I tried it a bit to see what's up.

What's new: it lives inside a browser window. No flash or silverlight, though: you install a plugin for Firefox or IE, and BAM! your browser becomes a slow host for a 10 year old game.

Yes, because the game is... Quake 3 Arena inside a browser window.

Pros:
- it's free
- it runs on my machine (damn, it's Q3A after all)
- you can play the training stage while the game downloads the rest of the media contents
- when looking for an online game, it suggests games you will find challenging with your skill level (adaptive shit)
- it's Q3A

Cons:
- it's hosted in the browser, but still needs you to open ports on the router (no http tunnelling or other junk)
- long queues before you can download or join
- still lots of crashes :(
- it's Q3A

Discuss.

So what is the advantage of this over say, playing Quake 3 other than the fact this is free and Quake 3 isn't?



The new and improved King of Lamers 2003!

I got access to the beta a few weeks ago. After registering and all of that, i got an error about needing to open some ports. I figured that it's just not worth the hassle, since i've got plenty of other multiplayer games to play. When the open beta began the other day, i tried again but the page wouldn't load after i registered. Too much work for never being much of a fan of quake 3 anyway.

I guess it's neat in that it runs in a browser, but being free doesn't interest me. I've seen a few screens, and it hasn't aged well. I would've been more intrigued if they released an updated version, with slightly new visuals and sold it for something like $10-15. Nearly every FPS these days comes with some sort of multiplayer component anyway, which is plenty for me, since i can only devote time to 1 or 2.

> So what is the advantage of this over say, playing Quake 3 other than the fact
> this is free and Quake 3 isn't?

Yes

>
>
>
> The new and improved King of Lamers 2003!
>

> So what is the advantage of this over say, playing Quake 3 other than the fact
> this is free and Quake 3 isn't?


it's pioneering a new delivery platform. it doesn't give me a boner, but it usually ends up making money and saving money for people.

i'm more of a brick-and-mortar type.

the biggest problem of quake live is that, well, it's vanilla q3a. i still play CPMA mod and got used to its behavior and physics, fast weapon switching, all the good things, you know...

when the beta test was still at the closed stage i played maybe a five or six clan arena matches. boy, it felt like a cripple even trying to bunny hop and strafejump.

also kinda sucks that so far they have very few totally new maps (it has every vq3a map minus q3dm0 and tourney5, couple from team arena although that addon was complete crap) and the old maps were somewhat retouched to have quakelive logos in 'em, etc. lack of good maps... there were not so many really good arenas in original q3a to begin with.

and now, when they went to the open beta testing, shit, the queues! like, 13000? the best bit is the online statistics though. some people also don't notice the "fullscreen" option too.

so yeah it's basically q3a. with online matchmaking and statistics. id is probably testing this online thingy on a 10 year old game and they will probably include this feature in their following games (doom4).

so... i'd rather play challenge pro mode arena.

p.s. don't care about the visuals, q3a looks fine to me. i prefer eye candy in the single player. but - they removed the gibs. now instead of fountain of blood and pieces of meat you get wussy-ass sparks. wtf.

> So what is the advantage of this over say, playing Quake 3 other than the fact
> this is free and Quake 3 isn't?

Joining online games is supposed to be somewhat easier.

For id, however, there is the advantage of deploying a 3d engine (and god knows what else) in a number of browsers. This goes beyond their usual release of a game as a tech demo for their engines :)

Something about this browser-based Q3 is different from the original. The mouse movement is weird and I can't hit shit. I guess I just need to get used to it. It seems like from Q1, 2, and 3 the feel of the mouse movement has changed. I think my favorite one is Quake 2; the rail gun is so easy to aim in that game but I don't do too bad in Q3.