Unreleased champion Wrack discovered in Quake Champions PTS files

YouTuber

KitKat, known for previous videos exploring hidden map details and deleted arenas, has published a new breakdown of the Quake Champions PTS files. The video reveals an in-development playable character: Wrack.

According to the video, Wrack has been in development since late 2025 and quietly teased since then. The game files contain a character biography that perfectly matches his original description from Quake III Arena: "He's a fighting machine, but shell shocked induced amnesia has made him less challenging a foe than he might once have been. He imagines that he once was the avowed master of arenas like this... but things changed and it doesn't work right anymore.".

His intended abilities include:

Passive - Decorated Airman: Grants QuakeWorld-style air control, allowing for sharp turns at the cost of low acceleration.
Active - Flashback: Creates a field that cancels opponents' abilities and drains their cooldown recovery.

The character remains in a prototype state. Wrack's model is based on Ranger, outfitted in heavy plated armor fitting a Slipgate Marine. He currently uses Ranger's intro animations and deeply pitched-down Ranger voice lines. He is completely unplayable; attempting to load him as a bot in a custom game simply spawns a standard Ranger because the server does not have him enabled.

The files show the character went through multiple iterations. In March 2026, his passive was titled "Jumping Jack" and his active was called "Trauma Bond". The description for Trauma Bond read: "Lost in the thrawls of his past trama, Wrack's delusional state can become a shared psychosis, leaving those in his presence trapped in confusion.". Other internal files refer to the active ability as "Shell Shock", with code explicitly programmed to cancel active abilities and reverse cooldowns.

When Wrack's code was first introduced, the internal list of champion IDs was also updated to include placeholders for several other unreleased characters:

Xaero
Beastmaster
Hunter
Raine
Klesk

Despite the progress on his development,

KitKat concludes that Wrack will probably never be officially released. In light of the recent mass layoffs at id Software and the departure of lead developer SyncError, future content updates for the game appear unlikely.

Anonymous (lxACevpI)

Hi, thank you very much for writing about my video and spreading the news about Wrack. I've just realized I made an error and forgot to include a note about terada_engineer in the video. terada_engineer is actually Eisen's champion ID, not for an unreleased character. Eisen was originally going to be named Terada before release, and almost all of QC's game files still refer to him by that name. Some of these internal names are different, like hell_knight being Death Knight's ID and unholy_paladin being Galena's.

It is interesting that Eisen's placement in that list comes after Xaero and Beastmaster though. There are some very small remnants of those unreleased characters in the game today unlike all the others listed, so maybe they were intended to release before Eisen and never did? That's just a random theory though, we'll probably never know for sure.

posted 2 months ago

d1z

thanks for your comment, i removed the terada_engineer mentions from the text
also, thank you for your work on the videos, they're quite interesting!