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Quake Live In-Game Footage from QuakeCon

@ 2008/08/12

A two match set of games between ZeRo4 and rapha. Commentary provided by Carmac, Rod "Slasher" Breslau, and Brian "destrukt" Flander.

Comment from jmke @ 2008/08/12

From Digg.com comments field:

Quote:

I'm one of the commentators on this video and I'd like to point out a few things about the video and the game in general.

For the video, simple items are turned on for all ammo, health and weapons, which is why you see square icons instead of the actual models. Most professional players use simple items on because they don't care about such nuances, and I forgot to turn them off to make it look prettier, so my bad. We could have maxed the settings also which would have made it look a bit nicer. Those of you who think the graphics 'look like Nintendo 64' or focus on it at all are probably the same who would say the same thing about Counter-Strike 1.6 and StarCraft, therefore missing the point entirely.

The game (www.QuakeLive.com) is coming along quite nicely and has greatly exceeded my expectations. This will not just be Quake 3 for free, but will have an entire development team behind it. The second map shown in the video is a new duel map created specifically for Quake Live, which took months to create from scratch. The graphics and lighting have all been improved from the original, and several features from mods like CPMA have been added including the addition of brightskins on players. Not only has the look of the game changed, but the gameplay itself has been (and continues) to be heavily modified. The railgun no longer does 100 damage and now does 80, and the lightning gun's damage has been decreased slightly. Rockets now have a larger splash damage and may actually travel faster than before (not sure about this). Precision mice and other equipment, along with a highly increased skill curve over the past decade, have made hitscan guns (those that hit you instantly) too overpowered. Id software have taken these things into account and are changing the gameplay to fit the current needs of the gamers. Personally I've always felt rockets should dictate Quake's gameplay to begin with, so I can't really complain.

Later in the day after Carmack gave his keynote speech, he came over to the tournament area to watch a couple of the games. No one seemed to notice so I went over to have a chat with him, and boy was I impressed. He's definitely a no-***** kinda guy that can take some heat, dish it back out, and also listen to the concerns of everyday gamers. Besides listening to my thoughts (and actually agreeing with me at times) on Raven's inept failure with Quake 4 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars' par performance in general, he gives a very positive look on Quake Live. He says that matchmaking should be implemented soon, which will have advanced algorithms on matching up players with each other so that newbies don't end up joining a server with players who have been going at it for 9 years and lose 80 to -2. Modes like CTF, TDM, Clan Arena and Instagib will have priority focus instead of creating dozens of modes that no one will play. There will be more stats and numbers then ever before. Carmack joked and said that they have enough info to be able to find out 'how many times you died with the flag within a 20 ft in-game radius of the quad'. Wins/losses, frags/deaths, accuracies, captures, defense career stats will be amazing, on top of all the new stat categories we could come up with. Batting averages and RBI stats come to Quake.

I will have a much more extended interview with one of id software's top men, Marty Stratton, regarding several of the issues I noted and many more that I haven't. As someone who's been part of the Quake community for a long time and seeing the community develop all the mods for the past decade, I think id finally have a good grasp of what they need to do to succeed and what they need not to do to piss everyone off - see Raven Software.

Here's footage of the other games from the tournament. The finals video between the 17-year old Belarussian Cypher and the American ZeRo4 -is- online, but we captured it without brightskins and is being recaptured/reuploaded and will be done by today. The CTF upper bracket finals (three overtime games!!) and grand finals are also being done by today.

1v1 - ZeRo4 vs Chance: http://www.quakeunity.com/file=2741
1v1 - ZeRo4 vs griffin: http://www.quakeunity.com/file=2751
1v1 - Rapha vs Cypher map 2: http://www.quakeunity.com/file=2738
CTF - innitforthe$ vs rage: map 1: http://www.quakeunity.com/file=2728 map 2: http://www.quakeunity.com/file=2730 map 3: http://www.quakeunity.com/file=2732

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