What FPS games will Quake Live have to compete with in 2009?

After reading this interesting article “2009 is looking dry” by Peter Molyneux, head of Lionhead Studios, I wondered what games could be Quake Live’s rivals in 2009.

Any interesting games recently?

Honestly there haven’t been any good sci-fi first person shooters for ages. I might be exaggerating but actually there hasn’t been any good one since Quake III Arena back in 1999. Well, actually I enjoyed one FPS game, namely PainKiller. The game was really bad out-of-the box but when it was elected as the 2005 CPL worldtour game it had the support it needed to become a good game.

Other FPS games like Doom 3, Quake 4, Unreal Tournament 3 … never really broke through. Those games were all made very well but they missed too many features to remain interesting on the long run.

The real success games in the last few years were all realistic shooters like Mohaa, CS, COD1-5, battlefield, …

And what about the future?

Looking at the game releases for 2009, I do not see that many games in the genre of Quake Live either.

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin might just be an interesting game. Though, as its main focus is not on competitive gaming I do not think it will be a competitor of Quake Live on the long run.

Maybe Severity could be an interesting game … if it will ever be created. This game is an upcoming first-person shooter, funded by the Cyberathlete Professional League’s parent company, it is currently being developed by Escalation Studios and will blend different FPS gameplay styles, separating them as individual game-modes. An interesting article over at gotfrag.com, makes me curious what this game will look like. At least I like the fact it will be on the Quake 3 engine.

First person shooters like Call of Duty & Counterstrike are of course big competitors as well. Both games have a very big and active community. The success of these games can be attributed to many factors. 2 Factors have been vital to make these games a success, in my opinion. To start with, those games are very competitive: a lot of cups and events are organized which keep the game alive. Another, maybe even more important factor, is the reasonably low learning curve.

Obviously the real competition will not come from the shooters but from games like Starcraft 2 and of course the game that has millions of hooked up players, namely World of Warcraft.

Challenges for Quake Live

In all fairness we have to admit the quake community has never been very big. Therefor Quake Live’s main goal will definitely be to expand its community and attract new people to this wonderful game.

Id software made a great choice to create a free webbased game. The advantages are obvious but let’s list them anyway:

• It’s free! Most gamers aren’t very wealthy as most of them are students so it is a big advantage if you can offer a game for free.
• It’s easy to install. You just register on a website, press a download link and hop on a server. Who doesn’t want to test a game that’s so easily accessible?
• The matchmaking system makes it fairly easy to play matches against people with the same skill. This is definitely the most important aspect of the game to attract new people to the quake community.
• The game is created by people with years and years of experience. All of id software’s game have been of excellent quality.

This should be able to convince people who have been playing games like Call of Duty, Counterstrike and other games to try something new after playing the same game for years and years.

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