Quake Live

It's the minimalism of Quake III that surprised and delighted me so much when it arrived, and it remains enormously appealing. It was the reason I came down on the side of Quake III in the endless arguments concerning the Id games and Unreal Tournament. Both were beautiful, but there was something about the pared down power-up selection of Quake III that seemed just right, and somehow more honest. It was a hymn to videogame skill.

Sometimes I think the game could just be stripped down to the machinegun default, rocket, and rail, and still be absolutely perfect. I always felt comfortable with the spareness of it, and I have to admit that when I was playing original Quake III I never touched the expansion pack materials after its release. And that meant to the weapons too - the nailgun, chaingun and prox-launcher. These three weapons do show up on certain Quake Live maps, and it's a good indicator of my Quaker puritanism that I usually don't play on those particular rotations. Even these small extras seem like a bold step too far.

In fact, the more I play of Quake Live, the more begin to yearn for some of the features of the past. The array of tweaks introduced by the Orange Smoothie Productions mod, for example, which allowed for plenty of player-defined HUD tweaks and even coach spectator modes with split-screen streaming. Then there was the force-enemy model command, which was a must in the past, and doesn't seem possible now (I am hoping to be corrected). Making all my enemy appear as the TankJr model certainly aided identification when hearing someone approach, and I wish I could still benefit from that kind of audio signposting today.

Indeed, while Quake Live does seem to have concentrated and reinvigorated the game by keeping it up to date in one easily accessible place, it has drastically limited the freedom that the original game had come to allow. You can, of course, still go and experience that - the original Quake III still works, and there are numerous servers available that do still support the old mods, although their numbers are much depleted by time - but it would be great if this new web service erred on the side of the community and destined to be able to support a wider range of features and mods. I should love to see the Quake III release of Rocket Arena on here, which I poured thousands of hours into years past.

What I would hope is that Quake Live is indeed able to make a profit and expand into both more and better features, such as providing for the finest glory day mods. I'm certain Quake Live will bring back home of the best of the old deathmatch and capture the flag maps, but it could just end there: this game will need significant sponsorship if it's to survive on ads alone, and whether this will happen is unclear.

Quake Live has some stiff competition from games such as Battlefield Heroes, and since there is no micropayment model for Quake Live, the income here is going to be based purely on whatever advertising they can pipe into to site, (and potentially the game arenas too).

It is impossible not to be entranced and enthralled by this mighty relic of Id Software's heyday - indeed, I found myself taking screenshots for this article only to emerge an hour later with three games of capture the flag under my belt. Yet I do wonder if the things that made it hypnotically great - the mechanistic minimalism and spartan feature list - are the exact things that will mean it cannot truly claim its place in the future of persistent characters, upgradeable experiences, and micro-payment enjoyment extensions.

Id, meanwhile, say Quake Live is here to stay and have continued irregularly updating the site. I hope they're right, because my lunchtime deathmatch is back.