[NEW GAME] Quake Champions

[fromhell]

Trailer

What's said and seen:

- ranger and visor definitely recognizable
- 120hz/uncapped
- arena fps and esports emphasis
- graphics too good for the pro playerbase (we already know this)
- player classes (already causing a controversial internet backdraft)
- Windows only (so far)

More info to be revealed at QuakeCon.

[fromhell]

Debut gameplay trailer

[Neon_Knight]

So far, I've also recognized Slash Anarki and Campgrounds (aside of what's already revealed). Is there anything else I'm missing?

[Akom74]

Yeah ! I like it !   

Unfortunately i can't play that game cause my little PC is not able to run this graphic...

....i'm sad....

[Gig]

Hi everyone, do you think it's time to say your own opinions about Quake Champions, successor of Quake 3 and Quake Live, which should be released in 2017?

It's currently still in "(closed?) beta" stage, however I tried it today, and you don't need an invitation: you just register on the QC site and it gives you a code, then login to Bethesda site and insert that code... then you can install and try the game (through installing a Bethesda game launcher).

Features (at the moment):
- Engine hybrid of id tech and Saber Engine.
- Some classic modes such as DM and a few new modes, such as "duel" made of "best of three champions each" or similar.
- Each character ("champion") has got different speed/health/armor values, and a distinctive special "active' ability (e.g. teleport, invisibility, wallhack...) than can be used at request after a cooldown period. Champions also have distinctive "passive" (always equipped) abilities such as strafe jumping, wall jumping, lower self-damage, etc.
- "Free to play" business model. You need real world money to buy more champions... however you can earn virtual money to unlock them for a day.
- Quite demanding in terms of system requirements, maybe? Loading times may be improved...
- It looks like it lacks command console (booo!!!!!). Let's hope they will add it later...

What are your thoughts?
Did you already try it?

[Neon_Knight]

So it's basically Quake's version of the Hero Shooter. Good to know Id's not trying to replicate Q3A and instead is trying something new for the Quakeverse. I'm interested in seeing how the next champions would look and play like.

[Gig]

So it's basically Quake's version of the Hero Shooter. Good to know Id's not trying to replicate Q3A and instead is trying something new for the Quakeverse. I'm interested in seeing how the next champions would look and play like.

Various people pointed it out as "Quake 3 Arena meets Overwatch", with the fast action of Quake series and some MOBA aspects.
I've read mixed reactions about this. Someone likes the "modern" features (although one may say that some class-based mods existed back in the Q3A days), while some old school "fps purist" players do not like them at all. Maybe they could later add a "classic mode" where all characters are equal, who knows?

About availablity of the beta, it looks like for the moment (the beta is still "closed", although anyone can register and enter without an invitation) the servers are not always up. Since yesterday evening, the game cannot access the server, giving error 107. It looks like they do activate the servers, let people play some time, then shut down and analyze the results, then re-activate the servers a few days later: Bethesda game launcher reports that the next Beta Test Session will start on 2 June.

[PopeJo]

TL:DR - Its neither creative, nor conservative enough, imho

• champions abilities add a random encounter to the game. abilities don't interact witch each other. you can't block one heroes ability with another or interfere with it otherwise, hence most abilities just give you a free kill on a cooldown cycle.
• Gameplay is much like q3, OA or QL, with well known guns and game mechanics + random abilities from heroes.
• DM, duel and TDM as gamemodes are well known. the "new" game mode "sacrifice" is simply one-flag ctf, where the objective spawns mid map and has to be carried to one of two opposing locations on the map that the enemy team will try to defend.
• the "social features" like in-game friendslist don't work most of the time. so far, no skill-matching or coordinated gameplay (clanwar) is possible, but will likely be implemented someday.
• the game still has quite some lag and stability issues.
• there is no "console" you can use to modify game appearance.
• The "hero" concept and alternative art / skins you can unlock aim at a young audience that will "identify" with "their" heroes. The whole idea is taken from the likes of Overwatch and Paladins without changing the concept in any significant (let alone creative or interesting) way.

my personal conclusion: the only reason to play the game is because it might become the quake game with the largest player base. nothing it offers would make me prefer it to q3, OA or QL, appart from always finding enough (skill-matched) players to have games with.

[Neon_Knight]

So it's basically Quake's version of the Hero Shooter. Good to know Id's not trying to replicate Q3A and instead is trying something new for the Quakeverse. I'm interested in seeing how the next champions would look and play like.

Various people pointed it out as "Quake 3 Arena meets Overwatch", with the fast action of Quake series and some MOBA aspects.
I've read mixed reactions about this. Someone likes the "modern" features (although one may say that some class-based mods existed back in the Q3A days), while some old school "fps purist" players do not like them at all. Maybe they could later add a "classic mode" where all characters are equal, who knows?

