A major tournament is a busy time for the developers and staff behind a game, and though he’s a busy man, we managed to catch up with Joshua “tokyopunchout” Boyle, Quake Champions Community Manager, to talk about the growth of the game, it’s rise in esports, and how they plan to keep the spirit of the Quake franchise alive while also preparing for the future.
Quake has quite a history, with QuakeCon being one of the first esports events. How does it feel to carry on that tradition with Quake Champions?
It’s a beautiful feeling. Full disclosure, this Quake having so many parts and iterations, all the parts that were so important to all the different Quake’s, like literally having champions that have the movement styles of Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake 3, Quake 4, being able to pull in the different weapons, all of our favorite ones and all of the fans favorite ones from the different games and having them balanced and feel just like they did in that game is incredible. There is really no other place, we go to all kinds of different conventions and esports tournaments and we love them all, but this is absolutely the Mecca for Quake. There’s nothing else like it.
In a game with as long a history as Quake, how do you remain true to the history while also making things fresh for newer audiences?
I think a big part of the design philosophy when we started it was that we were never going to do anything in the game to make it just easy. It's to make it more fun without changing anything about the core aspects of the game which is speed and skill and more of the two of those. And control. Adding abilities was a huge thing for Quake because we’ve never had anything similar to that before. In Quake 3 you could pick up a pack which could do a thing for a second like a personal teleporter but nothing along the lines of specific champions that have different stacks which we’ve never had before. But different movements, different speeds, and now new specific abilities that are unique to them.
So, for example Ranger who is originally from the first Quake, he has a personal teleporter which is the Dire Orb, and with that he can basically get from A to B, but in doing so if it hits you or if he teleports right into you, you explode. Then we have Nyx who disappears with ghost walk, so the variety of who they are and what they are and the depth of the game, where it's not just that everyone has the same stats now here’s the levels be good at it, Now it's all the levels, all the champions, how do you take advantage from that player when you have this specific set and they have that specific set and now it's chess, but it's chess at lightning speed. Because again I'm talking about 1v1 but if you're talking about 2v2 or team battle we're just taking all the best parts not just from this quake but from all iterations of quake
We have the release of the new character today, Death Knight. How does the team work through that, do they identify a niche that needs to be filled, do they come up with the aesthetic and then work out the functionality later?
It’s a lot of different ways. With Death Knight in particular, knowing we might be around QuakeCon, we thought to ourselves, “OK, classic Quake, original Quake, we’ve got Ranger in, who else could we pull in, potentially as an enemy now, from Quake 1? Death Knight. How could we pull somebody in and what would the balance be like”. We took the Death Knight, who is one of the most iconic enemies from the Quake 1 single player campaign, and we said ok, he’s undead, he’s got a flaming sword that when he swings it, three projectiles come out. And then one thing that we couldn’t do back then in 1996, was that he could then hit his ability a second time, once the flames were out, which by the way, they’re projectiles which also have a trail of flame on the ground. So, if the projectile hits you it’s 25 per projectile, and if you go through the fire on the ground its like, I think, 10 damage per second for like 5 or 6 seconds. But if you hit the ability again they all converge on one point, so it’s very devastating up close, and it’s a pretty high skill ceiling ability to use the second half of it at distance. But again, it just comes back to “What are our favorite things from Quake?” that’s the best part is just sitting around the table and going ok, we’ve got all these Quake franchises, Quake 3 and Quake Live have a ton of champions because they already had a bunch of different characters. They didn’t have any abilities and they were all the same stack, but yeah, it’s really just what aligns with all our favorite stuff now, based on all the different Quakes.
Speaking to that ceiling of skill, how does the team work to create a balance of the characters? Obviously different meta’s emerge from the competitive scene that people favor, so how do they balance them to make sure a lot of them see play and not just a handful?
