Quake Live rode the crest of games as a service. Built initially as a web experience, id Software stood at the boundaries of asynchronous social development. Though the implementation was not ideal for many, the initial technical achievements were real. As senior developers departed id in pursuit more fruitful (not solely monetary) opportunities, the deflated Quake Live development team lost direction. The technical achievement of the beta release was the third-to-final clearly defined goal for the project.

The easy availability of the Quake 3 gameplay experience on then-modern platforms shocked an aging community into activity, spurring a series of tournaments that, while epic to players and fans of the game, are slowly fading into irrelevancy as the weighty crush of the pestle of a bountiful and massively productive gaming ecosystem grinds their ever-weakening memory into the dusty mortar of history. In many ways, the achievements of Quake Live, both technical and social, blatantly surpassed those of Quake 3, though Quake Live lacked the inherent impact afforded to Quake 3 by virtue of the context of its release in the much sparser and much less perceptibly technical gaming ecosystem of the late 90s and early 00s.

Quake communities, like most--if not all--internet communities, were rife with contention incited by strongly-held opinions expressed in absolutes. Where some would argue that rifts between players resulting from differences of opinion about the merits of various aspects of Quake Live--to name only a handful, gametypes, playstyles, maps, netcode implementation, and refugee crises--inhibited participation, my position has been, through many years, that these clashes of perspective helped energize and divide the community into distinct subcultures that passionately advocated for their ideal qualities of the game. This tension between subcultures generated dynamic competitions that both stoked fires of life into the community and satisfied a classically masculine desire to establish the superiority of the positions adhered to. Without such oscillation of collective energies, players who aren't satisfied with merely excelling at the game became disinterested and wandered to more socially engaging or less socially conflictory communities.

As the years passed, a vocal minority community manager-approved player opinion panel pushed for whimsical changes sourced from their personal experiences and desires, resulting in a schizophrenic pattern of development that drove much of the less-vocal majority of dedicated players to other communities and games. The quality of development declined rapidly, resulting, at one point, in broken netcode that fundamentally altered the online experience in many negative ways, such as broken rocket jump consistency. As a service, id Software provided servers for users, and the quality of those servers also declined notably as the game aged, with many users getting drastically different representations of the game state at any given moment, resulting in an unsatisfactory feeling of inconsistency that subverted the mechanical and strategical facets of Quake Live gameplay that were, and are, so alluring as to be almost universally appreciated by players who otherwise reserved no respect for the opinions of others with regard to particulars of the game layered, in Quake Live's case, haphazardly atop of the pure foundation of interaction with a competitive system in an arena of well-defined boundaries for skillful development and growth.

The second-to-final clear goal for Quake Live was to modify it in service to the development of a beta for the ideas that would ultimately culminate in the production of Quake Champions. Features such as loadouts--the selection of default weapons that players started the game with--were forcibly inserted into previously cherished gametypes with, seemingly, no regard for or analysis of the motivations players held for enjoying them. The sycophantic vocal minority steadily voiced complaints over the inability for new players to gain a foothold in the sheer cliff faces of distinct plateaus of skill, and posited a variety of solutions that omitted variables that, if considered, nullified their conclusions and invalidated their solutions. Quake Live, in a convergence of technical stagnation, problematic implementation, and misguided development, shed its players with offensive disregard for player satisfaction, and soon the rabble had driven away the undesirable masses who so restricted their personal enjoyment of the game, and would have found, had they possessed the self-awareness to do so, that in their pursuit of the promise of progress, they'd only hastened the collapse of a once vibrant ecosystem. As the player base shrunk, the distinctions between skill tiers came into sharp focus, and new players attracted by the mechanics were confronted with less dynamic, less favorable, and less manageable experiences. In the pursuit of modifying the game to appeal more to new players, the sycophants had actually driven a greater wedge between the new players and their ability to enjoy the game.

The path to hell is paved with good intentions.
- Plasto, ca. 5 BC

The final goal of Quake Live was a tragically late love letter to a doomed community more than decimated by alienating changes and counterproductive decisions. Classic features of Quake games, such as dedicated servers and modding, albeit severely limited, were implemented, allowing for some extension of (greatly waned) vitality to the remaining player base. Steam integration allowed for smoother socialization and organization, and the Steam workshop integration promoted and normalized creative development that is readily available to all players, eliminating much of the hassle of obtaining requisite content that previous Quake titles suffered from. I can only wonder at the impact of such features had they been implemented at the onset of the release of Quake Live. Artificial limitations to end of match map selection were lifted, loadouts were ousted, and the restrictions to players experiencing the game as they desired were lessened, allowing for the remaining players to cultivate experiences and subcommunities that continue to drive community activity. Server quality increased, netcode was much more consistent, and players finally had a game they could exercise control in. The server supply was no longer artificially rationed by developers to funnel players into new undesired gametypes, and instead rose to meet the demands of the community.

For me, Quake 3 was hours of RA3 on the same map, liberally seasoned with a dynamic variety of rewarding, fun, frustrating, and infuriating social experiences that acted as hooks sinking in to drag interest out of what is, otherwise, a very sterile system of competitive mechanics of play. Though Quake Live's final--what I call--apology release provided some appreciated relief to the decimated player base, it had also shattered that endearing and engaging social experience through the implementation of modern pacing introduced by console games, such as greatly shortened map cycle times. Where in something like RA3 players of any skill could join servers and run around the same map for hours, developing familiarity and comfort with new environs and sharpening their mechanical skills, in Quake Live players are ushered quickly through a variety of maps, any potential flow they may have developed eliminated with each transition. Where in something like RA3 the vanity of winning the game came third or lower to socialization and the enjoyment of combat, in Quake Live the pursuit of winning on a given map takes priority, as the definite end of the match creates a pressing need to perform, resulting in differences of skill becoming frustrating and distracting from the enjoyment of diverse situations, and an overhead of stress that obfuscates playful engagement. Gameplay patterns developed in the restrictive temporal boundaries, causing further unfulfilling frustrations to players who held and continue to hold inflexible expectations for the perpetuation of such patterns.

Quake Live, now, is as it should have been 10 years ago, and Quake Champions, regretfully, carries the torch of schizophrenic direction that served as the catalyst for the demise of Quake Live. From my perspective, it appears as though Tim Willits drove Quake Live in a direction that allowed him to trade the contracts of Saber Interactive's involvement in the development of Quake Champions for a lucrative executive position with Saber once the wilted teat of development ceased its secretion of nourishing productivity, unfairly placing id Software in an untenable position with no recourse to salvage any potential Quake Champions's appeal to a greater audience.