Will a potential Quake 3 Arena Remaster be well received?

[Azuris]

1 minute ago, LexiMax said:

 

League of Legends and Valorant put this exact twist on Dota 2 and CS:GO respectively, which did not lock out champions or operators behind a grind-wall, and it's widely accepted that LoL/Dota 2 are both MOBA games, and CS:GO and Valorant are both tactical shooters.

 

QC put that twist on Quake Live and it didn't attract a large audience, and I doubt it was because it wasn't a "pure" arena shooter.

 

The "Champion" Stuff brought a bad Reputation from the Beginning. as it was received as Overwatch "Clone".

 

But i am playing it here and there and i can say, it is Quake 3 with some additional special Abilities for each Character.

 

Imo they should take Quake Champions as the official Multiplayer for every ID Singleplayer Game.

 

No dead Multiplayer anymore, fresh Blood with every Singleplayer Release.

No BS Doom Eternal Multiplayer.

[LexiMax]

1 minute ago, Azuris said:

The "Champion" Stuff brought a bad Reputation from the Beginning. as it was received as Overwatch "Clone".

 

The bad reputation was amongst die-hard Quake and UT players, in the same way that Valorant had a bad reputation amongst die-hard CS:GO players and LoL had a bad reputation amongst die-hard Dota players.  All of those bad reputation amounted to nothing because the newer game attracted enough players from the older game to survive, as well as attracting a raft of new players who had never played the genre before, because fundamentally people enjoyed the core gameplay of the genre.

 

Quake Champions never got that critical mass of old or new players.  My ultimate point is that QC's lack of popularity had nothing to do with the hero system, because there is prior art for games where introducing a f2p character system in fact made the game more popular and accessible.  Instead, it had everything to do that underneath the QC hero system the game was still too similar to old-school arena shooters to be appealing to a wide audience.  I am confident that the mythical arena shooter savior that most arena shooter fans picture in their head - a modern remake of Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament that utilizes the brand name and makes no substantial changes to the gameplay - would also turn out to be a dud with a wider audience.

 

And arena shooter fans would likely find some nitpicky reason to explain away this mythical game's failure, just like they have done the last dozen times.  It's couldn't be because arena shooters are a flawed genre that were less "designed" and more "grew naturally out of the gameplay of the single-player games" with very little refinement.  It couldn't be because arena shooters were only popular during the era where there were few other alternatives.  It has to be the kids' fault, because in their mind kids these days have to have immediate gratification, despite numerous examples to the contrary that younger generations are just as likely to play games with obscure mechanics and high skill ceilings as they were 20 years ago.

[indigotyrian]

Quake Champions would've been an absolute hit if it actually leaned into that Champion aspect and did crossover stuff way harder than they did. They gave us BJ, Doom Slayer, and Ranger, but *really* there should've been a push to get more Bethesda (and beyond Bethesda, other PC gaming/shooter heroes) into the fold. People absolutely love the "banging action figures together" aspect of crossover stuff (look at Smash) so adding Corvo, a Brotherhood of Steel paladin, Morgan Yu, etc would've been a huge shot in the arm of the game's staying power.

[D4NUK1]

i got my fair share of time playing Quake Champions and while it's a great evolution of Quake 3, it's have some flaws that while they fixed across the years, still suffers for many things that could be better in a new re-edition of the game, like better lobby server system, and make possible more custom gamemodes. (Clan Arena with timed respawn like Diabotical would be a good newer comp mode).

 

Edited May 7, 2023 by D4NUK1

[Kinsie]

6 minutes ago, segfault said:

Quake Champions would've been an absolute hit if it actually leaned into that Champion aspect and did crossover stuff way harder than they did. They gave us BJ, Doom Slayer, and Ranger, but *really* there should've been a push to get more Bethesda (and beyond Bethesda, other PC gaming/shooter heroes) into the fold. People absolutely love the "banging action figures together" aspect of crossover stuff (look at Smash) so adding Corvo, a Brotherhood of Steel paladin, Morgan Yu, etc would've been a huge shot in the arm of the game's staying power.

There were plans for wider representation from Id's ludography, like the guy from Rage, various Q3A characters and some version or another of Commander Keen(!?), but the game simply didn't live long enough for that to happen before experiencing community colony collapse and entering its current state of weird quarterly-patch stasis.

