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Quake Live
Feb. 1st, 2012 12:39 pmThere's a video on Youtube that you might have already seen, showing what Quake (and there's another one for Doom) would be like if made today. While it's a caricature, it made me think about how first-person shooters - once a genre about flying around nonsensical architecture at the speed of light - have been supplanted with realistic war games, the pace of which have all but vanished.
Then I found where it had all gone - I've really got into Quake Live over the last week. It's a real sign of progress that I'm no longer all that surprised that it's possible to squeeze a free remake of Quake 3 into a browser, even when I realize that the game is now more than ten years old. The game looked noticeably slicker than the more moderately-paced Unreal Tournament from the same era, but its gameplay was simple, no-frills fun, with the focus just on dropping you into an arena with some other players and some weapons scattered around and having you fight it out in any way takes your fancy - explosives, lasers, the ID Software staple shotgun, and the quad damage which enhances all of these with the side effect of lighting you up like a Christmas tree with a sign on it saying "INSERT ROCKETS HERE". And on a good day you don't even notice any network latency at all - it's strange now to think back to when a ping of 400 was really good when madly rollerskating around the original game.
This is usually what it looks like
It's not without its problems, the most blatant of which is the skill matching system. Strangely there is no overall visible ladder, but they've made an attempt at sorting players into four tiers per game type - in theory, the games presented to you contain players of about the same skill, and you go up a tier when you're too good for the one you're currently in. However, in practice the system feels a bit... top-heavy, and the fourth tier contains players who range from "pretty good" (me) to "turbo nutter bastard nitrous" (the rest). Having been trained in the art of Quake 3 by the ancient masters (or at least one Linux geek in university), what usually happens is that I fight it out for the top of the lower section of the scoreboard while two or three mutant killer cyborgs from the future compete for actual first place.
Even when they're beating you to a pulp, some of the population are surprisingly polite, but there are also a fair number of people who remind me why I stopped playing the original Quake, spending less time playing than hurling whatever grunted insults they can manage to dribble out of their proto-human mouths or whining about people cheating by having moderately good aim. That's the risk you take when you're playing with unknown people over the Internet - so if anybody else I know wants to try this out, my account is DavidN. I'd be glad to meet up with you and/or blast you into oblivion on The Longest Yard.
Then I found where it had all gone - I've really got into Quake Live over the last week. It's a real sign of progress that I'm no longer all that surprised that it's possible to squeeze a free remake of Quake 3 into a browser, even when I realize that the game is now more than ten years old. The game looked noticeably slicker than the more moderately-paced Unreal Tournament from the same era, but its gameplay was simple, no-frills fun, with the focus just on dropping you into an arena with some other players and some weapons scattered around and having you fight it out in any way takes your fancy - explosives, lasers, the ID Software staple shotgun, and the quad damage which enhances all of these with the side effect of lighting you up like a Christmas tree with a sign on it saying "INSERT ROCKETS HERE". And on a good day you don't even notice any network latency at all - it's strange now to think back to when a ping of 400 was really good when madly rollerskating around the original game.
This is usually what it looks like
It's not without its problems, the most blatant of which is the skill matching system. Strangely there is no overall visible ladder, but they've made an attempt at sorting players into four tiers per game type - in theory, the games presented to you contain players of about the same skill, and you go up a tier when you're too good for the one you're currently in. However, in practice the system feels a bit... top-heavy, and the fourth tier contains players who range from "pretty good" (me) to "turbo nutter bastard nitrous" (the rest). Having been trained in the art of Quake 3 by the ancient masters (or at least one Linux geek in university), what usually happens is that I fight it out for the top of the lower section of the scoreboard while two or three mutant killer cyborgs from the future compete for actual first place.
Even when they're beating you to a pulp, some of the population are surprisingly polite, but there are also a fair number of people who remind me why I stopped playing the original Quake, spending less time playing than hurling whatever grunted insults they can manage to dribble out of their proto-human mouths or whining about people cheating by having moderately good aim. That's the risk you take when you're playing with unknown people over the Internet - so if anybody else I know wants to try this out, my account is DavidN. I'd be glad to meet up with you and/or blast you into oblivion on The Longest Yard.
