Quake Live

About Quake Live
Quake Live (formerly known as Quake Zero) is a first-person shooter video game in development by id Software and announced in 2007. Focusing on the multiplayer aspect of the game, it succeeds its predecessor Quake III Arena as a “major league” first-person shooter eSports competition game. The game has entered an invitation-based closed beta in 2008. Open Beta begins on February 24th, 2009.

Quake Live will be released as a free version of Quake III: Gold (Quake III and its expansion pack, Team Arena) available only through a web browser. Live will be backed financially by in-game advertising from IGA Worldwide. Skill-based matchmaking will be powered by a “metagame engine” developed by GaimTheory.
[Source]

My experience
Friday the 20th. i “discovered” a bug in id’s beta system, and got the opportunity to create an account on the closed beta and play Quake Live… Wow it was awesome! Saturday they fixed this error, and i signed up for the beta program. Today, Sunday, i got a mail from id’ with a CD-key, so i could now sign up for the closed beta legit.

I have now played all the new maps, and all i can say is; “Bring back the pain!”. Quake 3 Arena really rocked as the best first person shooter  ever - in my opinion. After id released Quake 4, Quake died slowly, and we didn’t get a replacing shooter game. Now with the remaking of Quake 3, to a browser based FPS, the action and good old gameplay is back.

How it works
First of all, Quake Live is an “online only” based game. You log onto quakelive.com and create an character you are gonna play. You’ll only be able to play on id’s servers. The site stores your stats - time played, wins, losses, frags, deaths, hits, shots, accuracy, rewards, ranking, etc., so that you always can see how good you are compared to your friends or the best players in the world. That’s really sweet. :-)

After creating an account you download a plugin at the size of 3mb for your webbrowser, and can now play. It sounds a bit weird, and we are not used to that type of games, but making it this way, they really make Quake portable and playable on all platforms. You can play in a minimized window as showed in the screen shots further down, or you can play it full screen, just like in Quake 3 Arena.

Overall
The graphic has got a big boost since Quake 3 Arena, and runs very smooth even on old computers. They have made several new maps which really rocks. You are able to play CTF, CA, TDM, FFA, Duel and Instagib, either with bots or online players. The bots are now even smarter, and gets better as you gain experience and skills, so that they’ll always match your skills.

Quake is back! Really looking forward to play Quake Live. :-)

Open for the public on 24th of February

Screenshots