Quakecon 2016: The Quake Champions gameplay trailer is gloriously gruesome

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Quake 3 is hands-down, the very best arena-style deathmatch shooter in the market. Yes, even today. The likes of Halo, Call of Duty and Battlefield have established their own niche, and Unreal Tournament is a distant second, but Quake was there first and even now, almost 15 years later, Quake 3 still has no competition. In fact, id Software’s own developers couldn’t improve on it with Quake IV .

The upcoming Quake Champions looks set to change all of that, however. We only saw a cinematic trailer at E3 this year, but at QuakeCon 2016 , we got our first look at the game to be. The video is only 76 seconds long but oh my, what glorious 76 seconds they are! The gameplay seems as fast-paced, brutal and as gruesome as Quake should be. The graphics are also stunning, which is to be expected, given that it’s probably based on Doom’s id Tech 6 engine. Most of the gameplay elements that veterans will love and know seem to be present, including jump pads, rocket jumping and even strafe jumping. I am a little worried about the lack of weapon pick-ups in the video; timing weapon respawns was an integral part of Quake’s meta-game, after all. 2016’s Doom also dumped weapon pick-ups in favour of class-based combat, and it wasn’t as much fun as I hoped. To each his own however, and to be fair, the trailer only shows off pre-alpha footage. Give me DM17 and a rocket-launcher though, and I don’t think I’ll care about the rest of the game.