Adam Pyle, our lead designer, is obsessed and drenched in the details of this stuff at all times. Not only is he paying attention to the pro scene Meta’s, but it’s more than that, he’s got an original design for them based on how they’ll fit in different modes. For example, if somebody is not as picked in Duel, maybe they weren’t meant for Duel as much as they were in Sacrifice, or 2v2, or TDM. But always he’s looking at these things and tweaking them, kind of like the fighting game scene, there’s buffs and nerfs happening really every other patch almost. Of course, when we’re getting close to events like QuakeCon, we’re not going to do anything so the players that have been competing have a whole new meta and balance two days before the tournament. But when we have a little bit more breathing room, like between now and PGL, there’s the chance to say ok, where is everything at, what are the things that are being the most used, the most exploited, the less used and exploited, and then we balance around that.
A lot of it is, you know, every game that deals with balance on a big roster like fighting games do, a lot of it is surprisingly small tweaks, not major changes, to make these changes where something can’t be exploited or used as well as something could be days before the patch. I think it’s always just looking at the feedback, and not just the pro player feedback, we’re everywhere on Discord, Reddit, Bethesda Forums, even new players if they’re having a hard time with something, we always just take a look and say, how can we balance this across the board so that new players just having fun and players that are taking this as their profession, how can we make it so that both of them are happy. I think we’ve done a really good job, and last year we did so much of it.
I was speaking to Team Liquid, and one of the players mentioned that some of the lighter characters feel like they need just a little bit of extra armor, just to give them a bit more survivability. But just so much that it doesn’t push them into being OP. Can you speak to the stress that goes into making those incremental changes without breaking them?
The stress and pressure that our team feels, but again more specifically, the genius Adam Pyle, our designer, I think he’s losing sleep half the nights honestly. That’s the person you want in charge of that, not just “this is what we want, play it and we’ll change it when we feel like it”, we don’t have that team and we don’t have that problem. That’s the fortunate thing about the team of really, really dedicated people we have on the Quake Champions team. It’s not just myself and Andre, Carlos, the community managers, digging through the forums and telling him everything everyone is saying, they’re bringing stuff to us and saying “Yeah, but did you see what this guy said on this forum?” it takes a village and honestly, we’ve got it. That village is obsessed with Quake Champions. I think it just takes the level of obsession, to care on all those levels. We’re not just saying that everything we do is right, we can do no wrong, here’s the champion, deal with it. We’re not that. We know the champions are good, we know the art is good, that’s on us. But as far as people play and what the Meta has changed to, trying to keep it fair so that everyone is having fun, that is definitely, you know, we talk about it non-stop.
On the competitive side, you’ve got QuakeCon and other events, are there any steps that you guys are taking, is there any planning going on to make Quake Champions into the next Overwatch League?
I can’t speak to the Overwatch League as far as, you know, it’s just such a different game and a different ecosystem. We’re basically just, today we went free-to-play, not a trial or limited thing, so honestly, from the last year, we’re still in early access now, even as free-to-play. We’ve still got a long way to go as far as all the cool stuff we’re doing, adding new modes and everything else. I think it’s one of those things like everything else, where we’re just doing what we’ve always done by being Quake, in the sense that we make the fastest, most fun game and we’re super dedicated to the competition without being like “You have to be this good to play the game”, that’s not what Quake is about. Everything we did last year and everything we’re doing this year and what we have planned to do in the next few years, everything is always about making the competition bigger and better and doing it in more places.
We’re doing Romania in October, then we’re in Sweden in December, and also in Italy in October. We’re trying to make it accessible so that anywhere in the world, we’re trying to have it so it’s not just “Come to QuakeCon”, North America only. We recognize the competition lives all over the world, that’s why we have servers all over the world. We’re always trying to make the competitions bigger and better. We’re always looking at that stuff, and I’m proud of where we’ve been and where we’re heading. It’s really about everyone involved with the pros and casual players, making sure they know what’s up and we can highlight them all.
Do you see Quake Champions becoming more of a franchise game like League of Legends or Dota, or do you see it staying more, not underground, but like the FGC, less franchised as such?
