Bethesda held their E3 press conference on Sunday evening. They made a number of announcements, but none were more surprising than the return of Quake, the legendary shooter in the form of Quake Champions. Id software all but invented the shooter genre and Quake was one of the first titles to put a focus on fast multiplayer combat. It doesn’t look like this new entry will be any different.
Id doesn’t really do anything half way. They just released Doom and it is just as gory and hellaciously violent as you would expect. This makes sense because remaking Doom without all of that would have been a disappointment. It just wouldn’t have been about… well.. Doom. Quake is the same way with regard to speed and Quake Champions is being developed with high end PC gaming in mind. It will run at 120 htz and with unlocked frame rates. (For those of us who don’t speak tech this means, “It will look really really good, and the animation will be very smooth on high end PCs.”)
Game developers may want to avoid it, but we are living in a post Overwatch world right now. The massive success of the hero shooter is going to have a profound effect on games for the foreseeable future. Quake Champions is definitely caught up in that wave. We don’t know many details, but they confirmed that players will be choosing between multiple distinct characters who each have their own unique powers and abilities. The trailer showed us a handful of characters including a blue haired woman who has some sort of teleport, a hulking alien with shoulder charge type attack, and a guy with a buzz-saw for a hand. We’ll find out more information at QuakeCon in August.
Quake just wouldn’t be the same without a competitive scene built around it. Id confirmed that they would be helping to foster a strong eSports community around Quake Champions and “other Bethesda games.”More info will be coming soon, but I am left to wonder which of their games will be involved. I would presume Doom is going to be on the list, but what else? Sound off in the comments. Maybe I’m missing something.
This is just the beginning of the E3 party. Stay tuned to Pixelkin.org for more coverage as the week goes on!