Edited May 7, 2023 by Kinsie

[indigotyrian]

Just now, Kinsie said:

There were plans for wider representation from Id's ludography, like the guy from Rage, various Q3A characters and some version or another of Commander Keen(!?), but the game simply didn't live long enough for that to happen before experiencing community colony collapse and entering its current state of weird quarterly-patch stasis.

 

Yeah but it needed more and, more importantly, more from things not id. Quake 3 Arena was already a sort of "id all-stars" game with the references to Doom, Quake, and Wolf in it, and Champions definitely featured all different sorts of original characters with their own Lore and Backstory from different settings. They really should've dug into Bethesda's back catalogue and made calls out to other PC game studios. Consider the fact that the fanmade versions of Quake Champions for Doom and Quake are basically just Smash Bros but for Classic FPS. That's what people wanted.

[Individualised]

We don't have a Quake 2 remaster yet (Quake 2 RTX doesn't count; it's a tech demo in my eyes) so thinking about a Quake 3 remaster is kinda running before we can walk.

 

IMO the current Quake 3 source ports do the job just fine for anyone who wants to play Quake 3. Quake 1 and 2 make sense to remaster because they have a campaign, Quake 3 doesn't, it's a multiplayer focused experience, and the people who play it online or competitively will probably be uninterested in a remaster that might change things just enough to not be considered suitable for vanilla gameplay purposes, similar to the Quake 1 remaster (and that's not a diss at Nightdive; it's why I love the Quake 1 remaster, most of my Quake 1 experience is with the 2021 release as I was a latecomer to Quake and I'm holding out hope for the same thing to be done to Quake 2. It turned a game that I wasn't all too interested in before into one of my favourite games and got me into the next 2 Quake games that I otherwise might have never played.)

 

Also, as other people have said, they've attempted making new versions (not necessarily remasters) of Quake 3 before, but nothing has beaten the original game.

 

 

[Individualised]

6 minutes ago, segfault said:

 

Yeah but it needed more and, more importantly, more from things not id. Quake 3 Arena was already a sort of "id all-stars" game with the references to Doom, Quake, and Wolf in it, and Champions definitely featured all different sorts of original characters with their own Lore and Backstory from different settings. They really should've dug into Bethesda's back catalogue and made calls out to other PC game studios. Consider the fact that the fanmade versions of Quake Champions for Doom and Quake are basically just Smash Bros but for Classic FPS. That's what people wanted.

Deathmatch Classic was a thing. That was a Quake vs. Half-Life crossover game. Imagine Valve characters in Champions.

Edited May 7, 2023 by Individualised

[Rudolph]

28 minutes ago, segfault said:

Quake Champions would've been an absolute hit if it actually leaned into that Champion aspect and did crossover stuff way harder than they did. They gave us BJ, Doom Slayer, and Ranger, but *really* there should've been a push to get more Bethesda (and beyond Bethesda, other PC gaming/shooter heroes) into the fold. People absolutely love the "banging action figures together" aspect of crossover stuff (look at Smash) so adding Corvo, a Brotherhood of Steel paladin, Morgan Yu, etc would've been a huge shot in the arm of the game's staying power.

Not necessarily.

 

Back in 2012, Sony tried to challenge Super Smash Bros with PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, but as far as I am aware, the game did not do well enough to warrant sequels and is not talked about much these days.

 

19 minutes ago, segfault said:

fanmade versions of Quake Champions for Doom and Quake

Wait, I know about QC:DE, but you are telling me there is a similar effort for Quake? :o

 

Edited May 7, 2023 by Rudolph

[Individualised]

1 minute ago, Rudolph said:

Not necessarily.

 

Back in 2012, Sony tried to challenge Super Smash Bros with PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, but it did not seem to have done well enough to warrant sequels.

That's a Smash Bros clone though. An FPS equivalent of Smash Bros would be a completely different thing.

[Rudolph]

6 minutes ago, Individualised said:

That's a Smash Bros clone though. An FPS equivalent of Smash Bros would be a completely different thing.

Of course. What I am saying is that doing the crossover thing might not be enough to make a game a hit.

