Death of a Game: Quake Champions 

With detectives none the wiser as to the next mystery I thought I would drop a clue. It's one of the first and only times there has been an MMO with cars in it :)

The business model of "release unfinished barren game with cash shop and close the game if people don't instantly spend loads of money on an unfinished barren game cash shop" should be illegal.

Welcome to another episode of: Bethesda casually releasing a high budget game with no budget and wondering why it's not doing well

It was a huge mistake not to allow people to make mods and maps for it.

Quake and Unreal Tournament are both in such sad states. :/

Quake 1 was and is fully customizable, using free tools and notepad. There are new maps and new mods to these days 23 years later. Enough said.

the lead developer was right quake is a game that should keep people coming back because of gameplay updates shouldnt be that important. but when your game literally has no content at launch then it is inexcusable. Halo 3 launched with a full 9 mission campaign with cinematic cutscenes, 10 great maps, 12 different game modes, great online matchmaking that mixed the game modes, a map editor, a theater mode and community creation sharing. that was all available at launch. companies are so lazy nowadays. early access for multi million dollar companies needs to be banned.

21:38 I couldn't agree more with that idea. Early Access is NOT FOR mega-publishers. It never was, and never should have been.

"Yeeah, Quake is back" . . aaaand, its gone.

Blazkowicz and Doomguy are still waiting for Ranger to make a fucking epic comeback.

I honestly love quake champions, as it's the most fun I've had with a competitive shooter since CS. But God damn, they really dropped the ball on this game.

In 1999 id software: "One thing that will not make it into the game is a character class structure. The team toyed with the idea, but eventually found it to be unworkable in a deathmatch environment." Source: shacknews

If you plan to apply to a new crowd by taking an old game that an old crowd loves and the new group hardly ever heared of.. and then try making the old game "newer".. you wont apply to either group.

tbh I like QC but lack of players makes is hard to start because you're in games with hardcore people that will destroy you instantly.

Whelp, this gray-haired FPS player will pour one out for Quake tonight. R.I.P.

I started playing quake in 1996. I became part of the mod community, and was eventually a beta tester for Q3A. The whole point of quake to us back then was the mod and multiplayer. Quake wasn't automatically popular because of it's design. The game became popular when people realised how much more could be tweaked, and how easily it could replace doom and duke 3D at lan parties. If you care, read up on maps from authors like Eric Sambach with the MunY set of maps (pretty much the foundry for most modern death match map design). Mods too like Painkeep, Quake Rally, Malice, all pieces of history currently being forgotten about, but vastly important to Quake. When QC was first announced, I was excited thinking this stuff would make it's way back! boy I was wrong. I stopped playing champions late last year when they yet again reset all of our accounts to accommodate a new pricing model. The shell of Quake is still there, but the heart and soul have long since shrivelled up and died. God I miss the community I grew up with :(

The tragedy is that once in a while QC matches you with people of your skill and it becomes a song of gun and fire that no other shooter can match. Sadly it happenes less and less often now with a dwindling population.

If lootboxes can be called out as illegal, so should this releasing unfinished games business.

you should do the unreal tournament version from epic since they pretty much dropped the development of that game to focus on fortnite even though the game was amazing

"If we blow it with the pro players we won't attract any casual players" is actually backwards logic. It's actually the opposite. Pro players will toy and tinker with setting to make a casual game into a competitive one. Casual players will not do the opposite. If it's too sweaty they'll just leave. Obviously there has to be some competitive bones to the game, but generally speaking it's casual before it's competitive.

The last part of your conclusion was my main reason to stay away from Quake Champions. Lootboxes, XP Potions and stuff like that shouldn't be in a game like this. And an early access/games as a service model just blows. You suck the life out of it before it even really started. The notion that a competitive Arena Shooter would always fail when done the classic way is just wrong in my opinion. There just isn't a real contender out there that has the marketing budget behind it to sustain a campaign to make it appealing. It's not like Quake 3 wasn't fun for casual players. Watching Arena Shooter matches is certainly exciting.

Most bitter "Death of a Game" for me. Game never had a chance thanks to no Server Browser.

Quake Champions died because it was mismanaged from the start. I've played around 2k hours of this game, since 2017 hoping this game would get better. It never did. SyncError himself has said the game is fine where it's at because it's a niche. I compete in this game, I spent 2 years hoping that something would change, and yet people can still defend this game when the developers have spit in it's communities face multiple times. Again, mismanagement is what killed this game. SyncError, Sponge, Zero4, and Tim Willits all contributed to the downfall of this game.

