Quake Live Beta Ends, Optional Subscription Plans Added 100
An anonymous reader sends news that the beta tag has come off of id's Quake Live, and they've added two subscription plans to monetize the game. The announcement asserts early and often that the game's current "Standard" play options will remain free-to-play. The lower subscription tier gets extra maps, a new Freeze Tag game mode, and clan creation abilities, among other things, for $2 per month. The higher plan, which is twice as expensive, grants players those benefits plus the capability to create their own private servers.
All this (Score:5, Insightful)
All this for a game that you could find the bargain bin for 10 dollars...3 years ago.
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i cannot imagine who's gonna pay for this.
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What's the average user count of Q3A nowadays, vs. Quake Live?
$10 once may be cheaper than (an optional) $4 a month, but what's the point when the population dries up? I know that people are still playing Q3A, but is it actively being developed or promoted?
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
forcemodels to keel/green is standard practice perhaps moreso in quakelive.
Its not exactly cheating if 95% of the players do it, and the other 5% are constantly being told about it/to do it, partially because its high speed and anything that isn't bright green is easy to miss, and this is not a forgiving game especially at the high levels.
Don't know of any working fps based techniques, but this game is full of techniques that make it easy to learn, nigh on impossible to master, its like chess with railguns,
Re:All this (Score:5, Informative)
Don't forget, the $10 bargain bin game is less buggy.
I played this last week, what a disappointing, pointless clusterfuck.
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Free is cheaper than $10, download is better than CD, plus leaderboards and matchmaking are great additions.
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I was very impressed with the Linux version of the game. Installed and ran flawlessly in ubuntu 10.04 x86_64. Didn't even have to edit a config file :)
i will have to check this thing out just for this very reason
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With a pro membership you can even ask for your own game to be set up on their servers.
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Yeah, its n
Linux broken (Score:4, Informative)
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Monthly payments, payable annually (Score:5, Interesting)
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I read that as in "if you cancel after 3 months, we'll charge you $6 at New Years." Do you know how much costs billing monthly would incur? This way the company only deals with the charges once a year.
mmmyea (Score:1, Insightful)
Pretty sure I can do ALL of that with the copy I bought over a decade ago, and of course, I and many others did.
Awesome (Score:2, Interesting)
At $2/month, I will join just to support them.
Pay for freeze tag?! (Score:3, Informative)
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sounds like a cool gamemode, i'd like to try it out
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If you buy the pro mode of Quake live you get freezetag
I don't understand (Score:2, Interesting)
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Yup, players.
This, mainly.
Also it has its own built in social network, forums, matchmaking and scoreboards.
Add on top of this the ability to run it via a browser on pretty much any machine - well as long as it is running a supported OS/Processor.
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> Just without paying annually. Is there something Quake Live has that Q3A and OpenArena don't?
As has been pointed out, players. Also, OpenArena has only a few maps, and they look terrible. There's a new version every 18 months or so, as opposed the QuakeLive which has the feel of a current, living project, what with the updates which seem to occur every few weeks.
Play OpenArena (assuming it's not too dark, and you can find a server with players on), then play QuakeLive, and see if you notice the diffe
So silly. Just remake Quake 3 already! (Score:5, Informative)
1. No ability to mod or create/use new maps.
2. No ability to host your own servers or use unofficial servers.
3. Common free user mods now require a subscription.
4. The subscription is between 2 and 5 times what Quake 3 Arena costs, but for that price you only get 1 years' worth of gameplay instead of a lifetime's worth.
Quake 3 Arena is an awesome game that, in terms of sheer gameplay, still has no equal. If Id just re-made Quake 3 Arena with updated graphics, but the same gameplay, same customizability, same map-making and mod-ability, it would be a smash hit. The only reason people stopped playing it is because at some point it crossed the psychological boundary between "new" and "old." Tournaments stopped using it, and it faded into obscurity. But when no game has topped the visceral, breakneck pace, strategy and balance of the game, Id has a surefire hit on their hands just simply making the game look new and re-releasing it. Why they wasted all this time trying to monetize the old version is beyond me.
I'm fine with the free version, and I think the free version is a great idea. But when they start to charge for anything, it's incomprehensible why they're wasting their time trying to re-sell a dated game at a higher cost and lower value than the original.
