http://i.imgur.com/5H5O8C4.jpg



144 hours and 6 minutes of play time from 1 to 100.

Upfront, I really like this game. Like I really have a lot of interest in the game, and i want it to be extremely successful and play it for years to come.



I have never played a Quake game before Quake Champions so I knew nothing about how to play Quake aside from videos from Rocket Jump Ninja.

The only experience I have with an Arena FPS before this is UT2003 more than a decade ago.

So this all is coming from someone who was essentially new to Arena FPS, came from a different genre of games for the most part(MMORPG and MOBA), to learn an entirely new genre of game and their only reference was previous FPS games were Counterstrike, Overwatch, Battlefield, Titanfall, CoD Black Ops3. So not new to FPS, but played many FPS as 2ndary to my MMO/MOBA main game experiences

The Good





Champion Balance: No Champion feels overbearingly broken or an absolute must pick, except Anarki. But even then he isn't so bad as to feel like a serious problem. His hitbox leaning is irritating and hitting him is a chore compared to any other champion, which should be dealt with. On the other side Slash feels underpowered but not so bad that she's unplayable. As it stands right now, Champion balance is actually really good. It feels like you can play anybody and do well with them. Which is something you certainly cant say about other hero based games, like OW and Paladins and LoL.

For being new to this Champion thing, Id/Bethesda has a pretty good starting point for their champion balance.

That being said, as some advice to idSoftware. Do not be afraid to deviate from your 25 point increments to fine tune.

There is nothing wrong with giving a character 65 max armor instead of 50 max to fine tune their balance in the meta.

Ultrawide Support: After being screwed out of 21:9 with Overwatch and Paladins, it's absolutely freakin awesome to have a competitive shooter that has real 21:9 support in it.

You really have no idea how awesome this feels to have actual 21:9 in competitive FPS gameplay available in something other than CSGO.

Ultrawide support is fantastic. It's not perfect but who cares, it works the way it should

You guys absolutely awesome, and you've given me something to play and share with everyone because of it.

I love bragging to people about your awesome addition of ultrawide support, and how you guys are developers that listened.

2 Thumbs up, you rock.

The Movement: The speed of movement and the precision of control in the game is beautiful. I used to think a game needed a sprint mechanic to be interesting otherwise it just felt old and lacking.

But Quake Champion's movement system was a revelation.

This is more fun and interesting than your military shooter with sprint mechanics. It puts movement speed in the skill of the player. And that is awesome. It feels wicked fast, it feels like it takes effort and it keeps you entertained while you're not fighting.

The most brillaint thing really was the idea to include different movement systems within the same game. Honestly that's brilliant. CPMA, Quake 3, Quake 4 Crouch Slide, UT doubletap dodge, Walljumps, DOOM will have double jump, honestly, this is freakin cool and Brilliant.

You cater to a huge range of skill and styles of players without compromise. That is bloody awesome.

Slash is just fun to watch and play. Crouch sliding backwards is so satisfying. Crouch sliding in for kills is so epic, Nyx walljumps look and feel awesome. Anaraki's speed is satisfying. Rocket lizard Sorlag is so funny.

The Characters: I love the characters in this game. The cast so far is awesome to play. Nyx is A badass, Sorlag is vile yet fun, Slash is so fun to listen too, Scalebearer feels like that big friend who'd break someone's face for you anyday of the week.

My favorite characters are Nyx Sorlag and Galena. Galena reminds me of the Sisters of Battle from Warhammer 40K. Sorlag is just so amusing and wicked. Nyx reminds me of MAJ Matoko Kusanagi from the 1995 Ghost in the Shell.

I love that Slash flips people off and spouts edgy lines. She's so fun to listen to.

One of the things I found really interesting was that all of the characters carry their weapons differently. I did not expect that. its subtle but yet portrays character and attitude.

The Vanity system is Brilliantly Executed: The vanity system in this game is fantastically designed. It sits somewhere between Overwatch and Dota2, but with custom color settings.

The vanity items mesh together very well, and each outfit can be mixed and matched with thematic attachments. This reminds me a lot of Dota2's system but with higher quality and exquisite attention to detail.

