By Jim Rossignol on February 25th, 2009 at 6:34 pm.
Carmack was talking up Quake Live today over on Gamasutra. “A lot of this project was about doing something that the PC was going to be better at than the consoles,” he told the big G. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Carmack’s comments is that he wants to see some of the web functionality from things like social networking sites to find their way into the browser-based game platform. “”For years, I’ve often thought about the fact that a lot of people spend vastly more time on websites and forums about the games that they’re playing than they actually spend playing the games themselves. We hope to have some aspect of that here.”
Quake Live went into open beta last night.
25/02/2009 at 18:45 Tworak says:
…the big G? isn’t that gaygamer?
“…the big G? isn’t that gaygamer?”
That one was AWFUL dude, jesus.
“That one was AWFUL dude, jesus.”
Sorry.
“Sorry.”
No problem just don’t do it again.
“No problem just don’t do it again.”
k.
yep still awful just like ur mum is in bed looool cause i had her last nite
shutting up…
25/02/2009 at 18:48 lumpi says:
@Tworak: it’s not half as awful as the idea to name a gaming site after an Indian sex bible.
25/02/2009 at 18:49 Tei says:
I think John Carmack has planned this for a looooooooooooooooooooooooooong time.
Lets look to the original QuakeWorld “.plan” file:
http://www.bluesnews.com/archives/johnc.txt
“Here is The New Plan:
…
Users will have a persistant account, and all frags on the entire internet
will be logged. I want us to be able to give a global ranking order of
everyone playing the game. You should be able to say, “I am one of the
ten best QuakeWorld players in existance”, and have the record to back
it up. There are all sorts of other cool stats that we could mine out
of the data: greatest frags/minute, longest uninterrupted quake game,
cruelest to newbies, etc, etc.”
25/02/2009 at 19:02 Heliocentric says:
Oh piss off and go make some mac/iphone/console exclusives.
I kid.
25/02/2009 at 19:23 Azazel says:
Quakeworld is amazing.
25/02/2009 at 20:08 catska says:
Basically whats happened in markets around the world. Former AAA developers turning into subscription or microtransaction based game studios for the PC because of piracy or just market trends of people not buying highend tech games anymore. Then focusing the main titles (rage, doom) on the consoles.
25/02/2009 at 20:53 lumpi says:
“We are putting new queue code into place. Your line in the queue may appear to jump VERY high suddenly, but will then drop sharply after.”
It did suddenly jump very high… but never dropped sharply.
Come on, just tell us this won’t be happening today, so we can turn it off without feeling like we just quit a second before it’s done. Jumping from place 5000 to 36000 (?!?) is no fun.
25/02/2009 at 21:40 Smurfy says:
I signed up, got excited, and got place 37,000 in the queue. I quit.
25/02/2009 at 21:42 Radiant says:
Someone should tell Carmack that youtube wouldn’t make you wait in a 50 thousand person line each time you wanted to watch a video.
25/02/2009 at 21:57 Meat Circus says:
NEEDS MOAR SERVER.
Their current Pentium II with 16MB of RAM, 56K modem and a 300MB hard drive is not keeping up.
25/02/2009 at 22:04 Meat Circus says:
I suppose I could just go play the Quake III I already have installed.
25/02/2009 at 22:05 CJD says:
Agreed, why hype something up to this degree if they do not have the capacity to achieve the demand?
25/02/2009 at 22:34 Radiant says:
Steady lads; Id are new to this online multiplayer malarkey.
25/02/2009 at 22:50 TheLordHimself says:
What the hell are you all bitching for, its a beta, not the final product.
25/02/2009 at 23:05 RiptoR says:
“Your turn is coming right up”… HAHA!
Not so funny when you look at the actual queue though… Still 25000 peeps in front of me…
25/02/2009 at 23:45 TheLordHimself says:
Also, Agreed, why hype something up to this degree if they do not have the capacity to achieve the demand?, uh what hype? Id have hardly been at every street corner peddling it like Microsoft were with Halo 3. What coverage it has had has usually been fairly descreet.
25/02/2009 at 23:45 TheLordHimself says:
discreet*
26/02/2009 at 02:57 Pantsman says:
What is the difference between an open beta and a 1.0 release?
An open beta chooses. A 1.0 release obeys.
26/02/2009 at 06:37 Deuteronomy says:
The servers finally seem to have settled down. I love Quake Wars for the frenetic pace but Q3 is just holy shit wtf insane. I kind of quit playing games while in college when this came out originally so I missed it. Everything else, Red Orchestra, COD4, whatever is an old man’s shooter compared to Q3. I simply don’t have the reflexes to pull off midair twisting headshots anymore.
26/02/2009 at 11:11 N says:
I bet you never had the reflexes to pull midair twisting headshots since *you don’t have headshots in quake*
lol.
Moving on, the game is as always a pill of pure crack mixed with coke and powdered pez… oh and arsenic. Strictly for the hardcore kiddies.
26/02/2009 at 15:00 Anonymous says:
Also, Agreed, why hype something up to this degree if they do not have the capacity
They honestly had no idea how popular it would get
26/02/2009 at 17:20 Robin says:
The question: do Id spend money to add capacity to serve ads to eventually pay for added capacity? How many of the initial surge will stick around to become regular players? How many of the initial surge are being turned away permanently by the queues?
An unenviable quandry.
But it’s going to open the floodgates for other games to be developed/adapted around this model if they get it right.
26/02/2009 at 17:44 Tei says:
Quake is ridiculous popular. 3 students in finland can make a experimental engine with Quake, and it will get NBC news the next day, as filler. Today consoles, and computers and arcade saloon machines have 3D Graphics Cards, because Quake itself moved the videogame world in that direction (It could have happend withouth it, but it was there to do it). Quake is the influential. Quake is to gaming what Aristotle is to philosophy. Is like the background, over where new games are painted. And I wish it would be different…
I suspect theres a horde of ex-gamers where the only method of getting his interest is dropping the name Quake. People with a family, that has not played games in years.
So Quake is like the nexus betwen software, hardware, gamers and ex-gamers.
26/02/2009 at 17:55 Anarki says:
I’m confused by this quote from Carmack:
Why would you not play full-screen? I didnt for a moment imagine that anyone would play in the browser window. If I hadn’t made the game I would be tempted to ask if he’d ever played it, a game of Quake 3 isn’t going to be much fun if you stop to reply to messages on MSN every 30 seconds.
“Oh don’t frag me a second i’m typing”…….
If there is a game that epitomises the notion of “blink and your dead” its quake.
26/02/2009 at 18:42 jon says:
anyone managed to get a game yet?! :-(
26/02/2009 at 21:46 Deuteronomy says:
Yes yes no headshots in quake. I was thinking of UT.
26/02/2009 at 22:07 rei says:
Finally got out of my browser crash loop, and I have to say the game’s a lot more fun than I expected. Alas, thus far I’ve only managed to play bot matches, but those guys are a lot of fun too, and such good sports what with the smileys when I frag them.
01/03/2009 at 02:18 Jetsetlemming says:
The strengths of PC: Long lines and small server pops.
Kidding, a ten minute wait is worth playing Instagib for the first time in a long time, with actual people on the internet!
02/03/2009 at 17:50 Jayme says:
I’m surprised at how quickly they decreased the lines in the queue, given the unexpected server loads.
I went from six digits to four, three, or two.
Oop! It just loaded up while I was browsing this site. Cool. :)