[Individualised]

2 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

Of course. What I am saying is that doing the crossover thing might not be enough to make a game a hit.

That's true. I feel like it could also be an untapped market though and id Software might strike gold if they try it. I've heard many people want a crossover FPS game, not just from Doom or Quake fans either, so the demand is there.

Edited May 7, 2023 by Individualised

[D4NUK1]

18 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

Not necessarily.

 

Back in 2012, Sony tried to challenge Super Smash Bros with PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, but as far as I am aware, the game did not do well enough to warrant sequels and is not talked about much these days.

 

• PS All Stars Battle had a low selection of characters in comparation of Smash Bros Brawl.
• Missing even fan favorites of the console early days, like Spyro or Crash, even a Final Fantasy representation. 
• Missing some characters of the same franchise (We have Raiden from Metal Gear, but they also could put place to Solid Snake
• They should had added Dante from DMC 3 instead of the DmC but that's on me.
• And the competitive scene fall of quickly as the game focus in combos to generate points or pickups weapons/points to trow the enemy of the map with a mega attack or a ultra attack, instead of the use HP or Dmg%. So the more 1vs1 battles would be a hit a run until someone had to make a attack that can push up some player.

 

@Individualised this remind me of this Fan Proyect in develoment for Quake 1. https://www.slipseer.com/index.php?resources/quake-champions-classic.112/
There's a lot of potential and i played it myself and it's really good. And this is another point of the type of Remasters.

 

Why bother to buy again the same Multiplayer with HD Models, when people style re-ignite players and maintain the scene for free?

 

 

Edited May 7, 2023 by D4NUK1

[Rudolph]

5 minutes ago, Individualised said:

That's true. I feel like it could also be an untapped market though and Bethesda might strike gold if they try it. I've heard many people want a crossover FPS game, not just from Doom or Quake fans either, so the demand is there.

Well, I do want a crossover single-player FPS myself. :P

 

But as far as competitive multiplayer games go, however, I fear what matters the most in a saturated market that requires as many players as possible playing at the same time is attention and timing.

Edited May 7, 2023 by Rudolph

[Individualised]

Also the fact that Super Smash Bros is... Super Smash Bros. There's simply not going to be a game that can compete with it's character roster even if they manage to get close with the gameplay. Hell, even if you don't count the first-part Nintendo characters, Smash Bros already has licences for so many characters that they'll probably not be able to make it into other games, even Microsoft-owned franchises such as Minecraft and... Doom (albeit the latter is a costume and not a full character).

Edited May 7, 2023 by Individualised

[Rudolph]

To be honest, I am still surprised that Blizzard managed to pull it through with Overwatch: from what I have read, they took about a decade worth of work on an entirely original intellectual property and reworked it into basically a Team Fortress 2 clone.

 

In contrast, Heroes of the Storm did not seem to have done nearly as well despite featuring so many fan-favorite characters from Blizzard's catalogue and being their attempt at reclaiming a genre that was born out of one of their own games, i.e. WarCraft III.

Edited May 7, 2023 by Rudolph

[Individualised]

4 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

Well, I do want a crossover single-player FPS myself. :P

 

But as far as competitive multiplayer games go, however, I fear what matters the most in a saturated market that requires as many players as possible playing at the same time is attention and timing.

This is true. I forget that multiplayer-focused games can be a huge risk to develop as if they flop, then the game is practically unplayable as there is no one to play with, therefore no one will buy the game past the original time of release. With singleplayer games you can still have a constant stream of revenue even if it isn't a big hit.

[Rudolph]

4 minutes ago, Individualised said:

This is true. I forget that multiplayer-focused games can be a huge risk to develop as if they flop, then the game is practically unplayable as there is no one to play with, therefore no one will buy the game past the original time of release. With singleplayer games you can still have a constant stream of revenue even if it isn't a big hit.

That is why I hate the fact that Quake III is called just that: it is as if, say, Super Mario Bros 3 had just been the versus mode.

 

It just feels wrong.

[Individualised]

2 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

That is why I hate the fact that Quake III is called just that: it is as if, say, Super Mario Bros 3 had just been the versus mode.

 

It just feels wrong.

Yeah I'm sad there was no "proper" Quake 3, would have been a good opportunity to make a sequel to the first game's storyline. Maybe Quake 5.

