Tag Archives: quake live

Quake Live on Steam – Thoughts

So Quake Live is now on Steam. For whatever reason, some people insist on calling it Quake which is just silly. I won’t be doing that, but I will be abbreviating it to QL.

A lot of mechanic changes seem to be operating under the auspices of making the game more welcoming, an understandable goal for a Free To Play title. But friendly mechanics can only work if the user can appreciate them, and that involves a useful UI. I’m not a UI expert, but if I’m going for a quick game and choose Team, don’t put me in a full game. I didn’t click Play to Watch.

The real crux is in all of the fairly random game design changes. QL is a modified form of Q3A. Q3A was very friendly to new players. Weapons respawned quickly and set the ammo for that weapon to either a minimum, or current + 1, making camping weapons or timing them a low return effort. This solution unto itself had the potency of Weapon Stay without the visual incongruity. Pair this with the mentality that QL is “too hardcore” or something of the sort. This is inane. QL has a high skill ceiling, but five seconds with any gun and playing two rounds on a map is going to teach you the nuts and bolts. The only not quite observable mechanic is in the finer nuances of bunnyhopping. Rocket jumping and plasma climbing are things you can observe. Item timing is a case of noting the time when you see an item picked up, and noting it again when it reappears. The rest is the mental juggling you would want to do, on par with the precision you would want to practice to improve your aim. Continue reading →

Not All Quakes Are Alike

Recently the gaming journalism scene appears to have gone into over drive to display their lack of professionalism. That is concerning unto itself, but I’m not going to post on those hot topics. I would rather prefer to focus on the simple things that they get wrong, things which do not provoke a sense of scandal, but when noticed call into question their position as those who bring us gaming news.

As I have brought up previously, often game journalists have the same comprehension level of games, ludology, and the technology as the average consumer which results in them being as qualified as any commenter on YouTube or reddit. This is more grave through the simplicity of it. You need to understand the difference between a franchise name, and a game title.

The new changes to Quake Live were announced recently. They were controversial, and logically a lot of people had a variety of emphatic responses. This was covered at Kotaku by Nathan Grayson, and by covered I mean there was some copy and paste, screenshots of comments, and filler. In the original article Nathan spoke of “classic Quake” and how Quake Live was based off of “Quake III Gold”. The problem is Quake Live is an adjusted and free version of Quake III Arena, and has no bearing on the original Quake other than franchise name. The article also incorrectly cites nostalgia when referring to an active and current community. Nostalgia does not apply to the present, nor the recent. This set me off a bit and I commented on this a fair bit on Twitter: Continue reading →

…and Everything Else

The site has been quiet, but my life has not. Things have picked up in taking care of my daughter, I’ve had some personal illness problems, and a new project is starting up at work. On that same note, I have decided to leave my current job and return to the south so as to be closer to my family as we raise our own family. So now our home is a bluster of packing and paring down, in between diaper changes and bottle washing.

I’ve got a few articles in the works, but am stopping to do this general update one to freshen things up a bit. Today is my 30th birthday, and to mark that I got my first “flawless” Call of Duty game, with 10 kills and 0 deaths. I used quotes because I did not earn the medal, as I joined about 30 seconds after the game started. Oh well. I’ve taken pleasure in my increased ability to predict an opponent who has gone behind concealment and still hit them without line of sight. I’m still usually doing terribly, but I’m catching fleeing targets that I typically would not.

On the subject of multiplayer, though on a vastly higher skill level than my own, and in a higher skill game, there was an excellent Quake Live match between Evil and clawz. The first match isn’t much to behold, but the second was quite thrilling to watch. If you are unfamiliar with Quake Live, Evil is one of the champions, a feared player by most and a respected player by the best. clawz is a relative newcomer, younger than the average member of the competitive Quake community, so in some ways you don’t get more of an odd match up.

So enjoy that, the second match, which is the best, starts at 11:39.

Lots more has happened, but I should probably spend more of my birthday either having fun, or being productive.