Comments on: Quake Live Beta Testing

By: Dane

Dane — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:17:36 +0000

Quake III arena w/ a face lift. Free is good.

By: Pitbull

Pitbull — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:29:17 +0000

Bringing old thread back, I know.

I see many people excited with Quake Live that will probably be officially released soon (open to public). I’m a die-hard Excessive Plus player, and I’m very worried about the Quake Live effect on our community, considering that there won’t be any mods support (at least, originaly). I feel Quake Live will divide the good old mod community. We’re a very small number on the American scene of Excessive Plus, and I already see people packing up to leave for QL. Is this only a wave effect? What do you think is really going to happen once QL is out? Will these old-school Quake players will dig their Q3A CD and go back play with their fellows?

QL will be basicly a revamped Q3A, didn’t we already had everything we needed with current mods and devoted coders that spent days and nights to complete a mod release, for free? A mod community requires devoted people to maintain it alive, will QL strips these rare people?

By: newborn

newborn — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 05:10:09 +0000

I meant “we” meaning the CPMA team.

By: illest

illest — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:03:36 +0000

newborn – I wouldn’t say we never got anything from id, they’ve been good about releasing source code, and they design their games to be relatively easy to mod. And Wolf:ET! Can’t complain about that…

By: newborn

newborn — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:18:11 +0000

Why they are doing it shouldn’t be THAT hard to figure out. Quake 3 Arena was released in 1999. Thats *9* years ago and a community for it still exists. Hell, there are still people playing QuakeWorld which came out a few years before that.

So if I had bought Q3 the day it came out and paid $60 or so for it I’ve now managed to get almost a decade of replay value out of it. If I’d paid $60 a YEAR to play it then id would have made almost 10 times as much out of me.

Obviously people are going to shy away from a monthly cost to play a FPS but that doesn’t mean you can’t keep making money in a less direct fashion – such as, oh, I don’t know.. advertising?

Annoyingly though they’re kind of missing something crucial here – they haven’t actually managed to create a game since Q3 that has been worth playing for ONE year, let alone 10. This is because D3/Q4 turned out to be a buggy, bloated pile of mediocre gameplay and it took people like arQon and AnthonyJ to make it even remotely playable.

Which they did. For free. But its another rant entirely to criticize companies for exploiting the community to deliver that last mile while frequently giving nothing in return. We’ve certainly never got anything for our efforts.

Back on topic I believe that id has a bunch of CPMA code at their disposal but it doesn’t sound like they’re particularly interested in using it. Even if they do its going to be obsoleted in a few months anyway as the next iteration of the mod is being worked on almost from the ground up.

Thanks RPS for the flimsy excuse for me to post long winded comments about the Quake3 scene!

By: Jim Rossignol

Jim Rossignol — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 19:03:26 +0000

Aye, seems like the reg has been open for ages, but it was the first I’d seen of it.

By: Radiant

Radiant — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:36:43 +0000

@steve that would make a lot of sense.
Probably a hint at where they are going with their racing/action game.

@sbs absolutely.

One of the things I hate about online multi-player games [apart from you know... other people] is how shitty a lot of games netcode is.

Playing online with a 360 is mind bendingly horrendous.
Gears of War for example has NO antilag what so ever.

It’s like playing in 1997 again; leading your shots by the ‘length’ of your ping [but they cunningly don't show you how much your ping is].

Even something like tf2 has really shoddy antilag in comparison to the systems that have been built on top of and tweaked using the q3 engine.

By: sbs

sbs — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:36:36 +0000

The more i learn about this the less excited i am about it – I really worry about the game being nearly unplayable for me as someone who’s pampered with cpma netcode and features.

By: steve

steve — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:56:16 +0000

@Radiant: From what I understand id is doing it mostly as a test bed for the game delivery system. Since they already have to Q3A code it makes for quicker turnaround.

The service will probably work much like InstantAction does with a browser plug-in downloading the game in the background and launching it when you click a link. As someone above said it’s not actually “in” your browser – it will be a Windows executable.

By: Radiant

Radiant — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:06:02 +0000

Newborn that’s really interesting.

Which asks the question of why are id doing this?

Ok so it’s essentially ‘free quake’ but there are tons of great q3 mods [urban terror for one] that run off the free to download/use ioquake engine and both warsow [free] and cpma [does it still need q3A or has that gone to ioq too?] both looked after the ‘pro’ community much better then Id ever did.

An exercise in content delivery?

By: newborn

newborn — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:57:21 +0000

Eep. I screwed up the quote. It was suppose to start with “And how is it different to io quake cpma?” and unfortunately it wont let me edit it. The comment system seems a little funky.

By: newborn

newborn — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:55:57 +0000

I’m part of the development team for CPMA and as far as I know the answer is ‘very’.

From what we’ve heard from id we don’t anticipate any major changes being made from the last id Software released Quake3 (1.32) and QuakeLive. So its good old baseq3 with all the bugs that we fixed years ago and without all the features the community takes for granted.

From the look of the released screenshots they have a nice looking brightskin and a slight change to one of the maps but there is really nothing significantly new visible in them. The texture quality is now higher then you’d get with our engine with the settings turned up.

If its moddable then arQon could probably port the mod over in a weekend and id would instantly have a product 6 times more polished then what their lazy arses put out in the first place. I suspect it wont be though since it would make it all too easy to strip the advertising out entirely.

Anyway, this was a long and ranty first post but there was finally something I could comment on with a little authority ;)