Quake Champions – old school but with new tricks

GameCentral speaks to id Software veteran Tim Willits about the Quake reboot and its old school approach to online shooters.

Considering they’ve already engineered successful reboots for Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, few people were surprised when Bethesda announced a new Quake game at E3 last week. But the nature of that game was, if not a surprise then certainly controversial. Unlike id Software’s other classic shooters Quake has something of an identity crisis and the question was never if Quake would be rebooted, but which one.

The first Quake is set in a dark fantasy, quasi-medieval world; while the second had a completely different sci-fi setting with the alien ‘Strogg’; Quake III Arena had no plot at all and was essentially multiplayer-only; and Quake 4 (the black sheep of the family) deemphasised the multiplayer and went back to being about the Strogg. Add in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars – a weird mix of Battlefield and Unreal Tournament – and it’s clear that Quake is simply whatever kind of shooter id Software feels like making at the time.



Quake III Arena, and it’s free-to-play follow-up Quake Live, is arguably the most popular individual entry though, and so it was no surprise to find that it’s the game which Quake Champions seems to resemble the most. We say ‘seems’, because Bethesda actually showed very little of the game at E3, and it’s only thanks to the interview below with Tim Willits that we gained a clear idea of what Quake Champions is going to be.


We asked Willits why the game is currently PC only, and he offered some interesting hints of it eventually appearing on Project Scorpio and PlayStation Neo. And perhaps even being the vanguard of a whole new series of different Quake titles…

Formats: PC

Publisher: Bethesda

Developer: id Software and Saber Interactive

Release Date: TBA

GC: I’m very glad to see a Quake revival. But it strikes me that Quake fans are a lot harder to please than Wolfenstein or Doom fans.

TW: Yes. It’s not a MOBA! [leans into recorder] It’s not a MOBA!

GC: Oh, is that what they’re saying?

TW: Everybody’s asked me that!

GC: Oh no, my complaint is quite different.

TW: [laughs]

GC: I’m upset that it doesn’t have a Lovecraftian single-player campaign. And I’m sure there are other people that are complaining – crazy as it may seem to me – that it’s not a sci-fi Strogg-based game.

TW: Yes, yes! [laughs] So… let me turn that question around. Tell me your… you play a lot of Quake, I take it?

GC: Back in the day, sure.

TW: You mentioned Lovecraft, so you’re hardcore.

GC: [laughs]

TW: The codename for this project, until Sunday, was Lovecraft. And people that knew Quake were like, ‘That’s the worst possible codename ever’. And the people that did not know Quake told me it was the worst possible codename ever… But your memories of playing Quake, what are your favourite experiences of playing Quake?

GC: Ah, oh. This is interesting. I remember the first room of the first game as a real milestone moment. The fact that it was in proper 3D, my first shower of gib when I blew up a monster, the gothic architecture, and the flames and fire…



TW: [laughs] That’s it! And what about how you played it?

GC: I remember it being very fast, and I couldn’t cope with the mouse controls because I only used the keyboard on Doom. And I kept being killed, and I couldn’t aim up properly, and I had to learn how to circle strafe and use rocket jumps…

TW: OK, good. Yes! So, what we found, and you fall right into this category with everyone else, is that when people visualise Quake… when you say Quake you think of Lovecraftian, gothic architecture. But when you think of how you played it, you think of circle strafing and combat that most people associate with Quake III. But they don’t visualise Quake III, they visualise Quake I. Most people’s favourite memories of Quake are, ‘I played multiplayer with my friends!’ and dragging your computers together for a LAN party.

So what Champions is – and it’s a tight focus – is it takes that visual style and the Elder Gods and Lovecraft, Cthulhu, and Shub-Niggurath… that look and feel and grittiness, and it incorporates that in a Quake III/Quake Live style of strafe-jumping, rocket-jumping, air control. So it’s very important for us to be true to that feel, and then it adds the champions, with their abilities, as an evolution of our genre. It adds a layer that makes it a little more advanced, gives more stuff for people to do; it modernises it to some degree.


