Quake Champions at PAX East event summary

With PAX East occuring this weekend, the Quake Champions development team will be hosting a discussion panel to discuss the future of the game, to announce upcoming tournaments as well as reveal a new champion. Doors will open at 17:30 UTC to attendants of PAX East at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, with the Quake Champions stream going live at 19:00 UTC via the

Bethesda channel.

This thread will be updated with news as it comes in!

Update:

PAX East

Looks like people are entering the designated Quake area @AGEgamingEsport.
More images of the venue and tournament areas via @amazonagent.
Can you spot the ZeRo4 imposter? via @agr1nja.
More images of the tournament area via @Quake.
Pre-stream has started at Bethesda.
Matt Grandstaff, Bethesda community manager on stage now. introducing the programme and people involved in the Quake Champions panel, includes: MortalEmperor, tokyopunchout, ZeRo4 and "Brandon Rifer."
tokyopunch out introducing a spring celebration video showing the pastel colored items and instagib.
MortalEmperor discussing how instagib is pronounced (instagib v. "instajib")
New map introduced. Called "Awoken." Looks like the same video which has been shown before which uses the Ruins of Sarnath aesthetic. Has an elder god ("cosmic horrors from another realm") called Ctalha (sp).
ZeRo4 remarks that the new map is "fun, circular in nature... vivid colours... and it's fun to play too."
Remarks that map has lots of "nooks and crannies" to shoot through and that you can fall off the map.
New weapon skin for the nailgun called "disruptor," it is the Quake 3 plasma gun. It will be in the April update.

_{Plasma Gun}

E-sports: LAN: DreamHack May, QuakeCon August, PGL October, DreamHack December.
E-sports: Online: Collegiate Starleague, Battlefy, ESL GO4Cups, and Quake Champions OpenLeague.
E-sports: Only one mode per tournament. ALL tournaments will be open, NO invites except for DreamHack December.

_{Esport Schedule}

E-sports: Top two teams from Collegiate Starleague will have all expenses paid to get to QuakeCon.
E-sports: "Quake Open League" will be run by Zoot and Jehar.
E-sports: Battlefy will host 2-4 events per week, with European and North American events.
"We're gonna have a lot of Quake this year" -- ZeRo4.
MortalEmperor discussing updates and that they made feedback based on community feedback. "Players can still influence the game."
They will not discuss movement changes for spring update, only that there are more changes based on feedback they received. "A lot of the feed back is very valid, very good."
MortalEmperor: "Quake Champions is built for the players."
New champion: introduced with small cartoon. Looks awfully influenced by Borderlands aesthetic.
New champion: Strogg and Peeker released on April 26, 2018.
New champion has has a recon drone called peeker which is his active ability. You deploy the drone and you can use the drone to shoot people, can give his entire team information on opponents. Peeker can self-destruct for doing a lot of damage. Peeker taking damage does not effect Strogg. When peeker is deployed, Strogg is invisible from game play footage but has a red outline -- He is "cloaked." Has a very similar silhouette to some of the other champions.
New champion: Passive ability is that enemies drop +25 HP upon death which can only by picked up Stroggs on the map.
Peeker can be destroyed by it self. When peeker is activated and Strogg is killed, peeker is destroyed.

_{Strogg & Peeker}

New champion: Aimed to be a support/recon hero than getting into lots of fights.
tokyopunchout pushing the Scalebearer pack and it looks like they are wrapping up.
Stream is over. SyncError wasn't there it appears like. Not sure why I expected him to be. No news on CTF. No new map styles introduced. No tournament features announced.

Links:

Quake Champions,

Bethesda

filo

nice tnx for the info.

posted 6 years ago

xou

Cool recap!

so the update is gona be 26.4. kewl

LeopolD

Hrmpf, looks like they gave up on Sacrifice, which imo was the mode where the champion aspect of the game made the most sense.

PiiSmith

I am one of the few who actually likes playing Sacrifice. It is more fun than TDM for me.

xero

My issue with Sacrifice that it remains to be very chaotic for two reasons: the champions are not designed with the mode in mind specifically, and the maps are not designed with the mode in mind specifically. This means that all champions can play almost any role and as such there's no "right way(s)" to play it.

They don't need to necessarily use the typical big, slow defender with a large stack and quick, agile attacker with a small stack motif but there needs to be better and more obvious class delineation. The issue here is that it could make some champions obsolete for duel, which seems to the primary competitive mode as far as id software are concerned. These issued are compounded with the devaluation of resources and the amplified strength of weapons.

What could be some possible solutions?

Limit Sacrifice to much a smaller champion pool (e.g. slash, bj, doom, sorlag only). This does not explicitly require any game changes from id software, just community agreement.
Limit starting weapon to one of the three only (ideally the sg as it should help reduce cess and random spam). This does not explicitly require any game changes from id software, just community agreement.
Set all skill cool down to 0 at spawn, that way there is a setup period. This will require id software to make changes.
Set all starting stacks at 0 armor, and HP at max natural HP. This should give tanks the initial advantage. This will require id software to make changes.

Overall, Sacrifice feels like it's missing something. There's just no down/setup time and feels like the last minute of a regular CTF game that's tied i.e. four player rush vs four player defense. There's no concept of a forward positions.

For me the main thing is the objective focus. My main games were and are always objective focused, from Return to Castle Wolfenstein to Overwatch. Any game mode without objectives is not as good for me, as I want some other focus than combat.
So I will miss Sacrifice. I don't want to it to be removed before CTF is added.

Objective focused team modes like payload in W:ET mixed with Quake speed and weapons just don't go that well together. OW style modes like capture point and Quake will just turn into 4V4 rail wars, which is a very dull affair.

Their best bet would've been an attempt to reconquer former Quake territory... like Team Fortress (e.g. QWTF2). Or to double down on what makes Quake good: strong mechanics and simple game play.

Sacrifice is a bad combination of 1 Flag CTF, TDM and Domination. It's arguably the shallowest competitive team mode featured in an official Quake game and definitely the most difficult to follow.

About being hard to follow: Some noons ago makaveli played some Sac on his stream. While in spec he used freecam most of the time (and complained rightly that the freecam atm. is too slow to follow a fast soul carrier) and voila! it was easy to follow. It is, although very dynamic on individual basis, quite static on team/base basis. Most of the time one team defends while the other attacks, most soul steals just get 20 cm before dying. Freecam works very well in that situation and gives a good overview of what is going on. Ofc this goes against the POV tradition of traditional quake watching.
I think it was really just presented badly because of all the spec bugs (can't switch away from dead etc.) combined with the obsession to "show where the action is".