Quake Champions enters early access next week

Doomguy included

Bethesda’s revival of arena shooters, Quake Champions, will be leaving its closed beta phase on August 22 and entering into Early Access on Steam and through Bethesda’s own game launcher (which I didn’t realize was a thing). While the game will eventually be free-to-play, this current Early Access period will require a payment $29.99 (25% off the usual price of $39.99).

If you opt in to paying for Quake Champions, you’ll receive all 11 currently available champions, any future champions, an early access skin for Ranger and three exclusive loot chests. Along with being able to finally play the game, players will also have access to the DOOM Slayer, clearly inspired by the Doomguy from last year’s incarnation of DOOM.

If you happened to be a part of the closed beta, you can still play Quake Champions for free, but you’ll be limited to launching it through Bethesda’s launcher. You’ll then have the option to upgrade to the “full” version or you can buy champions individually (similar to how the game will work when it finally launches as free-to-play).

All in all, this sounds odd to me. While I don’t mind microtransactions in free-to-play games, putting eventually free games up for sale at regular retail prices just feels wrong to me. Having loot crates and drop rates and all this extra crap in a Quake game is also sickening, since its following a model made popular by a totally different game.

I’m still interested to see if Bethesda has changed the game any from the beta I played at PAX, but I’m honestly not that optimistic about Champions anymore. It just sounds too much like following trends instead of trying to revive a beloved franchise.