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Quake 4 shares very little with Q3A physics and gameplay, it just has the "so called similar weapons" but it's a different game.
Quake Live is a modified Q3A but most of it is actually the same as Q3A, physics are tweaked but nearly the same, and so on
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1. As kangsterizer said, Q4 is not close to Q3 in terms of gameplay. Q4 was based on the Doom 3 engine, which was hardly optimized for competitive play. There were silly limitations on the number of allowable players, the gameplay was hamstrung in numerous ways, and everything was much much slower.
2. If you don't realize how strategic a high level Q3 match can be, I urge you to play against some of the active top players simply spamming rockets and "splashing around" corners. You will
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They did, it's called Quake 4. But I agree, this Quake Live think looks like a completely terrible thing that shouldn't even exist, but sadly it gets many new players or returning old players. I mean, pay 2 bucks per month for Freeze Tag, that I've been playing on th
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2 bucks for a game which works under Linux and has a guaranteed wealth of populated servers full of great players, excellent graphics and no (obvious) bugs? You don't even have to pay 2 bucks, if you know someone who's prepared to invite you onto a freezetag map.
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It's not just 2 bucks, it's two bucks each month, and that's the cheap subscription. If you played it for as long as Q3A has been available, you'd be out of 256 bucks, or $512 if you opted for the more expensive option.
Excellent graphics? Are you kidding? Quake live doesn't look very different from the regular Q3. All your other points aren't dependent on the player-milking subscription model either.
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ok well i've not got an axe to grind here. I use Linux, I play games sometimes, and I'm pretty lazy when it comes to looking for them. I heard about OpenArena, and someone there explained that it got quiet because everyone left to play QuakeLive and after checking it out I joined that exodus.
Where do I get a free, linux version of quake3arena? I can't see if on ID's site. Is this a spun-off free open source version? Are there loads of servers in/near the UK full of people all day every day? My machine
All your points are valid, but (Score:1)
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If Id just re-made Quake 3 Arena with updated graphics, but the same gameplay, same customizability, same map-making and mod-ability, 95% of the copies sold would be pirated, just like every PC game. Id probably wouldn't make a profit.
There, fixed that for you. Really, why does the average slashdotter think they know better than the people who do this for a living?
Re:So silly. Just remake Quake 3 already! (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree that a full-blown remake of Quake 3 would be a good commercial proposition. Remaking the game on fresh technology would be expensive; even with the current console generation (which defines the technical limits for most games, with a few rare exceptions like Crysis) edging up towards 5 years old, development costs remain far higher than they were when Quake 3 came out. The successful bits of the industry can absorb these costs because there are far more gamers than there were a decade ago. However, I think the appeal of a Quake 3 remake to most newer games is almost non-existent.
Even at the time, despite the strong support it gets from part of the fanbase, Quake 3 perhaps had less impact as a game (as opposed to its engine, which powered umpteen other games over the next few years) than had been expected. With its multiplayer-only focus, its emphasis on the "pro-gamer" market and its lack of new ideas, it really marked the point where id lost their leadership in the fps market. It's not really age that killed the game off from the tournament scene, but rather the fact that the audience shrank relatively quickly. If age had been the factor, then Counter-Strike (which ran on technology long-since obsolete by the time of Quake 3's launch) wouldn't have outlasted it for so long. In the era of Quake and Quake 2, if you played fpses online, you basically played one of those two games or one of their mods. Quake 3 was never more than one competitor among many.
Quake 4 achieved some reasonable sales success, but the fact that it vanished almost immediately from the mainstream online scene indicates that the singleplayer campaign was probably what most people bought it for. With the current online gaming scene dominated by Modern Warfare, Gears of War and Halo 3, it's pretty clear that tastes have moved away from the "bouncy deathmatch" model of the Quake series.
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Quake 4 achieved some reasonable sales success, but the fact that it vanished almost immediately from the mainstream online scene indicates that the singleplayer campaign was probably what most people bought it for. With the current online gaming scene dominated by Modern Warfare, Gears of War and Halo 3, it's pretty clear that tastes have moved away from the "bouncy deathmatch" model of the Quake series.