Everything looks good together, and looks like it fits together.

Ontop of that you dont make us aquire extra skin variations for colors, you instead let us pick colors based on a preset aquirable pallet. Which is really cool.

In overwatch you had to pay extra currency to get the same skin in different color. Here you can get your style on, And then pick a color to match, and change that color when ever you'd like.

This is a really good vanity system, with one drawback. I can't buy attachments or shaders with shards. One of my motivations to buy boxes is to get things out of the way so I start getting duplicates just so I can buy what I want.

I would like to be able to buy the attachements and shaders for Shards. This would personally give me a very good reason to buy boxes with real life cash. So I can start gathering shards and buy what I want.

Please upgrade the vanity system to allow me to buy shaders and attachements I want with Shards. It makes getting duplicates worth a real money purchase.

I'm more than happy to spend an extra 50$ on chests to build up some shards to get what I'd like faster.

The game looks beautiful and Interesting: Quake Champions' Graphics are really good for what it is and what we see. Even at low settings the game look distinctly better than I expected it to.

But more interesting is how it feels.

This game feels... Otherworldly, Sinster, and yet Beautiful.

Like theres' something creepy and strange going on. Something vile, something... vicious dark, and, dangerous. Yet there's scenes of beauty and serenity.

Ruins of Sarnath is my favorite map. It feels so detached yet it's beautiful.

The entire game is detailed and looks beautiful. But it also unnerves you. It's strange, almost alien, yet earthly and ancient.

It reminds me of the Eldritch, a little bit of Hell from Doom, and yet it feels unique.



Lockbox reminds me of Aliens, Sarnath of ancient worlds, Blood Covenent of Hell and Diablo. And yet having all these contrasts, it still feels like it all fits together nice and neat.

I find it more impressive than Overwatch TBH. More immersive than Overwatch.

The artists in this game's development team were obviously paying attention to details and quality aesthetics.

Because it doesn't just look good, it feels good, and unnerving.

That being said some of the human character animations look... silly. Nyx's face scrunches up in her animations in very odd ways like she's trying to not laugh at how funny you look.

BJ's animation on the podium looks like he;s staring off strangely into the distance and you're worrying if he forgot to take is crazy meds that day.

Some of the animations are gorgeous, and some of them... Really need to be fixed.

The Gunplay and Combat is just AWESOME: Everything about this game's combat and weapons is just BADAS.S I love the trinity of Quake concept. Rail, Rocket and LG.

Gunplay in this game makes killing an enemy player feel good, look good, and just fun.

Continuing this point below.

The Gun balancing and Zoom rework, and new Tribolt shows very good intentions and design behavior: The rework of the Zoom mechanic for the Rail and Supermachine gun, plus the addition of the tribolt and the buffing of the Nailgun shows some very clever and intelligent understanding of weapon balance.

The railgun does not feel stupidly overpowered like other sniper weapons. The Zoom mechanic was almost effectively removed from the game without it being removed as strategy.

Very simple and clear goals were accomplished with the Zoom rework, and they did it extremely well. Zooming with the Rail and SMG now presents a risk and reward factor to the game that feels very challenging to master, and very well designed.

Ontop of that The Tribolt is a BRILLIANT idea. After hearing everyone talk about the grenade launcher, I went back and watched a ton of Quake championships from the past that included grenade launcher gameplay and i began to understand why idsoftware did not put it in the game, and it validated their response that it was spammy and awarded low skill Frags. But missing from the game was delayed area denial.

The introduction of the tribolt was a stroke of brilliance in this regard. It added the denial factor back into the game while removing the spam factor. Instead the Tribolt is a vicious weapon for distance and engagement denials if you learn how to aim with it. It rewards you for good aim, and good spacial awareness without letting you spam endlessly to trap people with no counterplay.

I get why they didnt want the grenade launcher, and the tribolt was a great solution to fit into the game to avoid the issues the grenade launcher presented.

The buffing of the nail gun was simple, but also effectively put it in a good position in the weapon line up. It's not good enough to be a trinity weapon, but it's definitely a good defensive and area denial weapon now. It rewards good aiming and prediction and doesnt feel really overpowered at all.

