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Any FPS player? My review about Quake Champions
7 years ago
General
Why Quake does not find its success today?
Quake is a liscence that is over 20 years old, and 20 years ago the game concepts and the eSports were not the same, let me explain:
Quake is a classic arena that requires very little mental skill (no strategies, no mindgame), the game is based on its pure and simple mastery, weapons and maps. As a result, the skillgap is extremely high, being played primarily only by players who have always known and played Quake since the beginning. So when you arrive in a game, you barely have time to make 5 frags while another guy has already made 15 or 20. It will be impossible for you to win any game unless catching up at least a decade of experience on Quake.
Having myself played Serious Sam The Second Encounter (2001), much less known but still active until the termination of GameSpy in 2014, I saw the same phenomenon to happen. We had a community of very experienced DM players and we just inflicted 30/0 on casual players. Between 2009 and 2011, everyone had deserted the game, there remained only our community. We had simply disgusted the casual players, leaving them no room for improvement.
Today, at the time of more complex games where mastery AND mental competence (which can also compensate for a lack of mastery) are required to overcome, the classic arena no longer has a place among modern games, especially in the eyes of a young public, or even of a not so young public who grew up with Counter-Strike. And before you get the urge to bash me for making such comments about the holy father of eSports, I would still make you notice the failure of ShootMania, Toxikk and Unreal Tournament 4 (despite its free).
Adding special skills to the characters of the game would not have made it any better, on the contrary. By thinking doing it right to get back in time, they have taken the wrath of some players, sulking Champions in favor of Quake Live. If Quake champions were to be a pure classic arena and competitive, they should never have put these abilities. They are certainly a minority in the meta (if we can talk about meta in such a game) but they have nothing to do there.
The game is in beta but we note a very wobbly competitive matchmaking that does not rank the players by levels and a 1v1 system of 3 rounds of 1 frag that is completely absurd (this is only my opinion), and then a matchmaking that takes ages to find us a match. Lag happens often (and this is not my connection) and there is sometimes a huge latency (shots that pass through the walls because they are calculated way too late by the server) .
In conclusion, only the 4v4 mode is playable. Quake is no longer what it used to be and it's not appealing to the new players.
Quake is a liscence that is over 20 years old, and 20 years ago the game concepts and the eSports were not the same, let me explain:
Quake is a classic arena that requires very little mental skill (no strategies, no mindgame), the game is based on its pure and simple mastery, weapons and maps. As a result, the skillgap is extremely high, being played primarily only by players who have always known and played Quake since the beginning. So when you arrive in a game, you barely have time to make 5 frags while another guy has already made 15 or 20. It will be impossible for you to win any game unless catching up at least a decade of experience on Quake.
Having myself played Serious Sam The Second Encounter (2001), much less known but still active until the termination of GameSpy in 2014, I saw the same phenomenon to happen. We had a community of very experienced DM players and we just inflicted 30/0 on casual players. Between 2009 and 2011, everyone had deserted the game, there remained only our community. We had simply disgusted the casual players, leaving them no room for improvement.
Today, at the time of more complex games where mastery AND mental competence (which can also compensate for a lack of mastery) are required to overcome, the classic arena no longer has a place among modern games, especially in the eyes of a young public, or even of a not so young public who grew up with Counter-Strike. And before you get the urge to bash me for making such comments about the holy father of eSports, I would still make you notice the failure of ShootMania, Toxikk and Unreal Tournament 4 (despite its free).
Adding special skills to the characters of the game would not have made it any better, on the contrary. By thinking doing it right to get back in time, they have taken the wrath of some players, sulking Champions in favor of Quake Live. If Quake champions were to be a pure classic arena and competitive, they should never have put these abilities. They are certainly a minority in the meta (if we can talk about meta in such a game) but they have nothing to do there.
The game is in beta but we note a very wobbly competitive matchmaking that does not rank the players by levels and a 1v1 system of 3 rounds of 1 frag that is completely absurd (this is only my opinion), and then a matchmaking that takes ages to find us a match. Lag happens often (and this is not my connection) and there is sometimes a huge latency (shots that pass through the walls because they are calculated way too late by the server) .
In conclusion, only the 4v4 mode is playable. Quake is no longer what it used to be and it's not appealing to the new players.