Game is doing pretty well considering how unpopular arena shooters are today. It plays well, has enough players in eu and na and still get updates, not to mention awesome pro league. Also a lot more fun than other modern mp shooter games.

I feel for the Quake community, Bethesda killed my Favorite franchise(Fallout) as well so I know how it feels to see something you love lose its soul.

It just never had a proper release. It just kind of come out with no fanfare and that was it

My recommendation for Death of a Game would be Deepworld. It's projected to end on August 1st, and a video would be a good tribute to the game its fanbase loves so much.

best thing about Quake Champions is that it introduced me to Quake Live

Since the start of the pandemic, a group of us have started playing together weekly. The games we choose have to have low requirements and they have to be cheap. So for the 2020 version of a LAN party, Quake Champions fits the bill for us. I have ventured out into public play a few times and yeah. I got obliterated.

As a life long quake player who has been through the q3 ql qc era, Id like to add that the duel mode of q3 and ql was a core issue in qc. Duel was the heart piece of quake from a spectator perspective, it was what people wanted to see at tournaments. after the first qc tournaments it became quickly clear that QC duel has little to do with classic quake duel and that drove away the majority of quake spectators and as a result players.

When any company gives away a newish, paid game (before it was made free2play) that relies on people playing it to survive for free, you know the thing its already on a death march. They may turn it around but the ones that do are the exceptions.

As a character from a parody series of an anime that is fairly controversial for it's lack of quality story once said "You need to pick one and commit, because right now I'm not feeling either."

Considering that UT was abandoned during development, at least QC was treated better.

I only played it once, then looked away for a minute and now it's already dying goddammit!

I actually paid $30 for the Champions Pack of this thing. I deserve the entire clown outfit and more. On another topic, TotalBiscuit was completely right about one thing: most people who claim that they want arena shooters, ultimately just want to brag on the internet about their "dude so hardcore" internet e-cred. There's been tons of efforts in the last few years to revive arena shooters, every single one failed to even gain traction. Was QC bad? Yes, but there were certainly other entries, or even disregarding that, they could always go back to either Quake Live or Q3A, both of which they laud with praise. They end up not even playing those titles, bitching in the case of a new entry not being exactly like the afforementioned games, or if it makes one slight change, it's already some casual, "nuFPS pandering" game, and for as long as they continue to do that, arena shooters are still gonna be a thing of the past.

What Quake was: Moody dark nihilistic monster shooter. Quake Arena: Every other space marine shooting plasma. Seriously, just give me a dark Lovecraft shooter.

i just started to play 2 months ago and im having a blast with this game. even queue times are nice with 1-2 minutes.

I'd recommend moving the podcast to a secondary channel, having those uploads cluttering the schedule discourages people from turning on notifications. Not saying the podcast is bad, I literally have no idea. It could be your best content, but a podcast does not catch the eye the way this series does.

Do you take suggestions? I'd love to see Death of a Game on Loadout. Incredibly fun team based shooter with a huge focus on weapon customization. Its all time peak was almost thirty-thousand players. Now it's closer to thirty.

I remember he ads for Wolfenstein: The New Order and thinking,” Man, ID and Bethesda remaking ID’s classic.” Then they remade DOOM and me and my friends were psyched for it. Hell, I bought Doom before I even had my own Xbox One to play it on. I was excited to see them try and make a Quake remake. I guess Quake won’t be getting the ID and Bethesda treatment any time soon. Really disappointing.

Do unreal tournament next, that game was killed because they wanted the players/modders to make the game for them.

Just what I needed to watch during Quakecon week /cry.

If they just made a mode with no champions then it would be great but the character abilities just frustrate me

that they just could not stick to the classic gameplay formula amazes me

Quake Champions is objectively good. It plays very well, it looks awesome. The arena genre is simply not casual enough to attract a lot of players. Just check the feedback from new players, they just get destroyed and leave. The game needed an alternative default game mode with a slower pace and without the snowballing effect of powerups.

