In an interview with Tim Willits, creative-director of Quake Champions, we were told hardware is not the reason why the game is not coming to Xbox or PlayStation.

The announcement of Quake Champions as a PC-only game came as quite a surprise to many gamers. After all, Doom had just released on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC, playing like a dream on each and getting a great critical and commercial reception. However, following on from news that Quake Champions does not run on the same Id Tech 6 engine as Doom, we’ve got further clarification on the reason why it’s not earmarked for consoles. At least, not yet.

At last week’s QuakeCon event in Dallas, Texas, we had a great chat with creative-director Tim Willits – the full interview will be published shortly – who spoke more about this topic.

It did seem odd that Doom could work on consoles, but Quake Champions could not, when I wrongly assumed it was using the same engine… Well we can run Quake Champions on consoles now because, you know, it’s just code. But we want to run it really fast, we want to have the full twitch aiming, and we want rocket jumping, which is really hard on consoles - really hard. So we feel that for a competitive game to play at events like QuakeCon, the PC platform is the best. Although, and I mentioned this at E3 where it all got blown out of proportion, I am not completely shutting the door on consoles. It’s just not what we are going to do now, because we would have to change the game. Consoles cannot do the same things [as a PC]. Well given it looks like a 2018 game, the PlayStation Neo and Microsoft’s Project Scorpio consoles should be out by the time Quake Champions arrives, which may increase your options? True, but [this decision] is not about the hardware. It’s about how hard it is to play this type of game with a controller.

Our Take?

It’s clear from talking to Willits that Id’s priority with Quake Champions is its fan base; the very people bringing their own computer to QuakeCon every year. And they play on PC. I thought perhaps there was some concern that the game would lose too much in the way of frames on consoles and, as such, Quake Champions would not meet Id’s vision for it on those formats simply due to a lack of raw power. But that is not the case. It’s all about the twitch precision of a keyboard and mouse, so the extra power of the Neo and the Scorpio aren’t what Id Software is waiting for to greenlight Quake Champions on consoles. I do believe it will hit consoles eventually as demand is demand, and there’s an audience to appease. But late 2018 at the earliest (if at all).

Latest gaming headlines