Quake Live Created 15 years ago2009-04-02 00:21:01 UTC by satchmo

Has anyone tried it?

Just seems like a laggy rehash of Quake 3 to me, not worth playing. If you want a TRUE Quake experience, QuakeWorld (aka better version of Quake 1) is still the way to go. There's several free clients for it (you still need pak1 but it's cheap to buy on Steam, and some improperly configured servers will let you download all of the official maps anyway negating the need for pak1).

If you like Quake 3, you're better off just sticking with the real thing + CPMA. Vanilla Quake 3 is pretty mediocre, and a laggy version of it with no support for community modifications is just a waste of time.

I have tried it, and it was a waste of time.
You have to download and install a browser plugin to play it. If you have to download and install it why didn't they just make it a non-browser game?
It's like Quake 3 with more lag and IIR a bit uglier.

Bah, ive got Quake 3. Id rather play that than some buggy interface with some flash matchmaking abilities. Thats all it is. I think they tried to do this once with Unreal but it crashed and burned some time ago...

I know a couple people from school who play it.
The part that made me interested: Stat logging.
Tells your k/d ratio, accuracy. so on so forth.

There's a QuakeWorld stats site running too (it uses scoreboard info, so there's no accuracy stats, but there's plenty of feasible ways to implement that). It's not exactly hard to implement stats, MVDSV/KTX (the most common QuakeWorld server/side modification combination) has had limited statistics support for ages, and supports detailed XML statistics as of recently, though you'd need to waste alot of bandwidth and CPU time downloading + parsing every single log.

I personally see nothing special about Quake Live at all. I personally believe they should've based it on Quake as opposed to Quake 3, but I guess Quake 3 is a little more idiot-friendly with the railgun, overpowered shotgun, lack of aircontrol and generally slow gameplay in comparison to QW and they're trying to get mass appeal here I guess. That, and QW would just suck with the amount of lag Quake Live exhibits. Not that I dislike Quake 3 at all, it's a good game, but I much prefer it's grandfather.

The lack of modability also annoys me greatly. Quake 3 had many great mods that the new generation of scrubs whose first Quake experience is Quake Live are probably never going to experience unless they go and buy a copy of the REAL Quake 3. The Quake series has always supported modifications, since the days of QuakeC being released to the public, and id have history of making their engines GPL'd after being out for a few years. This whole closed system just feels like a bit of a slap in the face.

Not to mention that there isn't even a GNU/Linux port. If they can port it to OS X, unless they've made full use of Apple's proprietary features to the point they'd need to rewrite a HUGE amount of code, they can damn well port it to other *nix-alike systems. There's easily as many Linux gamers as Mac gamers.

I guess this Quake Live junk is just Quake wrapped up for a new generation of stupid gamers. The real Quake fans will probably stick to their beloved QuakeWorld/Quake 3+CPMA/OSP.