But it’s important for us, and I designed the shareware version of the original Quake. So I know how important it is! So that essence of what Quake is, is very important. So the question is, ‘Why not make a single-player campaign?’ We want to make a tight-focused, multiplayer-only experience for the PC. No excuses, no limitations.

Quake Champions – can it be both hardcore and accessible?

GC: But why PC only?

TW: We feel that it needs to be super-fast, 120Hz. We want this to be a true competitive multiplayer game, and we feel that PC only – and I love my console fans, trust me; I love console guys.

GC: I just want the maximum number of people to be able to play everything.

TW: Yes, but we feel that we want to keep the scope, we want to keep the design as tight and focused as possible. We don’t want to spread ourselves all over the place. I’m not shutting the door on console, and we have new consoles that were just announced this week. But to get the frame rate and to get the twitch and the real competitive eSports play… you need PC.

GC: I’m curious as to when you made this decision? I’ve made this point in a couple of different contexts already at E3, but there does seem to have been a shift in the variety and nature of FPS in the last year or two. Where multiplayer-only has become much more accepted and realism much less important. Games are now back to creating weapons and abilities purely for the purposes of gameplay, rather than some boneheaded idea of realism.


TW: [laughs] Yes, you don’t have to worry about realism with our game.

GC: With the originals you were making things up because they made the game better…

TW: Yes, we have the holy trinity: rocket launcher, railgun, and lightning gun.

GC: Were you looking at the industry and thinking these things are becoming more accepted again and so maybe Quake will have an even bigger audience than normal, or was this just parallel evolution?

TW: I think it was parallel evolution. So, Quake Live… Quake Live, which morphed from Quake III, ran for 16 years.

GC: Did it? Has it really been that long?

TW: [laughs] So there are millions of people that love playing Quake Live. So when we looked at Quake Live we were like, ‘What can we do?’ What is the next step, where we keep our Quake fans happy and what can we do? And we thought that we can add champions, and we can add this and we can add that.

There are a number of games that have these types of heroes or champions, because I really believe it’s an evolution of the genre. And, like you said, people are more accepting of, ‘This is a multiplayer game’. And plus, it’s Quake. And people associate Quake with multiplayer. Especially after a 16-year run of Quake Live.

Tim Willits – a Quake master

GC: So how far are you taking it in terms of them having individual abilities and weapons? Are they going to be Overwatch style characters that are almost like from a fighting game?

TW: So this is how we approach it, because that is a really good question. At its heart we knew that we had to make a real Quake game. You play the game the same way. Now, we have passive abilities and we have active abilities. And we know that people play first person shooters differently. Some people love the strafe jump, some people don’t rocket jump, some people don’t use air control, and some people are more aggressive or defensive.

So you could pick a character that has some passive abilities, maybe one that’s a little faster, say, that fit with your play style. Then you take that active ability and that’s what you use in specific situations, but it doesn’t change the way you play Quake – which is important. And we were nervous to put the champions into the game.

But we have a testing lab at id and we had PC-only Quake Live fans come in and we’re like, ‘Here you go, play it!’ And they really embraced the champions, they felt like it was additive experience – it didn’t detract – and they actually said at the test, ‘Yeah, you need even more’. And they gave us some ideas of different abilities different champions could have, so we felt good after running some tests through a lab.

GC: So how is it going to work… I quite liked Doom’s multiplayer…

TW: Doom’s multiplayer is awesome!

GC: I’m not sure how it got such a bad reputation.

TW: [whispers] People are wrong.

GC: [laughs] But the area where I could agree with them is with the loadouts, which really didn’t seem to fit the old school style.

TW: There are no loadouts in Quake.

GC: So you pick up the weapon in the map, you know where it’s going to spawn…

TW: Yeah, so you pick up all your weapons, we’ve got the holy trinity. You’ve got timer items; we have timers that help, but you have to get the armour and find your ammo…

GC: You’re bringing back such memories for me now. I knew this guy that always got his girlfriend to time when they respawned. And they all used to… I can’t remember exactly what they were doing but they turned all the textures off or something, to make sure it was always 60fps?