Maybe for consoles, but TF2 certainly is way up there as far as current online pc gaming scene. Guess you forgot about that market?
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Yep, TF2 on the PC has done pretty well. But this doesn't weaken my point. If anything, it enhances it. The relatively complicated class and objective based gameplay in TF2 is a long way from the pure-deathmatch of the Quake series.
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You do know that the original TF was written for Quake, right? IMO, it's still the best class and objective based gameplay ever written. TFC was merely a rewrite for the Half-Life engine. The only other mod that ever came close was Weapons Factory (written for the Q2 engine), and that borrowed a lot of concepts from TF.
I've said this before and I'll probably say something like it many times more: The sheer diversity and creativity demonstrated by the modding community for Quake and Q2 was mind boggling.
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I know the original TF was a mod based on the Quake engine. I also know that TF2 is a million miles removed, in gameplay terms, from the original Quake.
The starting point for this discussion was "a remake of Quake 3 would be a really good idea". I disagreed on the basis that the hardcore deathmatch playstyle of Quake 3 was already out of fashion by the time the game was released (thanks in part to more sophisticated experiences such as Team Fortress and Counter-Strike) and that a re-release of Quake 3 would
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Sounds to me like we're violently agreeing to a large extent, then. :) I think the major sticking point is still that your focus on the DM aspect of multi-player Quake and its successors as a significant factor in their success or failure. My admittedly fairly hazy memory is that MP QW didn't REALLY take off until after Threewave, the original online CTF mod, came out. Threewave showed what could be done in terms of developing true team based gameplay. Modders seized on the that path forward and never l
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You do know that the original TF was written for Quake, right? IMO, it's still the best class and objective based gameplay ever written. TFC was merely a rewrite for the Half-Life engine. The only other mod that ever came close was Weapons Factory (written for the Q2 engine), and that borrowed a lot of concepts from TF.
I never played the original TF (just seen it) but I think Q3F and later ETF were awesome. Much better than TF2 for gameplay and overall fun.
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Oh, I dunno -- Unreal Tournament was doing great until Epic dropped the ball in UT3. 2k3 and 2k4 were pretty popular until just a few years ago, and a lot of people were excited about Tribes: Vengeance util it became clear that the gameplay was getting dumbed down. I think there's a market for "bouncy deathmatch
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We just need a good commercial version of the Generations mod.
www.moddb.com/mods/generations-arena
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I don't really care about consoles--hand controllers will probably never compete with PCs in terms of raw playability compared to a mouse and keyboard. As to the expense, we're talking about massive savings us
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This is partly because of the proliferation of the game pad. Nothing demonstrates the weakness of a game pad like an acrobatic game of Quake.
The other part is that people like the realistic, punchy weapons you can find in the games you mentioned. Ever since Quake 1, iD has had difficulty making weapons with a satisfy
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I used to play Quake2 CTF obsessively (by my standards at least) in my early 20's; 3 hours a day for a couple of years. I loved being able to hide in wait at a strategic point in the map, and then grapple away just as I heard an intruder running towards me, and railing him half way through the grapple fall. If you were proficient at grapple, you basically owned the game. I had a custom binding script to map grapple to right mouse, and it was so easy to use! If you didn't master the key mappings, you cou
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ioquake3 - ioquake3.org
No what's funny: in many ways ioq3 engine is better than Quake Live engine (basic stuff like surround sound is actually working)
All it needs are updated graphics and a better server browser. Unfortunately the new QL graphics are not "licensable" so you're stuck with Q3A graphics if you paid the game, or stuff like Open Arena (it's ugly and does not represent Q3 game play imo)
Another alternative in the batch of mostly open source quake-like stuff is warsow, which has pretty fine graphi
Wouldn't a per-item model be better? (Score:2)
While I understand a consistent revenue stream makes life easier for the devs, is that really a good thing? A subscription model for maps and mods means that once the subscription is up, you either buy the game again (what these prices equate to) or give up access to the media you've been using for the past year. That could be a powerful incentive for some users to re-subscribe, whether the devs have been releasing new maps and mods or not. My pessimistic/paranoid side says they'll build up a semi-decent ga
Yeah... (Score:2)
I've played around with Quake Live now and then.
Its crazy buggy and the java in it slows my computer to a crawl. I have a fairly modern machine, and Quake 3 was making it bog down. Seriously?
