Quake Champions is a complete bastardization of the franchise, and an attempt by Bethesda to revitalize the Quake IP with increasingly familiar Overwatch / Paladins / TF2 formula.<p>Will the game be fun? Probably. But I doubt you will see more than 50,000 peak concurrent players, and I doubt QC will be anything but a blip on Quake's timeline.<p>The ethos of Arena FPS has been abandoned by Bethesda. The community has been begging for Bethesda to remaster Quake Live with a modern UI and modern matchmaking. It took 4+ years to implement a party system, so you could join games with friends. The state they left Quake Live in is such a disappointment, especially considering its potential in eSports. How they came to the conclusion that it was the gameplay or the graphics stopping people from trying Quake Live is beyond me. People want lobbies, ranks, matchmaking options beyond quick play, etc.<p>The demand for photorealism over high visibility has had an unattended consequence in relying on game engines that are frankly too easy to cheat in competitive multiplayer. Even if QC became popular, it would be plagued by the same fundamental client trust issues that CSGO has. I would be very surprised if this game maintained any sort of following through 2018. QC is a serious misstep, especially when it offers nothing but brooding backdrops to compete with Overwatch, which is already a very good contender in the mass-market Arena FPS world.<p>/r/Diabotical gives me some hope. Reflex has quickly established itself as the replacement game for CPMA diehards. But real Arena FPS has not figured out a way to break into the mass market, and probably never will.
I'm glad they've gone back to a relatively clean and legible environment design and aesthetic. Some of the environments in Doom 2016 are really hard to look at, and consequently hard to play competitively because they devolve into a mist of brown/red details that obscure both the level geometry and other players.
Hmm... I'm a bit torn on this. It's a little too slow to be Quake and the quips and movement remind me a little too much of Overwatch. It's like they're trying to fit the formula into what's currently popular without adding anything new just to try and capitalize on the nostalgia of the name.<p>There's a reason Quake was popular for so long and why Quake Live was popular after that. Just stick with the basics and add the things that weren't possible back then. Don't try to conform it to Overwatch or whatever the latest game is. You're not going to dethrone CSGO and Overwatch by trying to copy them and just naming it "Quake".
I hope the UI is customization - there was a lot of stuff going on there that made it distracting. The more they are releasing the less I am worried about it so far, excited!