Quake Champions impressions

2018-09-26

There was a good deal on Steam, Quake Champions was free if you install and run it at least one time. Being a Quake III Arena fan myself I decided to give this new version of Quake a try.

Game selection mode screen.

So what are my first impressions? They are as follows:

  1. There is no possibility to make the game look like the old Quake 3, where you could see your enemies better.
  2. At first getting blasted by Ranger's Orb was really annoying, well it still is now too.
  3. The duel mode is different, in the early days you selected a map and went out for frags until the fraglimit or the timelimit hit. Now you select a map and three champions, the winner is the one who defeats all three of them. This can take up to five rounds.
  4. A few maps are new, some of them are remakes from the Quake 3 Arena (DM6, Ztn3Tourney1, DM17).
  5. The game selection is different too. In the early days you were presented with a list and could join any game you wanted. Now you select a game mode (1v1, TDM etc.) and wait for the game to appear. Sometimes you have to wait more than 2 minutes.
  6. There is a new weapon called "Tri-bolt", Plasma rifle was replaced with the "Nailgun".
  7. According to the selected champion the hitbox is different too. That means that it's a bit harder to hit smaller champions..
  8. Movement speed, max armor and health capacity also differs per champions. Most of the champion movement is like in vanilla q3 and Anarki movement is like in CPMA.
  9. A lot of stuff is added that is really not necessary. I'm talking about various skins, weapon/armor shaders and so on.
  10. Currently there is no CTF game mode.
  11. A good thing is the matching system. When selecting 1V1 or 2V2 modes you are evaluated and enemies are picked up that match your skill.
  12. Sometimes it's really hard to hear where the opponent is. In Q3 you could easily hear the footsteps of the enemy.

So in short it is fun to go frag somebody. Though can't say that my rail ability is the same anymore. The Rocket launcher is also faster in this game. Currently the game is not final, still being developed. Sometimes there are updates which fix some bugs or introduce new features.

And here is a comparison how Quake Champions looks and what you could make from Quake 3 Arena.