The Other Game: Quake Live

The EVE universe is an incredible place, and I can’t help but be hopelessly in love with it.  It’s staggeringly vast, full of thousands of star systems, and players who inhabit them.  It’s stratospherically complex, a multifaceted universe which you could visit for years and still not understand in it’s totality.  Around every corner, after every jump, there is something new to discover, to learn, to experience.  Nearly most importantly of all, every action has consequence: every fleet movement and every trade, every PvP kill and every contract scam, each is  a a long term, well planned course of action you consider, and then reap the benefits or suffer the consequences.

That’s also why I hate EVE, and why, when  I can’t stand another minute of travelling through space looking for a lonely target to kill, or when I’ve harvested gas for hours and I’m bored out of my brain, I tend to come back to Quake Live.  It’s a game that’s as far away from EVE as humanly possible, both in terms of gaming philosophy and mechanics.

I absolutely love it.

When Quake 3 was first released, nearly ten years ago now, many would have argued the day of the bog standard, doom-like “shoot everything that looks at you funny” shooter was over.  Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike had changed the way people looked at First Person Shooters: people wanted sophisticated game modes, objective driven maps, complicated team work and tactical gameplay.

Then came Quake 3. It wasn’t complicated, or advanced, or difficult to grasp.  It had no complicated storyline, no daft new game mechanics.  It’s guns were bog standard, it’s single player lacking, and yet, it was as close to a perfect multiplayer experience as most people had ever known, the single best competitive shooter in the world.

Why?  Well, in hindsight, it’s relatively simple.  Quake is basic.  Not in a bad way: it just cut away all the elements it didn’t need to be great.  It focused on taking the shooter and slimming it down to it’s very core: fast, competitive twitch gameplay, with great maps, balanced weapons, and looking damn great in the process.  That was all it offered, but it did it so incredibly well, that it took the world by storm.  So well in fact, that it’s now be remade, and brought back to life, from the comfort of your browser.

It’s because of this minimalistic design philosophy that QL is such a great alternative to EVE.  CCP has concentrated on making EVE a game that’s huge.  So huge, in fact, that none of it is quite perfect.  Ask any EVE player, and they will be able to give you any number of game features that are broken, or unbalanced, or not quite right.  We accept them, look over them, deal with them as an unavoidably side-effect of such a complicated game.  EVE isn’t a game, it’s a simulation, and like with all simulations, when you create a world of that scale, some of it isn’t going to be quite right.

Quake Live however, has barely any flaws. It’s simple, yet perfect.  Quake Live is catch to EVE’s football.

Like EVE however, it isn’t for everybody.  It boils gameplay down to raw shooter skill, and if you don’t have it, prepare to suck.  A lot. Competition is balanced and fair, but the flipside of that is that a better player will continuously pound your face to the floor without breaking a sweat, wait for you to respawn, and then do it some more, just to watch you cry.  To a large degree, that’s been compensated for by QL’s matchmaking system, but still expect to have your gaming arse handed to you on a silver platter on a regular basis.

Stick with Quake however, and I’ll promise that just like me, you’ll improve, and you’ll fall in love.  You’ll love the maps, you’ll love the guns, you’ll love the adrenaline rush, you’ll love the fact that you can actually go and shoot stuff without spending ten minutes roaming the stars looking for a neutral.  You’ll love that you don’t have to activate modules, fit your ship, or deal with your corp.  All you do is log in, point, and shoot.

Oh, and don’t forget to move.