Not only that, but I wanted to play with a friend of mine who lives about 100 miles away. Neither of us could figure out how to start a game that was just private for the two of us.
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I've played around with Quake Live now and then.
Its crazy buggy and the java in it slows my computer to a crawl. I have a fairly modern machine, and Quake 3 was making it bog down. Seriously?
Not only that, but I wanted to play with a friend of mine who lives about 100 miles away. Neither of us could figure out how to start a game that was just private for the two of us.
I don't know what you're doing that makes it unstable. The only time I've had a problem with it crashing was in its first week when I tried to exec my Q3A config (duh).
As for your second point, in the beta there was no way to run private servers. This was common knowledge to anyone with 5 minutes and a web browser and id announced at QuakeCon 2009 that private servers would be a feature of the subscription service when it arrived.
On another note, there's a whole lot of whining from people who are objectin
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you can't make a game that's private unless you pay.
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"twice as expensive" (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks for doing the mental legwork, but if people just used _specific numbers and units_ instead of three SUV trunks to the gallon of football fields, I would feel less like smacking someone.
Rant over.
FRAUD (Score:1)
That would be $24. It costs 1.99 monthly only if you already subscribe, which means you paid $24.
How do these dickheads get away with this " $1.99 per month, billed annually," BS?.
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That would be $24. It costs 1.99 monthly only if you already subscribe, which means you paid $24.
How do these dickheads get away with this " $1.99 per month, billed annually," BS?.
Please explain how it is fraud when they are telling you right there in the text that you copied that they bill annually.
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But seriously, it's probable that they've taken this approach to avoid monthly transaction costs. They could add up to a sizable chunk of change. (citation needed)
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How would you like all the services you deal with billed annually, but then misrepresented as a monthly cost? It's NOT a monthly cost unless you have the option to pay monthly. The fact that you guys don't understand that this is a marketing gimmick is amazing. Just cause it's in the fine print, doesn't mean it's not a questionable practice. They know that no one will pay $24 for this 10 (?) year old piece of shit, so they advertise a monthly rate but then surprise them with an annual rate. They're sleazeba
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How would you like all the services you deal with billed annually, but then misrepresented as a monthly cost?
I wouldn't.
It's NOT a monthly cost unless you have the option to pay monthly.
That's debatable.
The fact that you guys don't understand that this is a marketing gimmick is amazing.
What makes you think I don't know it's a marketing gimmick?
Just cause it's in the fine print, doesn't mean it's not a questionable practice.
That was a very stupid thing to say culturally given that the assumption is that if it's in fine print it probably is questionable practice. If they intend to provide you exemplary service they don't need so many disclaimers.
They know that no one will pay $24 for this 10 (?) year old piece of shit, so they advertise a monthly rate but then surprise them with an annual rate.
Oh, so surprising... you can click submit or not, and pay or not. The dollar amount is presented before you commit to pay. That means it might be sleazy and misleading, but it is not fraud. This is no
how is quake live better again? (Score:2, Insightful)
1. no unsanctioned user content
2. no 3rd party independent servers.
3. it's a stupid browser dll. why? just have the javascript call quake3.exe with the params...
4. the stock q3 maps were not much to rave about. only a few were serviceable during q3's lifetime (q3dm6,q3dm7,q3dm13, q3dm16, and everyone lived q3dm17 for some reason). the rest were rarely if ever played. the meat and potatoes were the maps that came with the various large mod projects that came later.
5. the rest of the 'premium' content is just
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1. no unsanctioned user content 2. no 3rd party independent servers. 3. it's a stupid browser dll. why? just have the javascript call quake3.exe with the params...
It's a game delivered as a service. These restrictions are necessary to maintain a level of quality and consistency for all. This seems obvious to me and shouldn't really need to be pointed out.
4. the stock q3 maps were not much to rave about. only a few were serviceable during q3's lifetime (q3dm6,q3dm7,q3dm13, q3dm16, and everyone lived q3dm17 for some reason). the rest were rarely if ever played. the meat and potatoes were the maps that came with the various large mod projects that came later.
Agreed, there's no excuse for not developing many more new maps, or running a competition for the community to design them. They should be free for all to access, of course.