About availablity of the beta, it looks like for the moment (the beta is still "closed", although anyone can register and enter without an invitation) the servers are not always up. Since yesterday evening, the game cannot access the server, giving error 107. It looks like they do activate the servers, let people play some time, then shut down and analyze the results, then re-activate the servers a few days later: Bethesda game launcher reports that the next Beta Test Session will start on 2 June.

Well, the Hero Shooter is hardly something created by Overwatch, the whole thing is just a ramification/evolution of the class-based shooter started by the original Team Fortress and popularized by Team Fortress 2... and there was already the Xbox-exclusive Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict as a Deathmatch-based example. Overwatch was just the most recent and famous example of the genre.

[fromhell]

I see it more of as a "early Q3 plans retried" + a couple abilities (i.e. Superheroes Quake) fixed to players.  The whole Overwatch thing is just dramatic overblowing out of proportion by fearful self-proclaimed "quake fans" that don't know the difference......or even history (i.e. the old class mods for Quake in 96-98 are 800% more "overwatch clone" than Quake Champs is).


Q3 used to have light and heavy weight classes for player models that had similar health/speed limitations.  Some of this survived in the old 1.01 leak.


Maybe Q4 multi will finally get more appreciation after this. Rmeember when that was the "worst q3 ever"?

[Neon_Knight]

Everything new is the worst thing ever until it's old. It's almost a fact of life.

[Gig]

It looks like since the last update, the beta servers will be up 24/7 (except for maintenance). 
Also, there are some new maps and a new weapon, which shoots a bursts of three explosive ammo.

[Akom74]

Here is BJ Blazkowicz!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7tickml2gY

   

[Gig]

Here is BJ Blazkowicz!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7tickml2gY

    

Just tried (it looks like they temporarily unlocked all characters, to let people try them - while usually you have to pay with in-game value to unlock a character for a day, or with REAL money to unlock a champion forever). His akimbo (dual weapon) ability is cool, although of course it lasts a short time and its cooldown time is quite long.

After having played a few matches, I have to say that I like this game enough. This "abilities" thing does not seem so bad as initially feared. Of course, I'm not a "pro" player and I get owned quite easily...   - Although strafe jump is limited to Visor...
And while I'm bad with the railgun (I've always been!), for some reason I cannot find my old feeling with the rocket launcher. Maybe a part of it may be related with the 3d model of the rockets being smaller, less satisfying... but it doesn't explain why I'm so bad with it... maybe its blast radious is smaller here?
I found myself using the nailgun* quite often (the nailgun here does not work like the one of Team Arena/OpenArena -which is similar to a shotgun-, but is more similar to a machinegun).

* The "super" nailgun, as opposite to the "starting" nailgun (you can choose between a basic machinegun, a basic shotgun or a basic nailgun as starting weapon. For the moment I'm just using the machinegun as starting).

[Neon_Knight]

I think they're going to make every perk a character-specific perk (Visor's bunnyjumping, Slash's Q4's crouch-sliding, Wolfenstein's health regen for B.J., CPMA-style physics for Anarki...) so they can add everything the people want while keeping the game fair enough for everyone.

The Super Nailgun in QC is basically lifted from the original Quake's Super Nailgun.

[fromhell]

The SNG in QC is still rather dinky feeling compared to Quake's

Quake - centered, fires at a rate of 10 a sec, damaging, visible nails, booming sound
Quake Champions - Right up in your left eye, supposedly fires at a faster rate, tiny nails, dinky sound.   I think it feels weaker than Unreal's original Stinger (pre-patch)

[Akom74]

I've downloade all the stuff but, when i try to start Quake Champions, it gives me the brutal error.....

YOUR SYSTEM IS 32 BIT !!! ...argh !..... 

Quake Champions need a 64Bit system.... 

Some one tell me that's maybe a trick to play even in a 32bit system but i don't know if it's true or not...

...some help ?

[fromhell]

Installing a 64-bit OS might help

Most CPUs in the past 10 years have been 64-bit anyway, i've had a 64-bit computer since '05 so this shouldn't be too unexpected.

[Gig]

IIRC, the game takes something like 8-10 of my 16 GB of RAM... I don't know how well it may work on a system which cannot use more than 3GB of ram.

I don't know when I will be able to play it again. It looks like the last patch means redownloading almost everything. With my 5 Mbit adsl it will take many hours to dowload 12 GB, and in this period I can turn the PC on only for short periods of time.

Furthermore, it looks like the Bethesda Downloader consumes all the bandwidth of my connection, so when it is downloading, I use browser or email client on that pc worse than with a 56k. And strangely enough, instead I'm more or less capable of watching a youtube video from cell phone (wifi on the same adsl) in the meanwhile. Even activating the motherboard manufacturer "network manager tool" to give different priorities to different programs does not seem to help very much. I'm a bit confused... but until I find a solution, I cannot keep the quake champions download active when I need to do any other online activity...

