Image credit: id Software
Following (somewhat) in the footsteps of Quake Live before it, id announced at PAX East that Quake Champions will be a free-to-play game – with caveats.
In a chat with Polygon, id’s Tim Willits revealed that the Ranger champion will be free to all players. If you want anyone else, Quake Champions will have an option to “buy the Champion Pack”. ” There are a number of Quake players that just want to play their Quake, right? And they are familiar with the business model of our previous games, and they are totally fine,” Willits explained.
Alternatively, players will be able to spend in-game currency (called favour) that lets them rent other Champions for a period of time. You won’t be limited in what brackets or maps you can play, though, whether you paid for your in-game champions or not.
You can read the rest of the interview over at Polygon. A closed beta for Quake Champions will kick off later this year.
Comments
9 responses to “Quake Champions Will Be Free-To-Play With A Paid Option”
Awww man, this seems pretty Quake Wars 2.0. These guys have lost the plot. Nobody wanted a Quake hero shooter, they wanted a follow up to Quake Arena.
I just want vanilla Quake DM with no BS. Can’t they just make this Champions shit a different play mode and let us have our fun??
Will sell salt for sexy DM times.
In vanilla Quake DM the MP models differed by colour and little else, so if you’re all playing as Ranger I guess you get what you asked for!
They’d be pretty silly not to have a pure deathmatch mode as one of the game options. That doesn’t mean they won’t be pretty silly, but I’d be at least mildly surprised if it along with some of the other oldschool modes weren’t playable in some capacity.
There’s an old-school part of me that hates the hell out of this idea, but realistically it’ll probably be fine.
When you think about it they’re essentially backing themselves that the game will get a big enough player base that hangs around long enough that it’ll outweigh or equal the money they would make from a $50-90 initial fee, that’s fairly ballsy when you consider the fact that Quake has a pretty solid following of people who would happily pay up front. Better to do it this way than sell it at full retail for a few months in parallel to game-unbalancing microtransactions, have the playerbase dwindle and THEN go F2P and piss everyone off.
The developers know full well that if it’s in any way unbalanced then it won’t be Quake and it’ll flop HARD, they’re still going to have to ensure that the game doesn’t suck for people who are just trying it out.
I still really hate the idea of classes (however minor the differences) and I hate the idea of it being more team based (unless its straight DM)…. but the payment method thing doesn’t worry me.
Anyone remember Battlefield: Heroes which did pretty much this? No? Yeah it was a terrible idea then, and it’s a terrible idea now.
If you guys are sick of this, a Quake 3 Arena clone released last week called Reflex Arena. Its made by an Australian developer and is on sale at the moment.
There’s also UT4 which is free to play, at least whilst it’s being developed but it’s perfectly playable and great fun.
This comment from totalbiscuit on QC is appropriate after reading these comments:
https://imgur.com/a/WF6LJ#ScxZEE7
First the classes now this, doesn’t bode well.