I started playing QC in June 2018. As an old guy coming from unreal 1 und ut99, i was very excited, that finally a company stood up and was willing to fix the lack of a modern arena shooter. At this time, the game felt great. the perfomance was good. I couldn't recognize any major problem, that would be a dealbreaker for playing this game. I liked the champions concept, because it gave me the motivation to learn and getting better with them. And it brought variety to the game. I then quited the game after 3 patches were released. With every patch the game-experience got worse. It went from very enjoyable to totally frustrating. And seeing, that the devs/company were paying more attention to add cosmetics and other stuff that can be monetized in some way, instead of fixing the major problems, made me come to the conclusion, that the game is on a wrong path and I don't want to support that anymore with my time and money.

FYI Rocket Jumping and Srafe Running where in the original Quake :)

quake 3 and unreal tournament were some of my best days as a kid. glad i got to grow up with those games

"more advanced movement such as strafejumps and rocketjumps" ... these were in quake 2 and quake 1 aswell

Arena shooters are like chess. The pieces are supposed to be equal at the start. One wins by improving their movement, aim and teamwork. Having characters with different abilities brings in 'metas' and just kills the game. And how the hell can you not have CTF and community maps from the start. I spent most of 2000-2002 playing Unreal Tournament competitively. Team CTF was just an adrenaline rush, and new maps/mods made casual play interesting. I haven't played a shooter since that was nearly as fun.

To be honest Quake was dead to me since Quake 2 when they completely ditched the "strange creatures in strange castles with both great campaign and great MP" concept in favor to a "generic borg-wannabe brown mush bases with a barebones or a complete lack thereof campaign and MP focus".

Carmack before he left id mentioned he wanted to do a Quake 5, in the vein of the original Quake with the single player and lovecraftian influence. I wish we got that game instead.

Times changed, when Quake dominated, it was alone in the market with Doom in the 90s. But HL/CS happened on PC and Halo on consoles. From that point competition just got bigger.

I bought the Champions Pack, never regretted it, I am still having fun with the game everytime I get back to it.

As someone who grew up with Quake 3, seeing it become a hero shooter killed it for me before it even launched. It's the same thing with these battleroyale games. Following a trend doesn't help in selling a game that is is an old time franchise to fans of those old franchise (whom are likely going to be your main playerbase at first). I agree with innovation, but you can innovate without following a trend and trying to capitalize off of someone else's idea while also bastardizing an old franchise. Quake going back to its roots is what this needed, at least at first. Doom did the same thing, and NOW that it has gained attention and love of fans for understand what made doom DOOM, they can innovate and have it be accepted with less hesitation from fans. Quake needed that. Making quake arena again, in my opinion, is what they needed to do, at least keeping it close the original formula. After they showed they understand what made Quake...well...QUAKE, THEN they can innovate in a more ways outside of that. All that I saw in Champions was a lack of understanding what made Quake what it really was.

Quake is like a fine wine. It's not designed for the masses.

Tbh, the devs should have released a Map Toolkit for Quake Champions and let the fans submit it for official Quake Mapmaking or custom games. And they should have created an entirely new game mode called Quake Classic where the Heroes were stripped off their unique abilities and the hardcore purists can have their true Quake gameplay.

The oddest thing about this game is that it could have been saved with a patch introducing classic mode. 5 of the most popular maps from Quake, Quake 2 and Quake 3, with no hero abilities. It would do extremely well but Bethesda simply dropped the game for it to be killed early, that way Bethesda has a point against ever making arena shooters again. They can always spin their incompetence into "the fans aren't there for this type of game". Bethesda refuses to acknowledge fans and the games that made the franchises they bought successful. It needs to be their dumb down version, that goes for Fallout, That goes for Rage, that goes for Wolfenstein and Doom. Doom "needed" a reboot so they made a doom version where it plays nothing like Doom, and for some reason people liked it even though if they played the original doom the same way they play Doom 2016, they would be stuck on the same level dying over and over. The New Colossus is another example of them driving a franchise into the ground because it must be "their version" of it, the previous game was only held back on ridiculousness to maintain some type of connection to the classic game. Everybody who played the original Fallout games known Fallout 3 was a dumbed down version of Fallout, and Fallout 4 was even worse. Quake Champions is just the newest example of how a company with zero reasons to have any pride (incompetent developers, incompetent writers, incompetent directors) is willing to sacrifice the fanbase of a franchise they didn't build to success to try to farm new fans from people who have literally no reason to play their game (since it is always a worse version of something else in the market). They sabotaged the first Rage (which was an Id project before the company was bought by Bethesda) because they deemed it too close to Fallout, so that is why we got a broken desert simulator where only character design looked finished and somewhat charming. Now Rage 2 is "wow, crazy-mad-max-like type of action" that nobody asked and that they couldn't deliver when it came to story because they never delivered it on that in 25 years. The fans had to fix their games, the fans had to fix their engine, the fans introduced features with mods that Bethesda later ripped off to add to their games. That company is morally bankrupt and it always was, too bad it took Fallout 76 and 12 Skyrim versions for people to realize they don't give a shit and think they are untouchable. I long for the day where this company is either bankrupt for real or loses so much money that ID can buy their way out and make their own games again, maybe even get Carmack back from that pointless VR adventure he is having.