PS: does it really tell you the 32 bit problem only after it completely downloaded its 12 GB? In that case, I suppose that should be reported as a bug: there is no point in downloading it at all, the check should be done early!
IIRC, Bethesda launcher includes a button to check if your system fits the minimum requirements for a certain game (or does it just LIST them?), but that's something you have to manually launch...

[Gig]

@Akom:
Technically, you may "run" a 64 bit virtual machine (using vmware player, virtualbox, etc.) inside a 32bit host OS, if the hardware supports the required exensions. However it's probable the performances would not be very good, and using that for a "demanding" game such as Quake Champions sounds inconsiderate.

If you have will and time, you may install the 64 bit version of your Windows in the place of your 32 bit version (IIRC, Windows product keys are the same for both 32 an 64 bit versions... and in case you are using Windows 10, you can -and probably should, to do not consume some of the "counted" Windows Activations like in the previous versions- directly "skip" the product key screen during the installation, as it will self-reactivate when it will be able to connect to internet, as Microsoft keeps the association of your Windows license to your motherboard in the cloud).
The problem is that you need to do a "clean" Windows installation (backup your data, reinstall your programs, etc.) and that 64 bit Windows cannot run old 16 bit (e.g. DOS) programs, which run on 32bit Windows instead (you may need an emulator/virtual machine if you wish to do such kind of retrogaming... e.g. in case the host is win7 Pro then you can install "windows xp mode" from Microsoft for free).
https://superuser.com/questions/1000858/running-64-bit-programs-on-a-32-bit-system

Or if you wish a "dual boot" system, selecting between a (native mode) 32 bit or 64 bit Windows at each start... I haven't done it anymore since many years, however you can find some tutorials online:
http://www.pagestart.com/win7db06171101.html
https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8057-dual-boot-installation-windows-7-xp.html

In my case, i recently bought a new PC, and used Vmware Converter to transform my very old Windows XP machine (after cleaning it up) into a virtual machine, before scrapping it. Just in case I may sometimes need to use some old programs... Running 3Dmark2001 on it, the XP VmWare virtual machine running on a seventh generation Core i7 7700 with GeForce GTX 1050Ti had similar results to the old physical machine, which was an Athlon XP 2600+ with an old, passive-cooled Radeon AGP card.

PS: Sorry for the OT.

[Akom74]

No problem, i think to wait a new PC..... it will take some time....

[Gig]

Furthermore, it looks like the Bethesda Downloader consumes all the bandwidth of my connection, so when it is downloading, I use browser or email client on that pc worse than with a 56k. And strangely enough, instead I'm more or less capable of watching a youtube video from cell phone (wifi on the same adsl) in the meanwhile. Even activating the motherboard manufacturer "network manager tool" to give different priorities to different programs does not seem to help very much. I'm a bit confused... but until I find a solution, I cannot keep the quake champions download active when I need to do any other online activity...

About this: I tried with speedtest.net and it showed me a speed of just 0.10 Mbit, while Bethesda Launcher was downloading in background, using all my 5 Mbits.
I googled a little, and see that even people with much better connections than mine had similar problems.

Well, fortunately there is a workaround. Go to Bethesda Launcher, click on the square icon (upper left corner) to go to Settings. There, under "download", there is a dropdown list to select a bandwidth limit: you can set it in order to have a few Mbits of bandwith left to use your PC. To be sure, I also closed and reopened Bethesda Launcher afterwards.

However I'm not 100% sure about how that works: it looks like that with the limit set, it still continues to use all the bandwidth if you are not doing anything else, but now it allows other applications to use it when they need... It's not very clear.

In my case, I limited the download to 3 Mbit/s, so I have a couple of Mbit available. Maybe it's not an optimal solution (e.g. the results are not always as expected, and maybe the ability to manually enter a value may have been useful), but (more or less!) works.

[Gig]

Googling, I found a post on some forum where an user reported an answer from Bethesda which said that "in the next weeks" they should release an update for Bethesda Launcher to fix the problem of download resuming not working after closing the program (at the moment, if you reboot the pc, close the program or it crashes, it starts download 11 GB from scratch).

With my slow connection and my limited continuous uptime, there is no meaning in trying to download the game, before the launcher will be updated...

[Gig]

Good news, it looks like the Bethesda launcher has been updated and fixed: now it does a deeper scan of what it has got do download, reports it has to download 1.68 GB (instead of something like 13 GB) to update my Quake Champions install, and the download re-started from where it was interrupted after closing and opening the program.

I still have the "2 mbit" limit set in its options, and while I see from task manager that it uses up all my 5,9 Mbit, I can navigate without any issue in other programs (speedtest.net reports I still 2.41 mbit).

[Neon_Knight]

HABEMUS DOOM SLAYER