Quake Champions Leave Early Access After Five Years

Quake Champions is leaving Early Access, five years after the game first came out. According to the developer, the game is well underway and now is the time to fully release the game.

Quake Champions was released in 2017 and transitioned to a free-to-play model in 2018. Community developer Josh Boyle . told IGN at the time that the game on ‘from crawling on first release to walking [bij de f2p-overgang]’ had gone. Still, an actual release, without an Early Access stamp, would have to wait until “the game is really in a sprint.” According to Boyle’s reasoning, that moment has now arrived.

Quake Champions is described on the Steam page as ‘Quake III Arena with a twist’. That twist is the Champions: specific characters each with different traits and special powers. For example, the Anarki known from the original has the ability to give himself a health injection and he can move more agilely in the air with his hoverboard. Ranger can teleport short distances again and inflicts less damage on himself with, for example, a rocket jump. The game has game modes like deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, instagib and more specific modes.

Right after leaving Early Access, Quake Champions peaked at around 800 concurrent players on Steam. In recent days, that peak has been around 600. 71 percent of user reviews on Steam are positive about the game, which is being developed by id Software.

At the same time comes the popular mod Threewave CTF to the Quake Remaster which id Software released last year. It contains nine levels from the original mod, along with the grappling hook and special runes. All of this will be announced in the context of the Quakecon Scholarship. There, the developer also announced that Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein 3D, Elder Scrolls Legends: Battlespire and The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard all coming to Xbox Game Pass for PC.