Quake Champions isn’t Overwatch, but it borrows the right ideas

Let me just admit this upfront: I haven’t played a lot of Quake in my life. During that time of the late 1990s, I focused on Nintendo 64 shooters like GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark. Please don’t flame me. So id Software‘s return to Quake Champions doesn’t mean the same thing to me that it might mean to you, but I can still appreciate some of the anxiety around the changes this game is making to the Quake formula.

While the classic entries in this series delivered a multiplayer arena where everyone had the same basic capabilities, health, armor, and movements, Champions introduces heroes. And while that might sound like the antithesis of Quake’s beloved skill-based gameplay, I am coming away from the beta thinking that the subtle variations between each characters gives Quake the complexity it needs to justify a new game in 2017.