Quake Live (and mods)

Quote

Shack: As far as capitalizing on the strengths of the PC, will you be planning any kind of community generated content or mod support?

John Carmack: Not initially. That's been one of the toughest questions that people have asked us from day one, is how we're going to be integrating all of that. It is a tough call I expect.

Marty Stratton: Yeah, it is. I mean, in making a system easier--and again, as John has said, this is kind of a test case for us, so we're solving these issues to some extent as we go--in making the system easier, it's required us to take control of a lot more things that we normally do. Taking control of servers, taking control of content, delivering that content--as you probably went through the registration process, you downloaded maybe 180 megs of information basically without even knowing it, because it happened while you were playing your warm-up match. Those types of things require us to take control and somewhat close the system a little bit.

On some of the mod stuff, we've actually talked to the mod teams, particularly the competitive mod type stuff, who have maintained a community of people continuing to play the game nine years later. And we've incorporated a number of things that casual players won't know about. In fact, they're things that will actually make the experience a little bit better for players, but also things that experienced players will really appreciate: weapon tweaks, physics tweaks, networking tweaks, anti-lag stuff. Things that have been done in the mod community previously. We talked to those groups, and in some cases contracted those people to roll that stuff in on our site.

As far as content goes, it really is something that I want to bring in as we go forward, and as the product gets successful. My personal feeling is that it will come in more like user-generated content comes into, say, current social website communities. An idea would be like: we make our SDK available, we run a level design contest, a certain period of time passes, we take those levels, weed out the ones that basically aren't up to some level of quality, and then we put those up on the game, and they go out to everybody. So that again, we don't get that fractured community, where this person is running this mod, this person is running this map, and when you connect to the server it doesn't know that you have it--which is kind of the current state of the original Quake III.

But basically we push all this content to everybody, make it available to everybody, and then on the website we can enable people to either automatically, or by their own input, vote on this content, or put it up a ladder of quality or preference. And then either reward or award the people who created that content, or [reward them] just because it's up on the site and it's the most played map out of all of this user generated content, just like a Youtube video has a certain cache when your stuff rises to the top. I think that is probably the future of the way we're going to be able to deliver new content.

And of course I say all that--that won't be what we do initially. What we're initially focusing on for our first release is getting this core experience, this technology all in place to create a great user experience. But I think down the road, as we do roll in that type of content, we're thinking of new ways to integrate it.

John Carmack: But it's worth remembering that Quake Arena is not going away. It's still there, and I can very much see millions of people making Quake Live as their entry into that, and then the mod community will probably have a huge boost from all of this. The people that want to do something different that's not [supported] in Quake Live, well they've still got Quake Arena. It's open sourced and they can do anything want in there, and build whatever new mods they want, and I would expect this to have a positive effect on that entire community on a lot of different levels.

Marty Stratton: And because the fundamental engine and really the game hasn't changed, we can actually take Quake III content, a Quake III map--not so much a full mod--but a Quake III map, and it basically comes into the game in a matter of minutes. It's very easy, so, you know, it could be something where it just reinvigorates the Quake III mod scene, and we can continue to take a look at that and bring stuff to market that makes sense.

Short answer: No mods, but you guys are free to send us content and we might use it.

I'm suddenly less interested in the project. I've never gotten into an id game for its vanilla mode.