Overall, the Balance of the weapons feels just about right, Rockets feel dominating, LGs feel terrifying and powerful, Railguns scare the [censored] out of you, Nailguns are worth learning to play against and playing with, Tribolts are dangerous in good hands, but not dangerous to enough to avoid engagements, the super machine gun is very solid without replacing the LG.

And best of all, the sniper weapon mechanics of the Rail and SMG don't feel stupidly broken like other sniping mechanics in other games. They feel fair.

It doesn't feel like a company just blasting balance patches out and hoping for the best. This behavior instead shows a development team and balance management that is intimately familiar with how a game is meant to be played and what feels right and wrong.

No weapon is ideal for every situation, every weapon has a good reason to use it(except the starting nailgun), no weapon feels put into the game for kicks and giggles. It all feels like a purposeful, intelligent implementation of a weapon system designed to challenge a player in combat.

The Bad.



Frame Rate and Optimization: This game gets lower frame rates that I expected. It looks nice but it doesn't run as well as It probably should. I have to run it at 75% resolution scale to get an acceptable frame rate average that's suitable for Quake's highspeed gameplay.

I want to be able to play at 100% scale with my 4.2ghz haswell+Fury X 1100mhz, and it's simply not going to happen with this level of optimization./

Netcode: I have grown rather tired of dealing with rockets that do no damage, Railguns that go through players, nails that don't hit from pointblank range, and dying while using nyx ability yet the screen has gone dark as if I used the ability, only to respawn and it never activated.

With the netcode problems there is so little room to actually use ghostwalk as a dodge because it has this huge delay on activation, and it acts like it activated without actually activating meaning you die, despite having properly timed the ability.

That's just one aspect. I'm tired of watching 1 damage rockets that clearly hit at someone's feet. I'm tired of seeing rockets hit people directly and not do damage.

I'm tired of getting hit by railguns behind walls at 20~50ping.

I'm tired or getting killed around corners by LGs that clearly were not able to hit me, but it could because of the netcode's inability to properly parse my location and realize that I'm behind cover.

I'm tired of suiciding to rockets that were exploded 6+ feet away from me yet killed me anyways.

No Zoom Sensitivity Option: This should really be freakin obvious idSoftware. What the hell?

You should have had Zoom sense in the game from CBT1. Why is it still not there?

CSGO has it, Overwatch has it, and so Should Quake Champions.

I don't use Zoom in this game very much because the sensitivity for it is too low. It makes trying to zoom aim a pain in the butt. I need to be able to increase it's speed to make it effective, but instead I'm locked in. Why?

Fix this crap [censored]. This is one of the most obvious features that should have been added to the the game when you added accel, but it didnt. There is no excuse for this, I'm sorry, but fix it. ASAP.

Spawning Behavior: One of the most irritating and aggravating things that makes me step away from the game right now is the spawning behavior. It's bad. It's not as bad as CSGO team deathmatch, but it still sucks. I makes the game feel poorly designed and ruins much of the competitive feel of the game.

Duel spawn killing feels cheap, and it looks bad as a spectator.

The spawning behavior of this game really needs some improvements not just for player sanity, but also for competitive viability. Spawn killing looks cheap and frankly ruins the feeling that a player won by skill instead of just getting cheap or lucky spawns.

When you play with the same group of people, you start to recognize who is getting screwed over by spawns and who is getting good spawns. Which boils down to RNG. And RNG like that just doesn't belong in a competitive FPS.

Sacrifice Sucks: I'm sorry Tim and Zero4, but really this is one of those things you need to let go. Not every idea is a good one and Sacrifice is one of those ideas that seems good on paper and good in internal testing, but in practice... Is bad.

I dont want to step on toes here, but this is really something that you need to move on from. I know how hard it is to drop an idea you put massive amounts of work into and really like, but it's just not the right game mode for Quake Champions.

We need 2 Flag CTF instead. I do like the throw mechanic, it's a good idea. But the rest of sacrifice needs to go. You have the maps for it, you probably have assests somewhere, just make a Red and Blue Flag. Drop the Soul spawning, and rework it to 2 Flag CTF.



