The next update to id Software’s competitive shooter, Quake Champions is set to arrive sometime before the holidays. In a livestream last week developers from id outlined a lot of the bigger changes coming to the fast-paced arena shooter with the next update. Players can look forward to the reveal of a brand new playable Champion, increases to health and armor for better player uptime and a major adjustment to how the Tribolt weapon works.
Below is a brief summary of the changes mentioned in the stream based upon community input. Please note that this is a summary only and not official patch notes from id or anything like that.
December’s patch should include:
- Customizable crosshairs with different color options.
- 2 Vs 2 Team Deathmatch support.
- Small armor packs will respawn faster.
- The inclusion of a currently unrevealed champion.
- Tribolt’s rounds will no longer explode when hitting the ground. They will instead stick to walls and detonate as if they were proximity mines, giving players area of effect control.
- All champions will receive an armor/health increase to allow for longer survivability.
- Player selections for starting weapon (shotgun / nailgun / machinegun), as well as their preferred datacenter, are now saved client side.
- Anarki and Slash max speed reduced slightly.
- Doom Slayer’s berserk ultimate ranged reduced.
- Frames per second cap will officially be supported, alleviating issues with game upload speeds being tied to high framerates.
- A new, smaller map, similar to Lockbox coming for Duel Mode.
- Capture the Flag supporting coming in 2018.
- Character mesh/hitbox fixes coming in January or Feb 2018.
Quake Champions was released this past August from open beta into paid Early Access. Since then the game has struggled a bit, especially with the previous October Update which brought significant performance issues early on that were fixed with a series of hotfixes throughout last month.
December’s patch will bring a new injection of content with the new duel map, small group TDM support and Frames Per Second tied to upload fix. Hopefully, this will entice some new players as well as those who might have left the game to come back and check it out.
Quake Champions is expected to enter free to play sometime in 2018, it is currently available to play for free on the Bethesda Launcher for anyone who participated in the Closed or Open beta phases. According to Steam Charts Champions averages about 550 players per hour during any given 24 hour period.
Watch Developer Stream w/ Tim Willits and Adam Pyle from QuakeChampions on www.twitch.tv