TW: [laughs] It was called flat-shaded. It normalised the textures to a single colour.

GC: That was it! They were hardcore Counter-Strike players as well.

TW: Yes, yes.

GC: So that’s exactly the crowd you’re aiming for by the sound of it.

TW: Oh god, yes. I’d be dead otherwise. Can you imagine making a Quake game where the Quake pros didn’t like it? [laughs]

Quake Champions – a Lovecraftian Overwatch?

GC: Which is great, I absolutely don’t want to discourage that in anyway. But the question then is all about accessibility.

TW: When Quake first came out it was pretty intimidating. People are afraid of Quake, which is kind of awesome. [laughs] But you also have to remember that gamers are so much better now. Some of these multiplayer games are so advanced that I’m not too worried about that. And the champions actually do help.

Because in our testing we have found that people that are not as super-talented with Quake had success. The best guys will still win but the champions have really helped to bring people in. We’ll have better matchmaking, we’ll have good league systems and the tournaments. It’ll be more accepting.

GC: How are you expecting people to learn about things like rocket jumps? Will there be in-game tutorials or is that all going to come from wikis and YouTube and the like?

TW: We definitely want better on-boarding and we’re definitely working on educating people. But if you have one thing to worry about and you can be successful, then things can grow on top of that. But when you immediately start a game and you cannot be successful with anything, that’s when everything falls apart. And team games have become… we’ll still have Deathmatch, don’t anyone freak out, but team games have also helped a lot too.

Now, remember the old Quake – you just played Deathmatch, right? 16 people in Deathmatch, you had one winner and 15 losers. And it was, ‘OK, I’m a loser. That’s not what I like’. So we are putting some effort into making sure our team games are compelling and you have half a chance to win, and we offer those opportunities for new players to be successful and feel good.

It’s like golf. I’m no good at it, but I hit the ball once and I had that one success and I feel good. And I think we’ve gotten better at making people feel good and allowing them to be successful, and that will naturally push them.

GC: I don’t think you’ve said, but how are you monetising the game?

TW: We haven’t talked about that yet. We’re still working that out. But we do want to make sure we have as many people as we can. I mean Quake Live has been free-to-play since 2008, but we’ll figure something out that’s inclusive enough.

GC: That’s interesting, because the Overwatch guys hadn’t decided on that either just a few months before release. I like that working out how to make money from it is a secondary concern.

TW: We’re worry about that later. [laughs] Because, again, we want to be competitive. Not competitive as in competitive with other people, but we want the game to have… people to be playing in leagues and tournaments and stuff. So we need lots of people, but we still need to actually make some money, so it’s hard. We gotta figure it out.

(The PR guy comes in and warns us we’re down to our last question.)

GC: Obviously you’re not going to announce anything today. But was that just you telling me a story when you say this doesn’t close the door on other types of Quake game? Because if you’re making something that is this specific, that implies you could still do a Quake single-player and whatever.

TW: We are not shutting the door on new consoles or single-player…

GC: Because I know Jens Matthies from MachineGames would love to make that.

TW: [Purposefully ignores comment] We wanted a focused game, draw your lines and make the best game we possibly can within those boundaries.

GC: Will there be any lore in Champions at all?

TW: Oh yes. The fact that you said Lovecraft, that puts you in a different category of fan.

GC: I do like Lovecraft. Well, not the man himself, obviously. But Bloodborne kind of renewed my interest in using that kind of backdrop for a single-player game.

(We’re interrupted again by the PR guy)

GC: I’m done, we are done!

TW: [laughs]

GC: Well, it’s been a pleasure to meet you. I look forward to seeing Quake become famous again.

TW: Me too! Great to see you.

Quake Champions – will it come to Project Scorpio?

Email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk, leave a comment below, and follow us on Twitter