I tried really hard to like Sac. I really did. I played a lot of Sac scrims, and tried really hard to get into it, but it blows. It's not as fun as CTF. and its too chaotic to watch.

Flag runs and ambushes would be much more fun to watch than this 1 flag football+domination ect. It just doesn't work.

I still load up UT2003 to play CTF with bots just because it's a fun mode. But I have no reason to ever play Sacrifice ever again.

I'm on your side here idSoftware, but sometimes that means Tough Love, and I'm just saying, that Sacrifice needs to go and you need to work on 2 Flag CTF instead.

please, Please, PLEASE Work on CTF under these rules

-2 Flags

-Both Flags must be at your base to Score.

-Flag enables Toss mechanic behavior.

Win conditions(Suggestion)

Best of 3, 10 minutes, Most caps win. Max Caps of 5.

This means 1 Match of CTF lasts 20~30 minutes. Lower than a Dota2 or LoL match. About the same as an Overwatch Match(pending variables), and that means as a spectator you can watch a series unfold and be completed in 32minutes to an hour.

Very reasonable for Esports.

Wall/Collusion Geometry in this game is bad: One of the things that is starting to really get on my nervese is getting caught on things that should be ignored or ran over by collisions.

Especially little things on the floors and walls that I get stuck on. It's a huge buzz kill to be moving quickly and get caught on something.

Or to die because you cant strafe backward into the teleporters because there's some jutting peice in the way. The game's walls need a geometry smoothing over, really bad. It's a huge damper on the way the game is played and slows things down and gets people killed in situations where they probably shouldn't be.

There is a major lack of features that should be there already or focused on: Where's the Bot matches? Even crappy bots. Where are they? Bots are pretty important for introducing new players to the game.

Granted I had to learn walking through hell of playing with quake veterans, but Im stubborn and a competitive player so I pushed hard and I eventually learned. But I sure as hell dont blame people who got their butts handed to them, over and over from leaving the game and finding something else. They had nothing to learn against and got dunked on over and over.

There really need to be Bots: https://bethesda.net/community...



Matchmaking will help with this Im sure, but bots will still help. I love playing the bots in dota2 with friends who are new to dota. and sometimes I just like playing the bots for kicks and giggles.



There should also be a system to skirmish in an unlimited no stats tracked endless warmup mode where people can play for short periods of time during the queue for real matches.

That feature should have been pretty obvious as to add accessibility without impacting skill.

Also See Above at no zoom sense option.

I think a feature that should also be in the game is Left Right and Centered Weapon model placement. There is no reason to not put this in the game if you already have weapons and characters that can do this in the code already. Just add it, please.

Why is there no Friend Whisper option? Why cant i right click someone's name and "Message" them. I can't ask them in game if they want to party up or anything. I have to give them discord info or something.

I could go on but you get the picture. I realize it's beta and all, but dang it there's some obvious stuff here.

This game makes me really [censored] angry: I know this is my problem not the game's problem entirely but this game really gets under my skin rather often and I really dont know why it does.

I never got this irritated by BO3, and I never really cared that much in Overwatch, but QC has really sparked some rage in me and I don't really know why.

I like the game a lot, despite being irritated by it a lot, but I cant really understand why it does such an effective job at pissing me at the same time.

I need to learn to stay calm and cool and keep my head, but this game makes it hard. It'll take a long time to learn to keep my jets cool and I'll apologize for that upfront.

Summary

This is a really good and interesting game, as a new player to quake series it's got me hooked and I want to keep playing it for as long as can.

it suits my interests, and its at a good starting point.

That being said, it needs work. It's not good enough yet to be a replacement for other games for most people and I want most people to be playing this game instead of stuff like Overwatch and Paladins.

There are features the game needs, and some reworks needed.

I am ready to buy the game to show my support. I am sold, but you need to keep working on improvements to make sure you get more people in the game so everyone who is sold already has a lot of people to play with.

I am happy to now call myself a Quake Player. I adore this game and it's overtaken everything else I play. I want to play this game for years to come.\

I love the characters, the graphics, the aesthetics, the utlrawide support, and the gameplay.