Quake Live Premium Features Available for Free Until Sep. 26

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Bethesda has sent along word that id Software is making the Premium features of Quake Live, detailed here, free for all users until Sunday, September 26. Additionally, anyone who purchases a Premium or Pro subscription during this promotion will receive an extra month of service.

If you'd like to pass along that extra month to a friend, giving them access to the Premium or Pro features, you may do so if you so choose. The Premium features should be available to all members, including new members that sign up today.

Head on over to the official site to get fragging.

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From The Chatty
  • reply
    September 17, 2010 2:31 PM

    Or I could buy Quake 3 during a Steam sale and play with all the custom maps I want for no additional cost.

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      September 17, 2010 2:38 PM

      good luck finding people to play with

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      September 17, 2010 2:40 PM

      Against bots.

      4$ / month for personal servers and maps isn't much.
      2$ / month is nothing.

      And anywho, they have to make money somehow.

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        September 17, 2010 2:54 PM

        You have to pay in yearly increments for Quake Live. There are plenty of people playing the original Q1, Q2 and Q3 games online and you have your choice of mods and maps. I'm not knocking Quake Live--the free model is great if you don't have access to Steam. I just don't think the paid model provides any sort of value considering how cheap you can get the original games for during sales.

        • reply
          September 17, 2010 3:04 PM

          [deleted]

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          September 17, 2010 3:12 PM

          QUAKE LIVE, however, goes well beyond what Quake III Arena offered, by including: friends lists, provides player profiles, global stat tracking with player career stats, match history, match statistics; offers easy to use private server functionality, and is under constant development to bring additional features.

          • reply
            September 17, 2010 4:20 PM

            friends lists and profiles?!!?!?! WELL GOSH GOLLY!! its like quake with facebook

            • reply
              September 17, 2010 5:10 PM

              Obnoxious much?

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              September 17, 2010 7:27 PM

              Way to glaze over on the other, arguably more significant bonuses.

              • reply
                September 19, 2010 9:40 AM

                my bad. match history and stats are so important too.

          • reply
            September 17, 2010 5:05 PM

            Do you guys have any plans to make the base gameplay more interesting? Quake 3 is extremely old hat at this point and I say that as someone who has played the Quake series casually for 12+ years.

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      September 17, 2010 2:57 PM

      You could also not volunteer to be that guy who always points this out in every single Quake Live thread

      • reply
        September 17, 2010 3:04 PM

        Sure could...but I won't.

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          September 17, 2010 3:06 PM

          thanks for that, we were lacking in smarmyness

          • reply
            September 17, 2010 3:16 PM

            I personally don't see the value in the service, or the reason for so many people to become defensive about it either. I'm in no way knocking Quake Live. I love Quake, but would much rather play the original on Steam after having had paid a flat fee and play the free browser version when I don't have access to the standard version.

            Perhaps in the subtext I inadvertently questioned the moral integrity of someone's paternal grandmother, thus invoking quad damage ire.

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              September 17, 2010 3:28 PM

              Are you the lunatic lunatic? :) #spontanctf ftw ;) anyway I see in the way QL works lies the future. They want their money for multiplayer. XBox Live allready does it kinda. And Activision/EA are still shy to rent servers like id does. But DICE sells licences to server companies for the Battlefield series. All this stuff is happening and we can't stop it.

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                September 17, 2010 4:06 PM

                I do see QL being the future in one aspect--potentially a lot more games will become browser-based, or at least the browser-based games that will be released will be beefier. As far as the right to play multiplayer being a paid service, I sincerely hope that it remains relegated to consoles and on the PC MMOs and that future PC games will avoid this entirely.

                I disagree with you regarding the fact that we can't stop it--we certainly can, by voting with our wallets.

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                  September 17, 2010 7:32 PM

                  dude, Quake Live is still free. wtf are you complaining about?
                  quake3 costs money to host server as well and it doesnt integrate friends list or a much more
                  robust server browser.

                  • reply
                    September 18, 2010 7:01 AM

                    To be fair, I can see why people might complain - the Quake 3 community is a small but constant number of people and a large number of folks were very satisfied with that being the case for a long time, now Quake Live comes along and half of them peel off and go to the new free thing, much to the chagrin of those who have been sticking with the original game for close to a decade (over a decade now, actually) because it still offers some advantages over the free version (separate from the advantages the free version has).

                    Additionally, the ultra hardcore contingent probably liked the fact that Quake 3's difficulty ramp in just getting into a game meant that only a certain kind of person would be playing the game. Quake Live, by design, just lets everyone in. There's some mechanisms in place to try and keep the people of vastly different skill levels from interacting but it's unclear how well they work.