Please make a Tribes video. So many years of memories. F

I actually just picked up playing quake - it’s a lot of fun. People are way too good at it though lol

Really great documantery my friend.I watched all.Thank you so much.

I loved Quake 2 (jailbreak mod) on the barryworlds servers. my old man opened the first online gaming centre in the uk in 1998 and Q2 was the game we mostly played then UT and Q3 following them CS :D

I'd like to see a DoaG on Heroes of the Storm, tbh

For 10 ~ 15 years its the same world champions dueling each other at LAN tournaments every year. Cooller, rapha, DaHang, killsen, etc. they don't have any competition because nobody even plays the game.

Imagine Quake Champions on the latest Id engine with awesome performance on mid range PC, yeah...

If they ever want to bring back Quake they need to remake or even remaster Quake 1’s singleplayer.

This game was the first multiplayer only shooter I played when I migrated from console to PC. I have had a lot of fun playing this game, getting used to the arena style combat that I hadn't played in shooter games before. However despite my fun, I have to agree that the game is dieing more and more each month. It's a shame, this game had the potential to be fantastic. Now it seems destined to the annals of history to join many other dead games that had potential. Thanks for the informative video. Keep up the great work.

Another aspect it’s dying is because it cannot attract and retain new players. Whenever I see a new player in a lobby I and also other players apologize because we are just playing but the newer players don’t understand the movement, map placement, weapon combos. I’m a huge quake fan but it’s sad to see QC be abandoned, I mean the only thing that is added to the game at this point is a new battle pass every THREE MONTHS. No new maps, last one was the ctf map

It's shocking how many times while listening to this that I went "that's very similar to what happened with DOA6..." In particular where the game took one step forward and two steps back, and how it didn't know what audience it was trying to appeal to

Great game buried by awful performance. I tolerated the same bugs and unstability update after update for 150 hours because the core gameplay was so fun and satisfying and getting better at the game felt great. Needed more maps too, even if they added in all of quake 3's maps unchanged and unaltered I would of jumped with glee. They should port Quake Arena Arcade to steam, that game was the tits that noone played, it combined the best parts of quake 3 and team arena and had a ton of singleplayer and multiplayer maps.

Quake 4 is awesome and I miss it. I want a new SP Quake game like Q4

I love the announcer, voice lines from the characters and the weapons sounds.

Quake champions has great fundamentals imo. It deserves a Chance.

Saying "we're outsourcing for practical reasons" is like saying "we're making a crappy cheap game here, because you'll eat it up anyway"

i fuckin loved this game but as soon as they added in tiers and stuff i knew it was gameover

i have to say i really love these videos. i dont know if u read the comments on some of these still but yea just wanted to say, ive watched 4 or 5 of these back to back and just loved it the whole time. very well made : )

Quake Champions failed because Tom Willits thought he was the secret sauce to Quake. He wasn't and under his leadership they created a poor engine and poor server/netcode architecture. It never would have happened under Carmac. They also made the mistake on relying on SyncError to code... He was an admin to Quake Live nothing more. I remember tuning into the community streams with Willits and the managers... Laughable how they kept making excuses for all the problems.

