What exactly is Quake Champions, in comparison to say, Quake 3 Arena's multiplayer?

[BCGecko]

Have had this sitting here but never installed it or tried it. I used to play Quake 3 as well as 2 and 4 quite a bit online, I even had Quake Wars: Enemy Territory lol. Played Quake Live a bit cause that also was free, and that was literally the same gameplay as Quake 3 Arena.

So with that said, where does Quake Champions fit into this? Is it just Quake 3 classic gameplay, same weapons, new graphics? It's like 33 GB which is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane so I've never bothered to install it, I just play Quake 3 with some buddies if I really wanna relive the glory days.

[Shakes]

It's arena gameplay with hero/class aspects added. You have light, medium, and heavy categories which define your starting stack and max overheal, and then individual champs have different abilities and slightly different hitboxes within a weight category.

Grenade launcher was removed as a weapon and given to Keel as his ability (in a sense). What was added in its place is the tri-bolt, which fires 3-round bursts of timed explosives. Other weapons will vary slightly from Q3/QL in terms of stats.

Then you have the usual F2P gimmicks, meaning cosmetics, battle passes, and no offline play. It also doesn't have modding support, a server browser, or any kind of support for hosting your own server.

That being said, it's still fun as hell. The game's huge size is mostly due to it using a large number of hi-res textures (the artsyle is gorgeous, if a bit excessive in terms of detail). I'd say at least give it a try. If it's not your cup of tea, you can always go back to QL (something a number of regulars in the forum here seem to have a hard time figuring out).

[enko]

An amazing experience compared to Q3 that is totally not worth it because devs killed the online community with their skin/cosmetic unlocks and cloud servers.

Quake has always been about pick up servers. Q3A is obnoxiously annoying in that regard with their cloud bs. Which is a shame, because its such a smooth solid quake gameplay wise.

[BCGecko]

As soon as I read paid skins and hero/class aspects I was like WOW RIP! Yeah sounds like they wanted to make Quake Overwatch or Quake Team Fortress, which is what Enemy Territory did. And quite frankly, I barely played that game at all cause it just wasn't up to par with other FPS out at the time. That kinda gameplay is not why people play Quake3/UnrealTournament Arena type FPS games.


The whole point is to have pick up and play instantly servers, like enko said above, without matchmaking, without any paid addons or paid skins, where 100% of the extra content is just downloadable like the old days for free, and creatable by anyone in the community to play with online. Being able to just make a new map, weapon, skin, mod, or mutator and throw it onto a server, and have anyone auto download it, was 1 of the great things about those classic games.

[ciklotron]

I skipped Q4 and QL, so directly came to QC from Q3A/TA, after a 10+ years break, and it definitely brings back the feeling for me, while having a contemporary look. About things in the battle passes: they are pure cosmetics, you don't actually need them. The only thing you may need is the Champion Pack, as it unlocks all champions in a single purchase, otherwise you can unlock a new one in every ~10 days. But I don't suggest spending those "shards" immediately (you have enough right at start to unlock a new champ), because there are tryout champs on weekly rotation (I think 3 of them), and the starting champ is a very good one, plus teleporting and almost free rocket jumps definitely help when you're learning the maps.
Of course if you have fond memories of various special movement types from earlier, that can help a lot with picking, there are 2 champs with CPM and 2 champs with crouch slide as movement passive, and one with grappling hook as active ability.