                    Regardless, I think Quake Live is an excellent idea - it takes the best multiplayer Quake and makes sure it stays alive in a particular incarnation. I hope they do more over the next few years to address concerns (i.e., mods and custom maps) but I like it.

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              September 17, 2010 5:39 PM

              Because the number of people who play Quake 3 will dwindle over the years and the number of people who can connect to play it online are small. Quake Live is an excellent idea - it makes matchmaking easy, its free, it doesn't nullify the original game, and it runs everywhere.

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      September 17, 2010 5:02 PM

      Good for you. You do that.

      Have fun.

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      September 17, 2010 8:29 PM

      yeah, how about not.. last time i tried to load up q3 i couldnt get punkbuster to update, the built in server browser is the worst ever created, but i didnt feel like finding some other server manager to install so i wound up giving up and went back to QL which is fast, easy and always has populated servers..

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      September 18, 2010 7:50 AM

      Or I could play Quake 3 for free, since there are enough maps for me in Quake Live...

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      September 18, 2010 9:13 AM

      There's a big difference between Q3 and QL - Q3 is good. In it's launch state (before Id started "fixing" things like floor damage and map layouts) Q3 was fantastic. Unfortunately Id started messing with the game seemingly without a clue what they were doing. Id have never made a good game on purpose and the things that made Quake, Quake 3 and Quake 4 so good were either there by accident or added later by the community. These "improvements" have been taken to new extremes with QL and the game isn't worth playing. Both vanilla Q3 and CPM Q3 are better than QL so I can't understand why anyone would pay for an inferior game with a shitty web interface that just gets in the way.

      With the Q3 community now fragmented into vanilla, CPM and QL it's pretty much not worth bothering with. I've gone back to the original and best Quake. If you play QuakeWorld for a while Q3 feels incredibly dumbed down (slow, unresponsive, simplified movement etc) and it makes you realise that it was a considerable step backwards. The QuakeWorld community is very small but doesn't have any issues with people playing different versions of the game so so it's pretty easy to find an opponent for a duel (in Europe at least) and new players do join the community every now and again.

      Since Id have gone from making the best games in the word to garbage like Doom 3 I've got no hopes that Rage or Doom 4 will be any good and won't even bother buying them. I think QuakeWorld will live forever amount people who want the ultimate duel experience and I'm happy to just keep playing it.

      If anyone wants a good duel experience I'd strongly recommend installing nQuake and seeing what Quake should be like before Id ruined it.

      • reply
        September 19, 2010 1:19 AM

        I agree with you completely. I started playing Quake with Quake 2 and then moved onto QuakeWorld, so preference for whatever gamestyle you started with isn't an excuse. There isn't anyone at id software that actually knows how to make truly fun deathmatch games anymore and the fact that they keep repackaging vanilla Quake 3 proves it.

        Only problem with QW is... the NA Quake scene is pretty much a joke and it's impossible to get a decent QW duel unless you want to troll irc for hours. I wish I lived in Europe.

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          September 19, 2010 10:00 AM

          My only major gripe as I remember about QW were weapon related...I hated how weak the SSG and SG were...I got what they were trying to do (or maybe what they accidentally did)...but I ended up feeling that the weapons in general were a less interesting set than what DOOM1&2 had. I did love QW's RL and LG...I enjoyed the GL...but back then I hated the lack of the joy that comes with getting in close and hitting someone with the sack of bricks that was a well aimed really really close up SSG blast...or the constant dodging and jabbing with the SG. The shotguns in Q1 were weird...they were really un-shotgun like to me in gaming terms...I've heard the SG described as the best long range weapon in Q1 at times...and the SSG does 52 damage and has a reload of like 700ms or something...even compared to DOOM's SG, Q1's SSG was weak and it just felt all wrong like this is something that I hammer on to whittle down the other guys health with slowly.

          I really feel that a good SSG type weapon should do a LOT of damage in close...but only if you get in really fucking close...the further away you get the more you should have to be able to hit dead center on the guy to get as many pellets to hit and it shouldn't be much effective at all at the far end of medium range (let alone long range) other than as a finisher or harrassment weapon. Getting in really close in a game like Quake is a challenge all its own and timing that shot when you're in close enough and you've got your shot lined up if far more challenging that people give it credit for, and if you fuck it up...you should be at a disadvantage. But again thats sort of my POV coming from DOOM and DOOM2 originally.

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            September 19, 2010 10:31 AM

            I agree with you as well. Doom DM is still incredibly FUN which makes Doom another example of a game that id software made back before they lost all of their actual game designers. But, as far as modern mouse-look and jump DM games go QW is tops.

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