See also:
- the Fridge page
- the series-wide Awesome Music page
- Abridged Arena Array: The so-called "Big Four" in Live: Aerowalk, Asylum, BloodRun and Campgrounds.
- Ensemble Dark Horse:
- Visor, Anarki and Slash are some of the most used characters in the game, to the point where all three of them make a return in Quake Champions.
- Orbb is popular due to his unique design, one of the main reasons he's quite requested for Champions.
- Crash is up there in being one of the more popular characters in this game, mainly due to being a Distaff Counterpart to the Doom Guy. With many fans clamoring to see her again, either in another Quake or any kind of id Software game.
- Fandom Rivalry: With Unreal Tournament. To this day, debate rages on over which is/was the better game. Basically it came down to whether people liked the gliding, fast-paced, artificial play of Quake or the more gritty, slower (complete with head-bobbing and footsteps) shooter with weirder weapons. While Unreal Tournament got better reviews
and helped popularized certain tropes (Announcer Chatter, Capture the Flag, even Instagib as a gamemode) and Quake III did win in the Competitive Multiplayer market (no wonder, with help of Quake Live), neither game aged well in the long run, though III, From a Certain Point of View, got the last laugh. Quake lost its title as king of multiplayer FPS first to Counter-Strike and, eventually, to Call of Duty, as the realistic modern warfare trope started to develop, and the attempted comeback with Quake Champions didn't work as it should, while Unreal Tournament tried to reinvent itself as a Battlefield style vehicle-based game but didn't get anywhere near the popularity of Battlefield 1942 which was released several years earlier, and eventually got a failed reboot whose mismanagement and poor reception led to Epic Games themselves shelving the whole series and retiring it from all stores. At least Quake III, Quake Live and Team Arena are still being sold. Still, it's a friendlier rivalry than most though, and many of each game's players also frequent the other, and both parties (along many more parties outside of both fandoms, definitely consider both games as strong contenders for "best FPS/multiplayer game of all time". - Follow the Leader: Alongside Unreal Tournament, Arena started the multiplayer-focused craze.
- Game-Breaker:
- The BFG, changed from an imposing, slow-charging superweapon in Quake II and Doom to a Plasma Gun + Rocket Launcher on Steroids. It's little wonder that the weapon was not added to Quake Champions.
- The three new weapons from Team Arena, when taken outside of the pack: the Nailgun, the Chaingun and the Prox Launcher.
The Nailgun is a Shotgun with heavy-hitting nails which are guaranteed to destroy you unless you have the Guard rune.
Like Quake II, the Chaingun is a faster (thus ammo consuming) and even more heavy hitting Machinegun. Also, the same deal as with the Nailgun, in that you need the Guard rune in order to survive this weapon.
Finally, the Prox Launcher's mines can be blown but are hard to spot and players can even shot mines directly to their opponent, who will suffer "Spontaneous combustion" at the end of the timer, and cannot be removed by any means except death. To add insult to injury, these are the only weapons whose shots can trespass the Invulnerability shield, insta-fragging the shielded player after the explosion who had the bad luck of having a Proxy attached to it. - The Runes themselves in some maps, with the exception of the useless Ammo Regen rune:
The Guard rune saves the player from almost any hit and regenerates health to the very top.
The Scout rune favors Hit-and-Run Tactics, especially in non-frag based gametypes. Not even the fact that it doesn't allow armor carrying will stop a very smart player who can and will steal flags before the defense knows there's an attacker in their base.
The Doubler rune can be coupled with the Quad Damage for 8x the amount of damage. Think of the disaster someone can do with weapons such as the Plasma Gun (which now is on par with the BFG), the Chaingun, the Nailgun and the BFG itself (enjoy your easy "Excellent" awards).
- Harsher in Hindsight: Wrack can say "You're making it harder for me to go through airports" in a game released two years before the founding of the TSA.
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Unreal Tournament III includes a slightly modified version of Team Arena's "Harvester" mode called "Greed"note . As an answer of sorts, Live includes Domination as a gamemode, as well as Instagib versions of "Free For All" and "Capture the Flag"note .
- The previous installment had a secret Easter Egg room with a Tank having a lovely time with two Iron Maiden. Along comes Tank Jr. being the offspring of such love!
- Also from II, this isn't the first time that the authors insert themselves in the game.
- Your first fight in the demo (second fight in the full game) takes place against Ranger in a map which also has a statue of Visor (whom you meet later in the game). Ranger and Visor were the first two playable characters announced for Quake Champions.
- Sarge claiming to be in his bio "a master of modern warfare".
- It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The Steam version of Live, as it's basically just III Arena in all but name due to going from matchmaking-based multiplayer to more traditional server-based play.
- Most Wonderful Sound:
- The gib splat sounds chunk-tastically satisfying.
- "Impressive!"
- "Excellent!"
- "QUAD DAMAGE!"
- Also, each weapon sound four times beefier when you collect this powerup. This was intentional.
- Nausea Fuel: Several of Cadavre's quotes reference maggots, bodily fluids, and his own curious status as a living corpse.Cadavre: I let you hit me because I like to watch the pus run.
- Nightmare Fuel: Picking the (aptly enough) "Nightmare" in the difficulty select screen (not the skirmish screen) is pronounced with the sound of a spooky demonic groan.
- Polished Port: Each of the console ports for the game have proven to be pretty good in running the game smoothly and capturing it's feel. The main (and sometimes only) criticism these ports face is how the game plays with a regular controller.
- The Dreamcast version is often considered to be the best among them, with there even being servers for that version up to this day. With the right patches, it's technically even crossplay compatible with PC players altogether, albeit at obvious performance handicaps and PC players having far better controls if you don't plug in a system-compatible mouse and keyboard.
- Most of the time, the only criticism Quake Arena Arcade faces in reviews is... "Not enough people are playing it" (and its elevated price). Which says a lot about this port, as well as the fact that some of its content found its way back to Quake Live.
- That One Boss: Xaero. To summarize, he takes the Railgun and ALWAYS HITS, and if he's close to you, he can simply waste you with the BFG or the Rocket Launcher. Oh, and did we mention that he's hard to hit? Try playing against him on Nightmare.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Every single change made to Live inevitably leads to dozens of forum posts complaining about the change.
- Until the Steam release, fan-favourite and Tournament Play mainstay maps such as Blood Run, Wicked and Aerowalk being limited to subscribers.
- The Steam preparation update has the addition of loadouts, weapon-independent ammo, in-game item spawn indicators, the addition of the Heavy Machinegun, and single-button-press strafing, among other polemic changes. Paradoxically, most of these changes were accepted when Quake Champions was developed.
- The game going from a Free-to-Play game with optional paid subscriptions to a Buy-to-Play $10 game with sub services retired.
- The game going from a browser-based game to a Steam-based app.
- The BFG being changed from a slow firing super weapon that does massive damage with each hit to basically a souped-up plasma gun was disliked by many, which is likely why all the future incarnations of it (such as in Doom³ and Doom (2016)) it was changed back to its original functionality.
