Quake Champions' way to success?

There is probably no definitive answer to this question. The thing is, that every single player of a game will have different needs and expectations. Some just want a game where they can hop in and out of very quickly without investing a lot of time. Then there are the dedicated players who long for a game with a high skill ceiling. It's important to understand, that a single game will never be able to satisfy everyone's needs. Even though success is relative and I don't know what id Software would consider a success for Quake Champions. Independently from that, there are in my opinion two factors that can be controlled by the creators that make a multiplayer game successful: Gameplay and User Experience (UX).

Over the last few years I had many theoretical discussions about how Quake could increase it's user-base. A lot of suggestions were about how to make the game easier for newer and/or the so called casual players. In my opinion, the gameplay should never suffer, just so the casual players can apparently enjoy the game. The whole concept of casual gamers is unnecessary. When you think about it, what exactly is a casual player? According to Wikipedia „a casual gamer is a type of video game player whose time or interest in playing games is limited compared to a hardcore gamer.“ I've never understood how limited time makes one into a mindless zombie, not able to think more than two thoughts at the same time. As long as the gameplay is fun and engaging, it doesn't matter if I play a few games a week or eight hours a day. One way to make the level of entry for a complex game easier is by adding game modes, that don't require a lot of time commitment (e.g. Clan Arena). As long as there are enough players on your own skill level around, it doesn't matter how difficult the game is. Gradually getting better in your own confinements, no matter how little time a player invests, can be something very rewarding.

It doesn't matter how good the gameplay is, without a good User Experience, it means nothing. In Quake Live one can see hints of a user experience, but it's nowhere near the current standards of modern multiplayer games. A user interface with all it's features is not only detrimental for both the casual and hardcore players, but also for the whole eSports scene to grow. Matchmaking combined with a proper ladder/league system not only makes casual play even possible, but also ensures the game's longevity for the dedicated player. For a community to grow, communication tools, spectator mode with all it's functionalities, streaming and easy-to-access replays are a necessity. Tutorials and links to other sources of information or events going on in the world make it easier for newer players to get into the game. It also promotes all sorts of content creation. It's not the duty of a gaming company to create a community for it's own games, but to provide people with the necessary tools and encourage them to create it themselves. This could be in the form of creating maps, models, loading screens, tutorials, new in-game UI's, self-organised online tournaments etc. I understand that creating all of these features takes a lot of time and money, it's definitely not an easy task.

This is of course my personal opinion and could be wrong entirely. In my next article I'm going to try and get opinions from people who worked in the industry or are a integral part of the community, to see what they have to say about the upcoming Quake Champions.

日本語：
近代的なシューターを成功させることには何が必要か。消費者は皆それぞれのゲームに対しての希望や期待を持っているので、たぶん明答が存在しないと思う。あまり時間を費やしたくなくて簡潔なゲームが欲している人々があれば、至難なゲームに挑戦されてほしい人もある。一つのゲームが皆のニーズに答えられて満足させることは無理だという事実を心掛けるといいと思う。成功という概念は相対的で、id Softwareにとっては成功って何かもわからないのに、ゲーム開発会社が自分で制できる成功要素が二つあると思う。それはゲームプレイの良好とユーザエクスペリエンス（UX）。

数年前からクエイクがどうやって人気になれるかという観念的な議論をしてきた。ゲームの難易度を減らして初心者やいわゆるカジュアルゲーマーたちを魅力させるという発案が多かった。だが、カジュアルゲーマーの概念はもともと必要はないと思うから、そういう曖昧な対象顧客層のためにゲームプレイの難易度を犠牲になったら絶対に納得できないと思う。よく考えれば、カジュアルゲーマーというのは何？英語のWikipediaによるとハードコアゲーマーと違って費やす時間とゲームに関する興味が少ないゲーマーだという。暇の時間が限定されているからこそ、頭が完全に空しくなってもう難しいゲームができないという考え方は今まであまり理解していなかった。ゲームプレイが楽しい限り、そのゲームを週に1回だけか毎日8時間やるかどうかに関係がないと思う。初心者のエントリーレベルを減らすには時間があまりかからないゲームモードの追加などのいろいろな方法がある。自分自身の相対的なレベルに近いプレイヤーがいれば、ゲームの難易度も無縁になり、自分のペースで上達させる機会そのものはやりがいがあると思う。

ゲームプレイがどれほど素晴らしくても近代的なユーズーエクスペリエンスに欠けると成功になれない。もうなかなか年を取ったクエイク・ライブの中にあちこちUXの暗示が見えるが、近代のマルチプレイゲームの基準に近い状況ところじゃない。多様な機能に備わっているUXはゲーマー達にだけではなくイースポーツの場合にも不可欠な要素になるにちがいない。丈夫なオンラインマッチツールとちゃんとしたリーグプレイはいわゆるカジュアルプレイを可能にし、専用プレイヤーに長期的なモチベーションを確保する。ゲームー内外のコミュニティが成り立つためにプレイヤー同士の通信インフラ、観戦に関するストリーミング・リプレ－といった機能が必要である。チュートリアルや他の情報源を通してゲーム内外に何が起きてるかは認識してもっとゲームコミュニティの一部になれる。その上、コンテンツプロダクションを進めさせることもある。自分で開発したゲームコミュニティを提供することではなく、コミュニティが発生できる状況やツールを備え付けることは開発者の仕事だと思う。マップやキャラモデルを作ったり、チュートリアルを提供したり、ロアディングスクリーンの絵を描いたり、自分のトーナメントを設けたりすることを通して自分自身でコミュニティを生み出してしまう。上述した機能の開発は凄まじい手間とお金がかかることをよくわかるつもりなんだけど、これはただのクエイクシリーズの大ファン理想。

