Quake Champions open tech test starts on Friday
Nine days of fragging
If you know your gibs from your gifs and your frags from your frogs, draw a bloody circle around Friday, May 12th on your calendar then drag that fingerprint out and along to May 21st. That's the duration of the Quake Champions [official site] "large scale tech test" which will invite everyone to rocketjump and railgun, unlike the previous limited closed beta. Rick Lane was pleasantly surprised by how much he liked the free-to-play FPS so sure, go on, let us in. If you want in, sign up this-a-way.
Servers will be up all day, all week, rather than only for weekends like in the current test. The "technical test" suggests a possible element of wonk as hordes of players are let in but hey, that's testing.
Bethesda add that the start of the technical test will see the launch of Sacrifice Mode, a 4v4 team-based mode which I'd assume has some sort of sacrificial twist. It'll also lift the non-disclosure agreement, letting every stream and shout as much as they please.
Rick had reservations about the Quake Champs business model, which offers one single Quaker free then charges virtuacash to rent others or a lump of real cash to buy them all at once, but he did dig the shootybangs:
"Still, I can't deny that Quake Champions got under my skin in a way that I never expected it to. It balances tradition with innovation just right, and I reckon that provided Bethesda don't get too greedy with the free-to-play model, it'll be popular both with Quake veterans hungry for some frenetic old-school action, and neophytes like me who either have never played Quake before or never particularly understood it. It may not be as characterful as Overwatch or as innovative as Titanfall 2, but Quake Champions has got something else – pedigree and blistering pace."
Ooh go on then. I am wary of having distinct characters, as I'm so used to Quake being a barebones game that modders build upon if they want classes or whatnot, but I suppose it's not the '90s any more. Britpop has 'flipped' off, for starters.