same weapons, which is awesome. The standard free-for-all deathmatch game mode is really nice because you don’t have to worry about everyone else on your team being terrible, which is awesome. The chat is hidden by default, which is awesome. If there was any voice chat, I didn’t hear it, which is awesome.

But, it’s not as colorful as Overwatch, and it doesn’t have Blizzard behind it, and it’s late to the party, so it’s probably dead before it even gets out the door.

Apparently Quake Champions will be free-to-play. At that price, I could see myself leaving it installed and playing a match now and then. But I doubt I would sink any real money into this game.