14 DAY TRIAL // Free, browser-based first-person arena shooter Quake Live is heading to Steam, and in order to prepare for the massive event, the game is also getting a hefty update with a bunch of new features meant to make the title more approachable for newcomers.
Quake Live was announced for Steam back at QuakeCon, ZeniMax Media's fan convention, earlier this year in July, and the development team is busy getting the game ready for the influx of new players that everyone expects once the shooter goes live on Steam.
The latest update has already been applied to the game, and most of the changes revolve around broadening Quake Live's appeal, including things such as allowing players to select their loadout, the primary and secondary weapons, as well as other miscellaneous tweaks.
Players can now hold jump in order to continuously vault, and hold forward and jump, allowing them to slowly gain up to 2x their base movement speed, a trick known as "bunny hopping," that even professional sprinters such as Usain Bolt employ, because we all know that simply running is not nearly enough.
The loadout menu allows players to select one Primary Weapon and one Secondary weapon, and users are now able to switch between the two with a single key press. Furthermore, Ammo Packs are now global, adding a small amount for each weapon you possess, instead of being weapon specific.
Friendly fire has been disabled across all game modes, and weapon spawning time has been unified to 5 seconds across all of the available game modes. The ammo respawn timer has also been cut down to 10 seconds, from the previous value of 40, and there are now in-game timers for armor, megahealth and powerups.
In addition to this, the dev team has also included a new weapon, the heavy machinegun, and has operated some other global changes such as HUD support for widescreen monitors, customizable damage number indicators, and other such tweaks.
The update of course comes with a fair share of technical improvements, implementing a whole slew of bug fixes, and the devs are confident that the game is better off now.
That opinion however is not shared by a part of the shooter's fanbase, with many members claiming that the game underwent the classic "dumbing down in preparation for a console release" treatment that many franchises were subject to over the years.
Fortunately, the devs have the fans of old-school action covered, as the state that the game was in before the update has been preserved in the Classic mode.
"We feel that these elements overall help bring Quake one step closer to being a modern shooter, while still holding true to our roots of remaining an incredibly fast paced old school shooter. We've had a lot of fun with these new additions, and hope that you learn to appreciate them," the dev team states.
