Quake Live Enters Open Beta!

This week on Tuesday (February 24th) the beta for Quake Live opened up for all to try and test it out completely free of charge! Quake Live has been in closed beta for a long time now (almost a year I think) with the only way new people were getting in was if someone they knew had access and was able to invite them or they got lucky enough to get an invite to the beta through the website. At the beginning of February I was lucky enough to finally get invited to play in the closed beta and I can say that the game so far feels just like Quake 3 Arena.

For those of you who might not be familiar with what Quake 3 was exactly let me take a minute to explain it a bit. Quake 3 was probably and still is the most popular 1 vs 1 first person shooter (fps) game to ever be released and played competitively. It was orginially released in December of 1999 and is actually still being used in compeititions today for gaming tournaments around the world. Quake Live is a project that ID Software (the creators of the Quake series) started in 2007 to make Quake 3 playable from inside an internet browser and be completely free to play against other people or bots on the internet. The game is going to be completely free to everyone and in the website you have a profile which tracks ALL of your stats from when you are playing (everything from how many kills with each weapon to how many times you kill a certain person). It is giong to be funded from in-game advertising which will be used on a few billboards placed in spots around the maps.

At the current moment there are around 30 different maps in the beta, along with 4 different game types ranging from Free For Alls to Capture the Flag. Within the first 24 hours of the beta being open to the public, they reported having over 100,000 accounts registered and have and to place a queue on the site to keep it from being overloaded and un-usable. Overall with my experience so far in the beta I have been nothing but extremely impressed with everything as it feels like I am playing Quake 3 Arena all over again on my PC. It is shaping up to be an awesome game so I encourage everyone to check this out. Only downside right now I have found is that it only works in IE and Firefox running in Windows, but they have already announced they are working around the clock to get it up and running in more browser and as well as Linux and the Mac OS. So finally I will leave you with a video of some footage from in-game! Enjoy!

www.quakelive.com