Being able to play an old school deathmatch shooter you can play on modern systems that can be played easily with friends is harder than it might sound. Everyone having the same game on Steam is often a problem and if you are having a few friends over as finding a shooter you all have in Steam can be a problem. I recently heard that Quake Champions will be free to play at launch, which makes me very happy. Not only does this mean that anyone with a reasonably powerful PC can play it but it also means that it's available to anyone. Like some modern arena shooters Quake Champions will allow everyone access to Ranger, the default Champion and if you want to play the other Champs you will have to pay. According to Tim Willits you will be able to grind for in game currency to temporarily play as other Champs but if you want to own them, you will have to buy them. In other F2P MOBAs you can grind in game currency to unlock Champs but since different Champions in Quake are simply cosmetic, paying to unlock them makes sense.
Hopefully Quake Champions can be played on reasonable hardware so literally anyone with a PC could play it but if it requires a powerhouse anyone with a newish PC would be OK. The system specs or final release date haven't been announced yet but when they do i'll let you know.
What do you think about Quake Champions going free to play, is this a good idea or do you think this might be bad for the game?
http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/10/14877004/quake-champions-free-to-play-full-price-favor-currency
Hopefully Quake Champions can be played on reasonable hardware so literally anyone with a PC could play it but if it requires a powerhouse anyone with a newish PC would be OK. The system specs or final release date haven't been announced yet but when they do i'll let you know.
What do you think about Quake Champions going free to play, is this a good idea or do you think this might be bad for the game?
http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/10/14877004/quake-champions-free-to-play-full-price-favor-currency
If the purchases are purely cosmetic, and if they can make enough money from those purchases to keep up the servers, then yeah I like the idea and I think it'll be great for getting new players in and keeping it alive.
If you can pay for anything that gives you any edge in combat, then I don't like the move and it's going to be dominated by people willing to pay more.
It looks like champion skills will be the only thing non-cosmetic but if they're balanced well, then it's not an issue. And it looks like microtransactions aren't factoring into it either-- you just buy the champions pack or you don't-- so this seems to be a good fit.
> and if they can make enough money from those purchases to keep up the servers
They did that with Quake Zero or Quake something or other and it didn't seem to work out as well. I hope they can strike a great model here because, like Hearthstone, i'd love a free to play game I play often that has a large enough community to fund it.
> It looks like champion skills will be the only thing non-cosmetic but if they're balanced well, then it's not an issue.
So different Champs have different abilities? I guess I missed that. I figured it would be a sort of retelling of Quake 3 where everyone is the same.
They said in that article that the champ skills were different, but you could select any of them (which seems to be conflicting) and in another article I read earlier it said that they would be different but balanced.
Huh. Well having more than a cosmetic difference between Champs makes sense. That said, balancing them and only having access to one does seem odd BUT we'll see how it turns out. If it's not great we will still have Unreal Tournament which is shaping up to be great but moving a bit slower than i'd have thought.
And maybe the powers are only different in a cosmetic sense? I dunno, we don't have enough info yet, but there are plenty of ways they could do it right.
Also yeah, I had kinda forgotten there was a new UT coming. I need to pop in and see how it's progressing.
It's coming along really well. Feels very UT/UT3 ish.
Neat, that's basically all I wanted from it honestly! The user-created content is icing o n the cake. I haven't played it since around when it was first available to test and it felt close to complete at that time. I guess some things have changed!