上述した議論は個人の思想で、間違えてしまった可能性もあります。次の記事にゲーム業界で働いている人々やクエイクコミュニティに不可欠なパーソナリティとのインタービューを行って、クエイク・チャンピオンスに対しての感想を伺うつもりです。

Anonymous (46.211.156.241)

I do agree with you.

posted 7 years ago

Miles

Depends on the criteria for being successful. On a large scale, it would be nearly impossible to preserve the arena shooter gameplay and have a game have a consistent player base in the 10 thousands. But, if a game having a few hundred active players and a pickup scene is active, I think it just needs to have a high skill ceiling and fun game play, like most Quakes. That being said, most die-hard quake fans have already found their quake of choice and latched on; can't see someone, including myself, packing up and heading to a newer game when the game I currently play isn't completely dead.

sonigo

I think these days a player base in the 10 thousands is possible, even for Quake. If you look at the Quake Live stats on Steam you can see that in last 24h, around 900 players were active. This is a game from 1999 that has barely any UX, no updates, no new content, close to no competitive scene, a very split up community (as you said, scattered across many quake titles) etc.

I feel that, if Quake Champions is going to be halfway decent, people are going to switch.

I don't think the players left in Quake 3 and Live are there because they are highly polished games, more because they really enjoy the gameplay. I'm not denying the fact that QC has potential; if it's fun enough to pull the Q3/L fanatics away from their respective games it will surely have a good competitive player base.

da_coder

Casual gamers aren't just less thoughtful about their games, they are actually not as involved. For example: Chess.

The most hardcore players know all the openings, draw states, finishers, etc... but the casual doesn't care. The learning curve to having a fun consistent game of chess is very steep.

Another way to put this is like Blender3d, where the learning curve is so steep, that few people overcome the first hurdle of learning the keys and interfaces.

In Quake that is seen as rocket jumps, map knowledge, TIMING, and strafe jumping. These are all things that take time to master and even basically learn. And without them, the game is severely less fun.

But you can still have fun playing chess on a casual level, can't you? Quake being severely less fun without the aspects you mentioned, that's just your perspective (because you are used to them). Someone who's good at chess would say the same to someone who just plays it casually. But I can still play against a friend, barely knowing the rules of the game, and have fun doing so.

cityy

For me, the thing was always that chess you can only play if someone explains it to you. While comparing chess to quake is really terrible and you can play quake easily without having someone explain it to you, there is parts of it that just aren't intuitive; namely the movement. Despite the fact that the movement is one of the best things about quake, it's something that will remain undiscovered for about 80% of the people trying the game (if not more). I always felt like that it will be impossible for quake to set itself apart from other games if the things that actually set it apart already aren't visible.

Just ask yourself this: If your removed strafe jumping and rocket jumping from Quake... what kind of a game experience would you have?

For me, it would be basically Call of Duty. And although that is a really fun game, i would say that the most fun ive ever had in an FPS is in Quake Live.

erk

Quake used to regularly have 10k players in servers at the same time back in the early 2000s. Back then CS was the dominant game and dwarfed quake, but quake still had a lot of active servers. Quake had a chance to come back with Q4 and QL, but both releases were pretty bad at launch time and Q4 required state of the art hardware to somewhat smooth, which killed it at the starting gate. With QL the "queue live" and lack of maps and game modes killed it. A few of my friends, who used to play a bit of casual RA3 and FFA back in the day, got pissed by the waiting in queue and never bothered checking on QL again.

The main issue with id games is that id are used to releasing games in a somewhat broken state and wait for the community to fix it. It worked back in the late 90s and early 2000s, but nowdays there is so much competition and people have much shorter attention span so it must be good out of the gate. When your competition is COD, battlefield, overwatch etc. then you must bring a polished game with enough content to make some of the people stick around.

The most newbie friendly game mode in QL is probably domination with full loadout (all weapons except BFG) as it lets people try out all the weapons, it has teams, is action packed and new players can still make a difference, even if they die a lot. CA is another mode that can be nice for new players, but it will have a lot of waiting and the skill level gap will be much more apparent than in domination. The entry mode in quake used to be FFA, which I have never really enjoyed for more than 2-3 games at a time and I knew of a lot of other players that felt the same (most quit quake a long time ago). Most of the competitive games are based around team modes so a good team mode, that is easy to get into and doesn't punish dying harshly is a must for QC to succeed.