 

I suppose it was the first so there was nothing to really compare it to. Multiplayer-focused entries in FPS franchises that usually have a campaign is common place now and whether they choose to communicate that fact in the title varies.

Edited May 7, 2023 by Individualised

[Rudolph]

8 minutes ago, Individualised said:

Yeah I'm sad there was no "proper" Quake 3, would have been a good opportunity to make a sequel to the first game's storyline. Maybe Quake 5.

Or to attempt to reconcile the first two games, which Quake III's opening cutscene already sort of does by having a Quake II-esque character make a last stand against what looks like a wave of Strogg troopers, only to get transported to another dimension.

[Mr. Freeze]

In the grand scheme of things, Arena Shooters are just a fad that had a big splash in the gaming pond. There aren't Q3 clones releasing today for the same reason people don't wear Jnco jeans or form grunge bands anymore: they had their time in the sun and everyone else has moved on. 

[indigotyrian]

anyway the reason you haven't seen a reboot of the arena fps that's actually doing iron man numbers isn't that it's some kind of "inherent flaw" in its design that makes them bad games (what a silly concept lmao) but the simple fact that multiplayer shooters of all stripes are a saturated market. Getting a new game on the market and being noticed requires a huge marketing push. The closest we got to an arena fps blowing up again was Halo Infinite (which imo has fantastic moment-to-moment gameplay) but is in itself held back by really dumb live service nonsense, mired in technical debt, and just isn't really getting the support and content pipeline it needs from 343.

 

Every post-UT2004 arena fps that's been mentioned in this thread hasn't blown up to everyone's satisfaction because they didn't get the marketing push that other shooters do. It's not because of some old guard of Scandinavians gatekeeping everybody or because the entire genre itself is just inherently badly designed, it's because nobody's heard of Splitgate or Diabotical or Quake Champions.

Edited May 7, 2023 by segfault

[LadyMistDragon]

3 hours ago, Ludi said:

Quake 3 is from a completely different era of multiplayer gaming, and I highly doubt it could survive. We still have plenty of Doom deathmatch enthusiasts, and I think that's good enough for now.

To say nothing of Quake I multiplayer, that one game you can actually jump in while fragging.

[Rudolph]

What is the potential of AI when it comes to multiplayer games? Maybe instead of wasting their time fighting over a finite number of players, developers could focus more on developing human-like bots to make their games just as enjoyable offline than online and as such more durable.

 

After all, playing games with friends is nice, but I suspect most online matches are actually fought against complete strangers.

Edited May 7, 2023 by Rudolph

[OpenRift]

Will a Quake III remaster happen? Probably not anytime soon, given how terribly Tim Willits fumbled Quake Champions. Does it deserve a proper remaster instead of another remix? Yes. 

 

In Quake III's current state, you'd be hard-pressed to finding a populated server that doesn't have a fake player count and is just filled with bots. This alone as completely screwed over the game's accessibilities, even compared to previous entries in the series. This could be a byproduct of how idtech 3 games do server listing compared to id's previous and following games, since bots can be listed as players.

 

In the meantime, I'd highly recommend downloading Quake3e and the Flexible HUD mod for widescreen aspect ratios.

 

 

Edited May 7, 2023 by OpenRift

[OpenRift]

I also feel I need to weigh in on the Quake Champions discussion as well, given I've clocked over 600 hours in the game.

 

I've followed Quake Champions' development from the very first closed beta tests, and I can tell you right now that the reason the game failed so bad was a series of bad logistical and design choices. The game as it stands today actually isn't too bad of a game, but the journey there was way longer and painful than it really needed to be.

 

The bad decisions really go back to the beginning with the stupid saber hybrid engine they went with instead of using the perfectly optimized engine they already had at their disposal. This has and still does bring about constant performance issues both client-side and network-side. I've seen people every other match complaining about lag, and I've seen it too, so I know they're not just being salty. 

