Quake Live to become standalone

Holysh1t, time is flying and there’s been some interesting news lately. One of the most interesting bits of news is the announcement that Quake Live will be turned into a standalone game. A lot of people see it going back to the roots of Quake 3 but there’s more to it than just a Quake 3 re-release. 1 of the most discussed items is the discontinued support for Linux and Mac.

When the client will be released is still vaguely positioned at the end of year. The change will mean that a lot of things will be different, but a lot of things will stay the same. The core game as it is, with it’s web-based approach will be exactly the same as it was. The rolls of game and browser have been flipped around, meaning that you will launch the game and then browse quakelive.com from within the game itself. Quake Live will therefore be exactly the same as it ever was. However, all community added extensions by means of user scripts will become useless, because there is no longer a browser involved, something that a lot of people seem to be overseeing.

Will it be the end of QLRanks and user scripts? Luckily, no. The website will still be accessible via any browser, allowing people to see profiles and stats. This will allow QLRanks to crawl the site for stats and keep providing everyone with ELO based rankings. Most people at this point will find it very tedious to look up every player manually in the QLRanks database to compare ELO, but QLRanks and Id Software are working on a solution and they are confident that they will be able to provide the same service as before.

In the multiplatform department things are looking a bit grim. Linux and Mac will be cut out of support. The launcher is made in .Net and doesn’t play nice with Mono. This launcher authenticates the user to the Quake Live network, and then launches the game with his credentials. It is an important part of the login process. Then to finish it up, the framework used to display webpages in the game has Linux support, but is not as developed as the Windows version. Supporting Linux and Mac will only take away from other QL development, and we understand SyncError and sponge have a lot of other issues to resolve.

Here is a first screenshot of the standalone Quake Live

posted by sponge in #quakelive on IRC

Tl;DR? Linux/Mac out, standalone game in. Feature set stays the same as vanilla QL website offers.

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