Tag: Quake

Bethesda brings Wolfenstein 3D, Quake 4, and other classics to PC Game Pass

Several all-time great FPS and RPG titles are dropping on PC Game Pass as part of the QuakeCon festivities.

QuakeCon, the annual celebration of all things ID Software and Bethesda, is nearly upon us. As part of the festivities, numerous classics are coming to PC Game Pass and the Microsoft Store.

According to VGC, the following titles will release for both platforms on Aug. 18, 2022. 

PC Game Pass

  • Return to Castle Wolfenstein
  • Quake 4
  • Wolfenstein 3D
  • An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire
  • The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard 

Microsoft Store

  • The Elder Scrolls: Arena
  • The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall
  • Quake Champions

Anyone with an active Game Pass subscription will receive every Quake Champions hero for free too. That’s about 16 playable characters in total, so it’s a solid perk.

A relatively decent lineup of freebies, all told. Return to Castle Wolfenstein is one of the best entries in that series, and it still holds up well. On the other hand, Quake 4 is the forgotten middle child of its respective series. Being free should ease expectations slightly, thankfully.

As for the Elder Scrolls titles, these are considerably older than Skyrim or Oblivion. So keep that in mind should you download something like Daggerfall. Plenty of great mods for it out there too.

It’s worth mentioning that Doom 64 is currently free on the Epic Games Store as part of QuakeCon promotions.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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QuakeCon 2022 will be a digital-only event yet again

Skyrim and Doom fans will not gather for an in-person event this year.

This year’s QuakeCon will be an online event once again, much to the chagrin of LAN party enthusiasts everywhere.

On Wednesday, ZeniMax Media announced that QuakeCon 2022 be held from Aug. 18 through Aug. 20, 2022, but will not return as an in-person event. 

“Like you, we’re disappointed to not return to Dallas this year,” ZeniMax Media’s statement reads on Twitter. “An event this size requires months of planning, and in this case, we had to make decisions when there was still too much uncertainty to commit to successfully executing an in-person QuakeCon.”

It’s a bummer for fans on multiple fronts. Historically, fans of Doom, Elder Scrolls, and (of course) Quake attend QuakeCon for its massive Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) LAN parties. It’s been going on since 1996, with professional Quake tournaments being the draw for attendees. In more recent years, it’s also an event for Bethesda to reveal games like Doom Eternal.

The good news is QuakeCon 2023 will probably ditch the online-only format.

“We’re committed to returning with our full in-person festival in 2023 and already look forward to reconnecting with friends, a massive BYOC packed with your latest custom PC creations, our wild contests, and tons of great new games and hardware for attendees to try out,” ZeniMax Media’s statement concludes.

QuakeCon 2022 will be particularly interesting since it could be where we see more of Starfield.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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The 15 best PC games of all time

Got your ticket there for the best PC games of all time? Ah, you do. Welcome – come inside.

Got your ticket there for the best PC games of all time? Ah, you do. Welcome – come inside. You can hang your jacket on one of those vectors jutting out from Elite over there, and we do ask that you leave all electronic devices inside this improbably large PC game box from 1997. Look out for all the mouse balls and serial cables underfoot. We’ve tried clearing them out, but they grow back at an alarming rate.

As custodians of this PC gaming corps d’elite, we must lay a few ground rules before allowing you into the great hall. The first pertains to timeliness: PC gaming history spans several decades and many of its most revered titles released during the 1990s, whose incredible tech breakthrough saw leaps forward in both fidelity and ideation. But let’s be real: even if you did decide to go and play the original 1993 version Syndicate after seeing it on this list, which you wouldn’t, getting it to run properly on modern hardware would be quite an undertaking. Therefore, older games must be both playable and still genuinely enjoyable to make the cut, not simply ‘important’.

Secondly: franchises. The industry’s tendency to iterate on its most popular names and ideas means good games are often built on the foundations of great ones – so even though the real innovation might have happened nine years ago, we’re still inclined to put the best overall experience on a pedestal. Often, that means the most recent.

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With our methodology explained, we just need you to sign this waiver that absolves us from responsibility for any injuries incurred by falling CD-ROMs and any attempt from John Romero to make you his – well, you know, and we can now let you into the great hall.

Quake gets a horde mode more than two decades after its release

Monster Kill.

Quake  got an official horde mode Friday. Yes, as in the genre-defining first-person shooter by Id Software that came out way back in 1996. 

In August, Bethesda re-released the retro shooter for modern platforms to a  pretty glowing reception. Machine Games, the studio behind Wolfenstein: The New Order, were vital in Quake’s  remaster. Now, they’ve added a 1-4 player co-op horde mode to the game — completely free of charge.

Horde mode works like this: enemies come in waves while players must mow them down to progress to the next wave. Every third wave, a boss monster shows up. Once it’s dead, players get a gold key that lets everyone leave the level. The faster this all gets done, the more points you get.

Check out a trailer for Quake’s  horde mode for yourself below.

This update also brought a campaign expansion called Honey. It’s quite a neat addition, as it was created by a modder named Christian Grawert years ago. The cool part? Grawert went on to be a senior level designer at MachineGames. Bethesda spoke with him about how he made Honey.

“Originally I made it using WorldCraft and some tools I wrote myself,” Grawert said  via Bethesda’s blog. “For this release though I’ve gone through and updated the levels using TrenchBroom. I was a bit slow with getting started with TrenchBroom, but after getting used to it I couldn’t imagine using anything else these days.”

Wild that Grawert went from being a Quake  modder to actually working on the game.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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