Next-gen Quake Arena game shelved

By Tom Bramwell Published 1 August, 2008

Id decided to do Doom 4 instead.

Id Software is no longer planning to create a new, next-generation Quake Arena game after the launch of Quake Live.

"We did decide for a lot of reasons that we wanted to just push hard for doing Doom internally," technical director and co-founder John Carmack told the audience at QuakeCon 2008 this week.

"The door's not completely shut for another Quake project, and I would say that probably the success of Quake Live will determine whether we do another Quake project," he said.

However, "right now the publishers aren't all that interested in a multiplayer-focused game on there," he said, "and they're probably right. Quake for this coming year is Quake Live."

As for what a next-gen Quake Arena might look like on multiformat, all Carmack would say was: "It would have to be a 60Hz fast-action game."

Last year id Software announced that it was creating a second core development team that would begin by creating Quake Live - then known as Quake Zero - as a browser-based, stat-tracking, free version of Quake 3 Arena.

The plan had been to then push that team towards a new Quake Arena title, but Carmack's comments at QuakeCon 2008 put that project well on the back burner.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

You may also like...

Comments (15) Latest comment 1 year ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Rodney #1 4 years ago

    When they say next gen quake arena, they dont mean the XBLA quake 3 thing do they?

    I quite liked the crowd control gameplay of the original Doom/DoomII. Some more of that would be nice

  • t8yman #2 4 years ago

    I think so rodney, I'm gutted about it too.

  • Rodney #3 4 years ago

    Bugger.

  • Zomoniac #4 4 years ago

    Fucking hell. Q3A is way way way way better than Doom 3. I would go as far as to call Q3A the best multiplayer FPS ever, online at least. Cunts.

  • DFawkes #5 4 years ago

    I suppose it's possible they thought that Unreal Tournament 3 was enough arena shooters for this gen. It's still rubbish if they scrapped Q3A, it was my first online game and I've always had a soft spot for it.

  • asphaltcowboy #6 4 years ago

    /is gay for Q3A!

  • Machetazo #7 4 years ago

    No, they're talking about a full-blown, multi-format sequel to Q3A...:D
    Depending on where you read this story, you get different emphasis, lol. Some make it seem that Carmack meant, that if Quake Live is successful, that will effectively green-light a new Quake Arena game. I hope everything aligns right, for that event to happen.
    Edited by 1 at 01/08/08 @ 10:37

  • asphaltcowboy #8 4 years ago

    Yeah, that's how I read it to Mach - let's hope it happens! I will definitely be playing plenty of Quake Live when it arrives and there will be a purchase of Q3A if it ever hits XBLA!

  • Eraysor #9 4 years ago

    I imagine this was shelved because UT3 performed so badly.

  • Perjoss #10 4 years ago

    bad move imo,
    id are good at making engines for others to make great games on (or in the case of quake3, the players make up all the gameplay themselves) a quake arena for current consoles / pc is what we need, but i guess they are being clever as to not blow away their own quake live (correct name? you know that browser / ingame advert driven thing).

  • Sar #11 4 years ago

    Yeah I can't believe how unpopular UT3 has been tbh, totally amazed.

    Even now, post-patches, it's still a damn wasteland online. Q3 has more players online than UT3.

  • Darren #12 4 years ago

    Why don't id just farm out the original Quake to a third-party that creates XBLA games? I believe the forthcoming conversions of Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie for XBLA are not being coded by Rare.

  • Skywise #13 4 years ago

    @Sar: Is UT3 stable now? Even after the first patch it was hanging a lot so I gave up on it.

    And I was just beginning to think the age of bug-ridden pc games was past :(

  • Sar #14 4 years ago

    @skywise

    Yeah it seems fairly stable, but I know what you mean about the crashes, as it crashed quite a bit on me previously.

    Maybe that's why there were so few people online playing it?

  • SaturnVengeance #15 1 year ago

    NO!!!!!!