Recently, I was invited to beta test a new browser game by an ambitious small company. A browser game? What the hell? Yeah, that's what I said too.

Anyway, I took some screenshots with FRAPS.

Well, I can't really come up with too many conclusions with deep ramifications since I still have twenty tons of adrenaline still running through me, but one thing's for sure: This "id" company has got an amazing thing coming up with this "Quake Live" game. I've tried playing Quake Live even on the embarrassingly underpowered 4 year old Dell junkers at my lab, and it was amazing to see a browser game run so smoothly in 3D and at 800x600 in a tab in Firefox. So I don't want to hear anyone complaining about big PC games and their bigger system requirements. If you can post on these forums, you should be able to play Quake Live. Although...you'll probably get your ass kicked over and over again :p

However, the skill matching feature has thus far kept things really fair too; even Halo 3 can't touch it. You get the option to choose between skill matched matches or matches which are either challenging or very challenging. It's really refreshing to see that and especially to see it work. Oh, and so far, I haven't seen any of the typical idiocy that stereotypically plagues XBL or Counter Strike. I'd say more, but I think I'm going to go back to either play more or to recuperate :p

Oh, and is anyone else on the beta? I would like to play with people who aren't totally random strangers for once :]

More information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_Live

And sign up for the beta here: http://www.quakelive.com/

Yeah, i heard about Quake Live a few years ago, awesome to see its nearly finished. 2009 is going to be the year id software return.

mark_n_b:
So I'm not sure I follow? This wasn't id? i.e. why call it this "id" company?

As for the accusations that people make about gaming systems needing to be top notch, I will point out that such is the norm for almost every major PC game that has been released, so until the software / hardware that makes this browser game as efficient as it apparently is becomes the norm, the point stands.

And is the whole Quake 95 in a browser thing the promising future of PC gaming? Doesn't seem a huge deal to me, I've seen similar developments like that all over the place, browser based competitive game-play and 3D environments don't seem special to me. Where is the most promising future aspect of PC gaming in this platform?

Free broswer based games have been extremely popular on the PC for years now. EA is also trying to do this with Battlefield Heroes. I think its very promising what they are trying to do here. I wouldn't knock something like this because its this kind of stuff that tends to lead to better things and new ideas. Something the PC platform has been great at along with bringing new technology.

Who knows, give it a few years and you could be playing new big name games in your browser over the net and its entirely possible as the web gets faster.

So I signed up but didn't get any email.

Anyone knows why? Shame really because I wanted to add another game to my "Pwns Everyone" list.

The engine runs client-side. And the most amazing thing is the match load times: they're almost always under 5 seconds.

Eggo:
The engine runs client-side. And the most amazing thing is the match load times: they're almost always under 5 seconds.

What do you need to do to get in the beta?

Sign up for the beta and wait. I forget how long I had to, but it was a couple months :\

Heh, I was playing in a matched game. Protip: Unless you're really damn good, avoid instagib servers. I forgot how sore my ass could get after 15 minutes of instagib FFA :[