Yeah, I mean I think we’ve tried to build the programs as more of a series, a continuation from one to the next. It’s definitely how everyone is being seeded. If you did X or where in X position here, it’s not just what is your online ranking right now, we’re going on big LAN tournaments too. We’ve definitely been talking about that kind of stuff for the future, but again right now it’s still just building it up from the ground up. It’s been a while since we’ve had a Quake, and now that we do, Hallelujah, now it’s just seeing the best fits for us, for the competition, and then stringing it together more and more. We’re adding CTF and Slipgate, which is going to go to the PTS first, but the more modes we add, the more ideas we’re going to get. What are we looking at for next year, and the year after that, and after that, which is the fun thing, we’re not just stuck in the one mode and one type. Some leagues, yeah there’s a lot of stuff in the game, but this is the only thing that is competitive, that’s not the case for us.
It's just #QuakeCon2018 no big deal or anything pic.twitter.com/RUFCrn2In4
— QuakeCon (@QuakeCon) August 9, 2018
A lot of people do want to see the return of a CTF mode, and when you look at games like Call of Duty, in their major competitions they do have a cycle of modes. Right now, it’s mostly TDM, Duel and 2v2’s for Quake Champions, do you see that happening for Quake Champions, that cycle of modes in the future?
Absolutely, even from last year we’ve introduces Sacrifice, it’s basically single flag CTF with two bases, even going from there now we’re going to 2v2, seeing all those super groups of four players, how are they going to split, even from last year they’re now trading 2v2 partners. Seeing those mixes is what makes the game competitively fun, the fact that it isn’t just this stagnant mode, these are the teams, maybe we’ll switch one. It basically carries on as “This is who we are, and this is what we do”, because when you change the modes, when you change the game types, you’re getting such different variety. Like you said before with the Meta’s, it drastically changes the Meta, every single mode you’re in which is a big part again, when we were designing certain champions, that was a big, big consideration. Yeah, maybe this isn’t going to be the best Duel character, but in CTF they have to be picked because of X ability they have or because of the movement style that they have.
So, absolutely, we’ve been working super hard on both Slipgate and CTF, and that’s the best thing too, this community that we have is so beautiful in the sense that, we’re in 2018 and we hear from them about everything that they want, and we always try to make sure that the stuff we have in the pipeline is aligning constantly with the stuff that they want. That doesn’t mean that if someone says they want some crazy stuff we’ll just do it, but CTF has been a lot more than a murmur, it’s been a huge wave of people that want that Quake 2 and Quake 3 CTF. So, we’ll see it soon, in a couple months on the PTS, and we’ll let people play with it, break it, give their feedback to let us know what they like and what they don’t, so we can tweak everything to the point where when we get it live it will be the CTF that everybody wanted.
And we are off to a great #QuakeCon2018 let's go everyone! pic.twitter.com/lOKUTjWrua
— QuakeCon (@QuakeCon) August 9, 2018
Back in the day, Quake had a big competitor in Unreal Tournament, and clearly Epic Games has since pushed their focus elsewhere, mostly Fortnite now. Do you lament the lack of competition? Would you want to see that competition come back, that one-upmanship where you’re going back and forth?
As a gamer first, of course I want to see every franchise I’ve played and loved succeed and do well, and just have more games to play. But it is a really interesting point in the sense that we’re the only arena FPS game on the market, period. There have been others that have come out and then fallen back to the point where they are, sadly, less relevant to the player base, but it’s a really unique and fun position, and more competition is always good, but at the same time we’re having fun with being the first arena FPS that some people have ever played. All these young players coming in and are having fun, it’s like yeah, these games have always been fun, we grew up playing them. But it’s so beautiful to be the one that people are coming to first and getting their feet wet for the first time, thinking like, wait, there are no loadouts, I have to earn them? And that’s the armor I need to get in the game and I have to think about where I am and where they are, and what my abilities are. It’s brilliant, super fun.
QuakeCon 2018 is ongoing, and you can find out more information on the Quake Champions tournament on their official website, here. For more interviews from the event, check out our chat with Team Liquids rapha and DaHanG, as they talk about Quake Champions and the evolutions it has undergone over the last year.
(Header image via IGN)
