It may have taken five years, but Bethesda’s long-awaited first-person arena shooter Quake Champions is finally out of early access. The game was quietly released to the wider gaming audience on the same day that Bethesda announced the arrival of several other games on PC Game Pass at its recent QuakeCon event.
Quake Champions was first released in 2017. But since then, it’s been a year of rumors, supposed full release date leaks, and developers saying that the game simply wasn’t ready yet. These sentiments were echoed by community developer Joshua Boyle in 2018 when the game went free-to-play.
Fans were confused that the game was being made free but still wasn’t getting the full release treatment that Bethesda’s other titles did. In response to queries on the matter, Boyle simply stated that the game wasn’t ready. ‘I’d say we were at a crawl [at launch last year], and we’re at a walk now.’
Another reason that Quake wasn’t released fully until five years later may also lie in how the game was perceived on Steam. Even though the game received primarily positive reviews on the popular PC gaming marketplace, it never quite grabbed gamers’ attention the way other games had.
This was in relation to similar free-to-play shooters. Even with the addition of well-known faces such as Wolfenstein’s B.J. Blazkowics and Doom Slayer, the game failed to take the gaming industry by storm.
If you’d like to try your hand at Quake Champions, it’s available for download at the moment. In the meantime, we’re waiting for more news on Starfield.
