Quake Live - First Impression

Introduction

The title of this article is Quake Live, let's start with a little background. ID Software, which stands behind the project Quake Live, is a video game development company. It was founded in the prehistoric computer age in 1991. ID Soft firstly shocked the world with the game Doom in 1993. Doom is the younger brother of Wolfenstein 3D with a lot of improvements on graphics, gameplay and effects. There still exists a no small community around Doom nowadays.

Moving on, ID Soft released the first Quake in 1996. Thanks to the huge players' community ID Soft came out with Quake 2 in 1997 and two years later with Quake 3 Arena.

Quake Live: Capture the Flag:


Quake Live: You have to hit the F3 button to start the match:

I suppose you all know the Q3A, it's a legendary game. Quake's main innovation is the capability to play a deathmatch (competitive gameplay between living opponents instead of against computer-run characters) over the Internet.

Let's get back to Quake Live. What is it and why do I write about it now? The answer is simple. ID Software again shows its power and introduces a browser-plugin based video game. In fact it's the old Quake 3 Arena running in your web broswer with loads of new features. It's based on the same engine as Doom3.

Since late 2008 there was a invitation-only closed beta. On February 24 2009, the game progressed from closed beta to open beta. Within the first 6 hours after launch over 110,000 player accounts were created.

Prepare to fight

You need to register to start playing. After that you receive an email with a link to continue (standard procedure). The browser-plugin starts the installation, which takes about 10 minutes. After the installation you are invited to the Quake Live by a female bot named Crash. She shows you the basic tricks. She speaks fluent and intelligible. After the speech you have to play a duel with her. It's because of the skill of players. You are automatically divided into a skill group after the match. This kinda guarantees you to have a good game with other players.
I was really surprised by the graphics. Everything is perefectly same as in the Quake 3 Arena. I had a feeling that the graphics is even better. It's a feast for your eyes.

Quake Live: Free for All:


Quake Live: The Quad Damage Bonus:


The are 6 game modes in Quake Live.

• Duel (1on1) - Player versus player (1-on-1) combat. Whoever gets the most frags before the time is up wins.
• Free for All (FFA) - Players engage in a match, where everyone fights for themselves. Whoever hits the frag limit ends the game, and this person wins. The fraglimit is mostly 50. When the time limit expires, the match will also end. All weapons are avalible in this mode (it's the difference between FFA and Instagib).

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• Team Deathmatch (TDM) - Same rules as 'Free for All' but in this mode, two teams fight each other.
• Capture the Flag (CTF) - Each team has a base, holding a flag. To earn points and win the game, a team has to take the opposite flag, and return them to their own.
• Clan Arena - Teambased gameplay, everyone starts fully equipped with full armor and weapons. When fragged, the player must wait for the next round to begin. Players can rocket jump with no health penalty.
• Instagib - This is my favourite mode. It's a FFA in fact where players start with only a Railgun, which always delivers one-hit kills. Instagib servers are unranked.

Conclusion

I really like the idea and I cross my fingers and hope ID Software will bring the project to the end. At this time Quake Live only runs on Windows XP/Vista in web browsers Firefox and IE 7/8. There are speculations of a portability to Linux and Mac, I'm looking forward to it.

You can check the Quake Live twitter to be in the picture. Finally you can also add me as a friend and challenge me than ;) My nickname is bulb.