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Does anyone remember QuakeWorld?
How long have you been playing FPS games online? How about your buddies you play with online or at LAN parties? Have you seen the latest
statistics showing how many people play FPS games online these days? The numbers are amazing, albeit somewhat skewed towards CounterStrike/Half-Life (which, in case you didn’t know, uses some code from Quake1).I say amazing in that I remember when the whole online gaming scene was MUCH smaller and pretty much just Quake1. Ohh the joys of Q1-ThreeWaveCTF via a modem with a 400 ping! Then QuakeWorld came along and changed everything. Soon playing online was seen in a whole new light. But time moved on and the QW scene slowly died out to its current, pathetic state.
Of course the reason the majority of players stopped playing QW was because they moved on to other games. I too moved on to Quake2 and some other games that came along such as Unreal, Tribes, Half-Life, etc. but I always found myself coming back to QWCTF. Like many, I was eagerly anticipating Quake3 and it turned out to be a fine Death Match game. One of the best ever in my opinion. And of course people should play whatever they enjoy the most. That is why we game; to have fun.
However I wanted to address two different audiences with these musings of mine on this rainy day off from work. The first audience are those gamers that answered the first question above with a response of 4+ years. To you I simply ask; when was the last time you played glQuakeWorld? Have you played it on your new Geforce2/900MHZ system with that DSL line you finally had installed last year?
The main group of people I would like to reach out to though, is my second audience. This group is by far the largest group of online FPS players; the 65,000+ players (and that figure is probably low) that are fairly new to gaming. They are new at least in that they never played QuakeWorld over the internet. How large is this group? I figure that the size of the group of QuakeWorld players, back when the game was most popular, is only about 1-2% of the size of the group of all of the online FPS players today!
So what is my point to all of this? Well, I wanted to make a plea to all these tens of thousands of players today; give QuakeWorld a try. And do it soon before QW completely dies. There will always be some few dozen hardcore players who will keep playing, but that will be about it. Why should you stop playing CS or Tribes2 for a day or so and give QW a shot? After all, isn’t the game ugly and just plain outdated? Well of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but running QW in OpenGL (glQuakeWorld) looks great in my opinion. However, gameplay is what is most important and this is exactly the reason you should try QW. To this date I have never played a game that is as fast, furious, and just plain more fun that QW. I prefer CTF but there are many great mods for QW. And the best part is that it runs super fast on today’s hardware. You can play at resolutions and framerates that people could only dream of 4 years ago…
I figure that QW could undergo quite a re-birth if just a few percent of you "newer" players tried, say,
Creeper-CTF or PainKeep. And if the online FPS players of today are anything like me and the other Quake players of the past, and I have every reason to think you are, I know that many of you will like QW as much as I do. So give it a shot. Go buy Quake1, patch it with QuakeWorld, and hit the two websites that combined have all of the QW information you need, PlanetQuake.com and Captured.com. You can thank me later!Spoon!