This was a bummer to me, because QC was supposed to work out after they shuttered the new Unreal Tournament game.

another great video, as a suggestion i would look into Tribes Ascend, you will likely have a blast, and a ton of content just going into the history of Tribes itself

I definitely feel like this game could have been something. Maybe not a smash hit but at least having a reasonable and stable player base to make it worthwhile. I had never played a Quake game before, I saw the first trailer and thought the concept was exciting, but then everything after that was confusing. The game sort of came out but didn't, it was perennially in early access. There was no marketing for it anywhere. When I finally played the game the menus were bad, the monetisation was all over the place and seemed actively hostile to anyone trying to engage with the game. The game didn't run as well as should do. Before I even got to the actual game everything around it was a such a turn off. The game itself was fine, fun even. It was obvious other players knew a lot more but you could get kills just by being accurate with any given weapon so it still felt skillful, just that there was a lot to learn in the application of that skill. But it wasn't so easy to get into playing, or even so easy a game to just log into and interact with as something like Overwatch, and that seemed prohibitive. If the game had had a decent UI, ran well, wasn't so bullshit and opaque with how all the microtransactions, loot boxes and that nonsense worked then I'd have played it more, and I imagine I'm not alone in that experience. I guess ultimately all I'm saying is the saddest part is that it seems like even the core game designed as it is with the flaws that entails and the ways in which it deviates from series tradition, even then it didn't have to do this badly. Quake Champions didn't *have* to be a failure. It just had those issues plus absolutely everything around it being wrong too. Edit: holy fuck I didn't even realise it was still EARLY fucking ACCESS. Wtf is wrong with Bethesda.

Happy to report there’s still a thriving community and has recently seen a boom of new players thanks to a particularly gifted shit posting voice actor. The state of FPS games now has no other shooter like Quake with Unreal being abandoned. It’s a phenomenal arena shooter, and I honestly hope it helps revive interest

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I’ve always preferred the single player Quake content. I even enjoyed Quake 4 more than Doom 3. A proper Doom 2016 style reboot with the lovecraftian aesthetic and atmosphere of the original Quake would be a dream come true for me.

As quake player since quake 2 and spent many hours in quake 3 arena game i was so hyped when quake champions announced played it for a half year and half year more on and off. The problems where 1. Performance issues 2. lack of ranked ladder for 1v1 3. progression reset FFS they have rested my progression while if playing this two times i know its cosmetic and stuff but it made you feel you wasting your time playing this game. 4. No content i felt stale for long time they added instagib too late they should have added more popular mods like RA and CTF. I didn't mind the abilities that much it felt like quake still but if they can take from this something is they tried a lot things i think porting quake to the new id engine and building it with pure quake arena style even if it is only on 1v1 and dont shay about what quake made it great game like they did on DOOM.

Game had so much potential and they messed it up. Sad in every way for quakers. I was mad at first, now i just pretend the game never existed. Makes it easier to deal with.

I just saw your videos about: Parangon, DirtyBomb and this one. Played all of them, good to know in detail what happend to them. Just subed to your channel, keep up the good work!

I can't believe this game is dead, I thought it hadn't come out yet

Hero shooter and Arena shooter just doesn't mix, cuz everybody should be on even ground.

Started playing QC recently, gonna be entering tournaments when I set up my PC in my new apartment

A Lot of these early access games seem to spend and waste there time on amazing looking trailers which may work on younger ppl but veteran gamers will be able to see the differences on there first viewing of gameplay!

Your videos are so interesting, man! I even enjoy watching the ones about games I'm not familiar with.

Just forget quake champions and make a Quake 5 with history..

If the game had mod/map support and a classic mode with competitive classic it would have been successful.

Meanwhile, Quake 3 Arena is still fun and has some servers running.

Fun fact: "Roberto Estropajo" Is a meme created from an Spanish bad traduction of SpongeBob meaning something like "Rag-Robert"

Yeah I tried it, immediately figured out it wasn't working out and went back to other games. I'll stick with Quake 1 thanks.

Last few times I tried to play at all, I just couldn't get into any games. Waiting for 5-10 minutes for nothing, i finally just had to uninstall. They just need to go back to the drawing board at this point.

Kudos for really laying it all out there. I just played QC and it crashed on me after my first match. It really doesn't feel like Quake after playing the remastered version. Now that game is on some sort of crack. It is high adrenaline and addicting.

Another good job. I love these long forum deep dives seen all that you've made. Keep it up

Speaking purely as a old school quake fan and devotee, I just want Id to make a new Quake game using their own technology. So far we've had third party's design using id tech, and third parties design using their own tech. None of this is what we want. I can't speak for the multiplayer people, but I just want a new Quake campaign, using modern technology, lovingly crafted by the ip creators themselves, and stop experimenting with outsourcing the series to other companies. Do that with Rage. Not Quake.

Great video clip about the game N.S! I enjoyed watching it. Nice to hear your thoughts about it and the things you dug up. Appreciate it, good job!