5. the rest of the 'premium' content is just the team arena maps. big deal. paying for map packs = lame bullshit.
Basically, id said that advertising alone cannot support the project, which was their original plan. It's a shame, but I expect the subscriptions
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It's a game delivered as a service. These restrictions are necessary to maintain a level of quality and consistency for all. This seems obvious to me and shouldn't really need to be pointed out.
this stuff-as-service meme wasn't needed before.. Quake 3 has/had quite a long shelf life without the vendor exercising obsessive compulsive control over the product. id made money on the sale of the game, and the community made/kept it viable.
Basically, id said that advertising alone cannot support the project, which was their original plan. It's a shame, but I expect the subscriptions will be needed to cover the bulk of running and development costs.
I don't, I'm sorry. Quake 3 was $50 when it was released. There were plenty of servers to play on, especially once the more popular mods got going. squelching this system and replacing it with a locked down experience in order to squeeze more money out of it only hur
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I still love Quake though, and I'm glad to see theyre keeping it alive and making it available and accessable to todays youth.
Hopefully this approach will work out for them (It seems reasonable and sounds like it will succeed)
Assuming it does succeed, it will hopefully open the way for future improvement and enhancement.
Perhaps in 5 years we'll have more games like this, where a new game comes out, with cutting edge features, that everyone can play for
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Sure, I get that you'd prefer id sell you a game, give it over to the community
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>> censored language chat in game
> Come on, do these things honestly bother you that much?
Also, wrong. There's no censorship in game.
No Voice Chat, No Community (Score:4, Interesting)
I am among those with the "Waiting In Line" achievement (or whatever it was called) and was playing from the early days on. IMO it lacks in some pretty basic things:
1) The matching system doesn't work for casual players (like myself)
I'm around for long enough to have played Wolf 3D when it came out, so I know rocket jumping, bunny hopping and so on. Yet I'm thrown into games with "matched" difficulty where I don't stand the lightest chance. I don't think I've ever completed a "matched" match ranking higher than last or second-to-last. This persists; no matter how many times I end up being last, my skill assessment isn't changed. Ever.
Yeah, I could spend weeks practicing, but if they announce they know my skill, they better know it. But they don't. You can guess how much 'fun' it is to play that way.
2) No voice chat
This one is a deal breaker really. At 35, I find Quake Live to be at the limit of what I can take reaction-wise, and typing stuff to communicate is simply out of the question. I'm a fast typist, but you're thrown back into the game in moments and I won't stand around and get my ass handed to me even to type "lol nice shot" or something.
OTOH, when I play the casual game of Counter-Strike: Source, no matter on which public server I play, no matter if I know the people playing there, there's voice chatting going on, people having a good time, commenting on the game, talking about whatsoever. It feels like being with other people, not like sitting around alone shooting bots. It's a bit like a night at the pub with the guys, only we're also playing a game.
Gaming is a social thing (at least for me), and QL just doesn't support that.
3) Stupid account management
So I registered waaaaay back when all you needed to login was a nickname and a password. I don't play regularly (because it just isn't fun) but check back every few weeks/months to see whether something changed for the better. When I showed QL to a friend who might like it better, I noticed that logging in now needs an email address and a PW. So I fired up my FF (which was still logged in because it still held the cookie) and wanted to add an email address to my profile so that I could login from another computer or when my cookie expired.
Guess what? There was no way of adding an email address to the profile. Now guess again. Yes, the cookie is expired by now and no, I cannot login any more.
I don't feel like starting everything from scratch again, so I simply abandoned QL. After all, CS:S might be old hat, but it's fun to just drop in, play some games, joke around with the guys, show and see some funny and/or awesome moves - all in a friendly atmosphere. The same goes for DoD:S, TF2, you name it.
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The "3) Stupid account management" problems maybe come from that silly 'beta' status.
No, they are produced by the complete inability to code a web front end to a database. I would have entered and even validated an email address, there simply was no fscking way of doing so. There obviously is that field in the database, but it can supposedly only be accessed during signup.
They are also caused by changing the account identifier after the fact, which is an absolute no-no. But hey, it's free, so I can decide to play or not, and I won't play any more. I'm too old and slow for Quake anyway. ;)