Quake Champions Closed Beta Preview
Quake is back! After a seven year hiatus, Quake Champions takes everything you know from the legendary franchise and moves it forward. With the likes of Overwatch and Halo’s recent focus on arena combat showing companies that not every shooter needs to feel like Call of Duty, it’s incredibly refreshing to get a new Quake game that still feels like Quake. We got a chance to jump into the closed beta which comes packed with three modes and a lot of shooter goodness!
The first thing I noticed was the sheer amount of options plastered all over the menu. I remember Quake when it was quite barebones, so to see customization options, in-depth match stats, and player profiles made me appreciate how far the medium has come since Quake’s heyday. Players are able to swap head, torso, and leg gear using either real-world money, Shards acquired from dismantled pieces, or in-game Favor which can be earned through play. Now while the options are incredibly limited, with each of the game’s 9 Champions only sporting two or three options, the actual gear is incredibly varied and the designs look great.
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“Quake Champions gets the important things right, and there’s no better feeling than tactically out maneuvering an enemy before blasting their carcass away with a shotgun.”
After the advent of Overwatch, Quake’s list of 9 Champions aren’t as likeable as they could be. Whereas I usually wouldn’t mind, Overwatch’s blending of a multiplayer game with likeable characters and a good bit of story has raised the bar. The character biographies present in the Quake beta alongside the mysterious map locations are just screaming out for a little more character and some type of story content that we will hopefully get in the future.
Like with all great arena games, Quake Champions brilliantly places the best weapons and abilities in power positions across the map. Now while this type of design has been around for ages, it falls firmly under the adage of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. Naturally then, because of this focus on team play and map control, Quake’s quintessential mode – and the one that includes the most fun and competitive frustration – is unsurprisingly Team Deathmatch. But the closed beta does come with your everyday free-for-all mode that pack eight Champions into a fight for the fittest as well as the all new Duel mode. Introduced as one of the four modes besides TDM and FFA, Duel mode pits two players against each other in rounds of three, but there’s a twist. Each player takes a turn drafting three Champions that act as three lives in each round. Eliminate your opponent’s roster, and you win that round. Now while it seems like this would provide a uniquely fun experience, I found most games to just drag and not provide any meaningful sense of competition.
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“With the likes of Overwatch and Halo’s recent focus on arena combat showing companies that not every shooter needs to feel like Call of Duty, it’s incredibly refreshing to get a new Quake game that still feels like Quake.”
But while team deathmatch stands as the premiere mode and Duel provides a twist on the Quake formula, it’s the FFA mode that really shows off the breadth and diversity of Champion abilities and tactics. Because you’re thrown into condensed combat areas, different Champions must change their tactics depending on who they are fighting, creating an interesting meta-game that sees smaller champions picking off the health of larger champions fighting up-close. It was almost like studying the behavior of different species of animals as I took part in some kind of science experiment. Anarki, Nyx, and the other quick and weak Champions would routinely go for long range weapons while the likes of Scalebearer and Sorlag would Hulk-smash their way into the eye of the storm. And the inclusion of the much contested Quad super ability would almost always be a fight between weaker Champions that managed to sprint away from their bigger counterparts and planned to use the ability to become powerful while still maintaining their speed.
At one point, an opposing player fired towards my direction with a low-damage but high fire-rate Lightning Gun while using the heavy Sorlag. Now you might be thinking, why doesn’t the bigger Champion just rush me for an easy kill? It took me a second to realize that they knew I had chosen the weak Anarki and decided to simply fire the weapon while moving backwards down a straight corridor, knowing full well I had much less health than them and they would win the battle ten times of out ten. It’s moments like that which truly shows the breadth of strategy and ingenious design by the developers at id Software while also balancing the Champions so that no firefight feels one-sided and cheap. If you are ever stuck wondering which Champion is right for you, playing a couple matches of FFA will uncover the many tactics and strategies employed by other players when using the respective Champions.
Quake Champions gets the important things right, and there’s no better feeling than tactically out maneuvering an enemy before blasting their carcass away with a shotgun. It’s newly introduced Duel mode isn’t as unique as I’d hoped, and the developers would do well to extend the mode into a team game that may solve its issues. And while the customization items look great, there just aren’t that many. But what is there can be built upon and the most important thing is that the actual combat and Deathmatch modes are just perfect and have me itching for the final release.
*** PC code provided by the publisher ***
