Quake Live Loses Beta Tag, Adds Two Subscription Plans to Go with Free Play

Or buy Quake III Arena for $20 and have unlimited play.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/2200/

Before you say, oh just buy quake 3 and play it forever.. realize that nobody cares about q3 anymore and all that is left is a few very small dinosaur communities, with a much smaller player base than QL currently has. No newb is going to worry about downloading q3 mods, maps, configs, tweak their config, download skins, and then worry about changing point releases to connect to a server they finally find that has people on it.

I can't believe this is only just now going out of beta. I've forgotten about its existence at least twice.

Most fun I've had for $24 in years, including ghetto brothels. I strongly encourage all of you to buy this, or at the very least start playing the free version. Free strafejump and tricking lessons to any shacker who joins and wants em!

I would be happier if the prices were $10 & $15. Still I may try the cheaper subscription and give the new maps a try.

I haven't played it in a while, I wonder if it's any more snappy than it was in the past. It always felt a bit exactly like I would expect playing a game in a browser with Java or Flash, a few msecs sluggish on the input response.

A question....the splash damage on the rocket launcher in this...is it a constant value or does it have a minimum value...or is it in a range from 1 to whatever?

I know they reduced the splash...but if it does like a minimum level of damage of like 50 or something (in Q1 and Q2 there was a minimum level of damage a rocket would do resulting from the way splash damage was calculated) or even if it was just the same damage across the board I could actually kind of get behind that. If its just reduced splash damage though...thats another move in this general direction that I don't really like.

It seems that deathmatch style games have had more and more a tendency towards less damage from weapons...and I get the idea of having more prolonged 1v1 combat going on...but that generally happened when you had both players with armor and what-have-you even in games like DOOM and Q1 and Q2 where you had heavy damage dealing weaponry. It seems that this sort of setup tends to encourage these sort of unfinished battles where one guy will run away and that was trickier to do before.

Then again I'm really a DOOM2 guy at heart (though DOOM1 and the Quakes also resonate strongly with me) so I like really punishing weapons in my DM. I'm not arguing for excessive overkill mr pants style weapons or anything (I'm not even saying we need UT99 style stuff)...I just feel that there is a trend toward weaker and weaker weapons in DM games like this to the extent that its almost become expected and I wonder if that best serves this style of gameplay, or if it adds a certain blandness.

Maybe I need to stfu and actually resurrect D2F as a completely different game or something (though I need to actually get the "advanced" lighting system I'm working on actuallly working for the GenArena guys before I do anything else...VBOs, GLSL, and what-have-you are kicking my ass...OpenGL can be a harsh mistress).

Add Q3F and such mods into Qlive and fuu Tf2. Then it might be worth the subscription.

premium mode only maps and modes? Rip quakelive.

i think premium accounts should do everything except the map shin dig. this will split up an already small community. they should just cut out half of the models in the free version, add them plus more in the paid for and add in a ton of skins and shit.

Didn't Intel pay enough WTF? Poor fucks!

Did they add Rocket Arena yet??

im curious what the max player count can be for private servers, sounds pretty good for $4 a month. shack battles :D

Cross-posting my thoughts from the chatty!

Well, the game is fun, and $24/year is hard to complain about, especially with 20 new maps. I guess that the game just isn't drawing the ad support that they had hoped for or expected. The "pro" subscription offering the ability to let up to 3 pals play the premium maps for free is a bit of a balance, too. Also, private servers? Hard to pass up on that for what is really a pretty affordable price.

Aerowalk is one of my favorite Quake1 maps, so it's pretty much worth the cost of the basic subscription to me. I'm not excited at all about a "Freeze Tag" mode, but it could be fun I guess for people who want to mess around.

It will be interesting to see how the new maps cycle into the competitive scene. Will they catch on? Will people stick with the originals? How many different game types are really going to be represented here? Can they make a map that takes TDM to a new level in Quake Live? Or hey, maybe they can just transport over DM3! :D

Overall, somehow this makes the game seem a little more legitimate. Hopefully it catches on with some more people. I've been having a ton of fun with it since I found some shackers to play with on a more regular basis (Lionel/Monty and reelbk in particular) and I hope that the pay-to-play doesn't drive people away. Hopefully the buzz draws some more people in--here's hoping! :D

Are there subtle balance tweaks between Q3A and QL or is everything on that front pretty much identical?

Those are pretty reasonable prices.

if they really want to make money they just have to make dm6 a premium map :P

not letting everyone play all maps and game modes doesn't seem like the best way to boost the community

quake might be the best FPS, but it certainly isn't a popular one. it's hard enough to find non clan arena games without waiting. i guess if you're willing to sacrifice a good ping you can find something most of the time, but not always

wont this just divide the players up. oh well, i wouldnt pay for it even though it is good.

lol

Seems pretty fair to me, although I personally don't have enough of an interest to subscribe. I do hope this helps them keep the service alive as it clearly didn't draw much support from advertisers.

im am so confused right now.