10 Reasons Why Quake Is The Hardest FPS Of All Time
What they don't tell you is that Quake is always on Nightmare mode.
Whereas once Quake was a household name, now in a world saturated by tactical shooters and battle royale games it has been all but forgotten, its glory days a dim memory in the minds of an old generation of gamers. id Software tried to recapture its magic with Quake Champions, but with only around 600 concurrent players, the game is but a shadow of its former self. There seems to be no place for the arena shooter in modern gaming - why is that?
Perhaps it is because the genre belongs to a bygone era where games were brutally hard and had no tutorials to ease you in. RPG games did not have quest markers and FPS games like Quake and Unreal Tournament certainly did not hold your hand. Game developers did not try to hide your terrible KDR or reward you for getting a whopping 10 kills for a daily quest.
The questionable design decisions and lousy marketing aside, I believe Quake Champions never took off because people nowadays are simply not up for the challenge. Indeed, I spent years trying to get my friends into Quake Live, but to no avail. Most of them developed PTSD after getting railed 15 times in a row and vowed never to play it again.
So, what is it that makes Quake so unapproachable for new players?
10. Movement
The movement itself is a challenge to master, for one does not simply run in Quake. In such a fast-paced environment, running is simply too slow and so players 'strafe jump' instead.
If you have ever played or watched Quake, you would surely have noticed the incessant grunting that almost seamlessly blends in with the headbanging riff-heavy soundtrack. These are the sounds that the characters make while strafe jumping, which is a form of movement that allows the player to gain momentum like 'bhopping' in Counter-Strike. The main difference is that in Quake, you can only strafe jump in a straight line and must stop and restart the strafe at corners with a 'circle jump'.
There are, however, other forms of movement that have been introduced into the game over the years that let you keep the strafe alive, namely CPMA air control and crouch sliding. Both of these are present in Quake Champions and have been integrated into the kits of Anarki and Slash. Thanks to this, they are able to make sharp turns and are resultantly the fastest champions in the game.
I would be surprised if this is not somewhat confusing already and we have not even touched on dodging, rocket jumping, and plasma climbing.