 

On top of this, there was never a clear plan with how they wanted to implement the differences between champions, and it's changed significantly throughout the game's time in early access. It really shouldn't have been that hard to figure out what it is that people like about the old Quake games and use that design methodology to do something new. I think the abilities, while gimmicky, weren't a terrible idea, but I think the way the varying Champion stacks and movement really could've been handled better. I was all up on the Bethesda forums making suggestions for what to do, and they would almost never listen or acknowledge what should've been common sense in terms of design. Varying stacks and base speeds shouldn't have been a thing at all. They could've done something fun like fully implementing all the different movement styles from the different Quake games, but they never fully realized that concept. 

 

If you can't take your community's beta feedback until your project is already a sinking ship, you should not be releasing in early access.

 

The fact of the matter is, it's not the genre of arena FPS itself that is inherently incapable of success in the modern games market, it's that all the projects that have existed seem to have significant issues in terms of direction (too derivative or not fully realized), not being very accessible (not in terms of gameplay, but in terms of introducing newbies to the genre), or not being marketed enough (if at all). Every newish indie arena FPS I've played has some sort of problem that has kept it from achieving its full potential. Some hacks will tell you it's just an "irrelevant genre" in the modern day, but the truth is, you need to make the right choices when developing and presenting in the genre, otherwise you'll fall by the wayside just like the other 50 Quake III clones.

[Individualised]

1 hour ago, LadyMistDragon said:

To say nothing of Quake I multiplayer, that one game you can actually jump in while fragging.

Out of curiosity I just tried and it took me a while to get used to the latency but then I was fragging good.

[mankubus]

The required skillset to perform in Quake is just too much. The mainstream moved to CS and team games in general because it's way more forgiving. In CS you can jump in there and get some frags, in Quake you will get obliterated. Of course with a big enough playerbase, this would be solved via matchmaking systems. The problem is that you need a big enough playerbase. The zoomoid will never get good in Quake when he has so many instant gratification alternatives today.

 

Here you can see a top player explaining what goes through his mind in a duel.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdkDjsBiO58

 

 

 

 

Edited May 7, 2023 by mankubus

[Kinsie]

7 hours ago, OpenRift said:

The bad decisions really go back to the beginning with the stupid saber hybrid engine they went with instead of using the perfectly optimized engine they already had at their disposal.

Id Tech 6 was not ready at the time development started.

[ReaperAA]

Not to say the learning curve isn't a issue, but I feel there are number of factors why the genre isn't so popular. I think one major factor is that the genre doesn't work well with consoles. Sure there are some popular arena-shooter-like games on the consoles. Halo is very popular and it has some arena-shooter like elements. But the traditional arena-shooter franchises like Quake and UT have always been PC-centric. This really is a big point as most of the casual AAA playerbase is on consoles and a PC-only or even just PC-centric game won't do well in terms of sales. Hence most AAA devs/publishers don't even bother.

 

This is a similar problem for RTS games. In fact, it applies even more for RTS games and even since the PS360 generation, the genre went into a decline.

 

Another not-so-insignificant part of it might have to do with the fact that the genre never evolved in a meaningful way past year 1999. Quake 3 gave us the refined deathmatch balance and smoothness, while UT99 gave us the fun weapons, gameplay elements, mutators and gamemodes like Assault, Domination etc. Even, UT2004 didn't really improve much on UT99's aspects as whatever new it introduced was hit-or-miss (most miss imho). UT2004's Double Domination was less interesting version of UT99's Domination, Onslaught was okay but not really arena-shooter, Bombing Run was actually pretty cool but it sadly didn't caught on. And so on.

 

Again another common issue with RTS games. Those didn't evolve much beyond the mid-00s either, and no RTS after Starcraft 2 has managed to gain a sizable audience.

 

And then there is the good old egg and chicken problem. Not many new players entering because there aren't many existing newbie/novice players for them to play with.

 

So yeah, all these factors + the fact that Quake 3 already saw a remaster (before remastering old games was popular) in the form of Quake Live AND had a failed sequel in the form of Quake Champions means that there is little hope for it to see a remaster. Honestly, Quake 2 has a much better chance of getting a remaster, and is honestly much more deserving of getting one since it's the one major old id software game that still hasn't gotten one (no, Quake 2 RTX is not a remaster and it sucks). And I don't have exactly high hopes of Quake 2 getting a remaster either (because of the recent negativity Quake 2 has has gotten because their favorite youtuber thinks its bland and boring -_- ).