LeadHead was reviewing Quake Champions: A Game That Could Have Been Legendary, a retrospective video essay looking back at the game's development, controversial design decisions and unrealized potential. SyncError joined the chat during the stream, correcting some of the video's claims and adding context from his time working on the game.
SyncError, who stopped working on Quake Champions updates earlier this year, also noted that there were limits to what he could reveal. At the time of the stream, he said he was still on the payroll and said that his NDA “never expires”.
Among the details he shared:
- Saber built a special tool to compare Quake Champions movement directly with Quake Live. According to SyncError, the tool took the player's input and sent it simultaneously to two separate clients — one running Quake Live and another running the Quake Champions prototype in Saber's engine. The aim was to reproduce QL's movement and feel and verify that both games produced comparable results from the same input.
- id Software considered id Tech 3, 4 and 5 during early technology discussions. SyncError said id Tech 6 was not yet finished. The team did not only consider using the older engines as they were: possibilities included taking id Tech 3 and replacing the renderer, or using id Tech 5 with different networking. He added that the reasons those approaches were rejected have not been widely discussed.
- Moving developers away from DOOM was never considered an option. According to SyncError, id Software was not prepared to move even “a single soul” from DOOM, which was the studio's main internal project at the time. He said diverting those resources was simply off the table.
- Saber had already spent around 20–25 years working with its own engine. SyncError said the studio had never developed on another code base. He also rejected the idea that its technology was fundamentally a console engine, saying Saber had developed native games with it and that the engine simply supported multiplatform development.
- SyncError described Quake Champions as one way to keep Quake alive while id Software focused elsewhere. He framed the choice as whether to potentially have no new Quake title for many years or to pursue smaller side projects that could keep the franchise active. In his view, both Quake Live and Quake Champions fit that approach.
- Outsourcing Quake development was not new to Quake Champions. SyncError pointed out that Quake 4 was developed by Raven Software in cooperation with id Software, while Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was developed by Splash Damage. He nevertheless agreed that id Software should probably keep Quake in-house when possible.
- SyncError defended some of the work done by external Quake developers. He called Enemy Territory: Quake Wars a great competitive game and acknowledged that it had “lots of engine jank”, but noted that Splash Damage managed to take technology derived from the Quake 4 engine and make it work with much larger environments. He also cautioned against simply blaming Saber for Quake Champions' problems, saying there were “a lot of good people” at the studio.
- Quake Champions did not have one single lead designer. According to SyncError, Tim Willits had an executive role, Saber had its own lead and SyncError himself was also a lead. He described the project as something they all had to continually guide together rather than a game built under one lead designer's vision.
- Early Quake Champions builds had full replay support. SyncError said servers wrote server-side demos to backend storage, while players had a browser through which they could find and watch recorded matches. He described the system as allowing clients to find and view any match that had been recorded.
- The replay system was affected when movement processing moved from client-side to server-side. According to SyncError, the original replay functionality existed before that change. Once movement processing was moved to the server, he said the replay system needed to be heavily retooled.
- Mod support was planned if Quake Champions became successful. SyncError said mods were “always going to come” if the game succeeded and continued receiving the same level of support that it had during early development.
- Scrag Battle was a real experimental mode, but the developers simply did not find it interesting enough. References to Scrag Battle had already been found in Quake Champions data in 2018, with a description telling players to collect tokens and defeat spawned Scrags. During the stream, SyncError explained its fate much more simply: “scrag battle was not interesting”, which is why it was never seen through.
- Other substantially developed features also existed in early builds. SyncError said early versions of the game had a fully working “keys” feature, although he did not explain its intended role or why it was ultimately removed. He also mentioned a “player killer card system” that was roughly 80% complete, without providing enough context to establish exactly how it was intended to work.
- Quake Champions' engine continued changing long after its early development. Responding later in the stream to the suggestion that the engine had effectively stopped evolving, SyncError said there had been “tons of engine changes” over the previous seven years. He pointed to his addition of picmip as an obvious example of functionality that required engine work.
- SyncError did not see middleware such as Havok as an inherent problem. He confirmed that Quake Champions uses Havok and said middleware of that kind was “fine”.
- SyncError strongly rejected the idea that Quake Champions was designed as a hero shooter. His wording was explicit: “This is not a hero shooter and never was.” He viewed active abilities more like additional weapons or utilities layered over Quake's existing gameplay rather than abilities that turned champions into conventional character classes.
- He compared active abilities to items already present in Quake Live. SyncError argued that expecting an ability to turn a champion into a traditional class was like complaining that the Medkit in Quake Live did not make its user feel like a Medic. For him, those abilities were tools supporting the core gameplay rather than replacing it.
- Passive abilities and movement sets were intended to define how a player approached Quake. According to SyncError, “passives define how you play”. Different movement styles were intended to let players choose the form of Quake movement they preferred, while active abilities did not fundamentally change the game.
- The champion system drew partly on ideas that had existed in Quake mods for decades. SyncError recalled his background as a CTF player, where teammates already occupied different positions and collected runes or power-ups that gave them abilities suited to those roles. He stressed that Quake Champions was not literally reproducing an old class system, but was building on a similar design philosophy.
- SyncError recalled the announcements of Overwatch, Unreal Tournament 4 and Paragon during the same broader period. He said he remembered sitting in a meeting when Overwatch was announced and added that the same was true of Unreal Tournament 4 and Epic's Paragon. Elsewhere in the discussion, when more conventional class-style champion roles came up, he responded: “We're not going for that. We don't want that. That's not Quake.”
- Quake's many game modes were both a major strength and a major problem. SyncError argued that successful multiplayer games generally have one form of gameplay that people immediately associate with them, while Quake has accumulated communities around Duel, TDM, CTF, Sacrifice and numerous other modes. He described that variety as both a “huge plus” and a “huge issue”.
- SyncError liked the way Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike handled gameplay variation. He pointed to Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike as games where maps could dictate gameplay differences while the games retained a recognizable central identity. Personally, he said Deathmatch feels too random to him and that he prefers TDM and Sacrifice.
- Duel was consistently Quake Champions' strongest spectator mode. When the Twitch chat discussed the popularity of Duel, SyncError said it had “always dominated” the game's viewership and described it as great to watch.
- CTF arrived after Quake Champions had already lost the team needed to properly support it. SyncError said that by the time CTF existed, “we didn't have a team”. In his view, the mode needed roughly a dozen good symmetrical maps, making proper CTF support a much larger undertaking than simply implementing flag mechanics.
- SyncError did not believe tutorials alone could solve Quake's accessibility problem. He said a tutorial could help players, but argued that mechanics such as strafe jumping cannot be taught quickly enough to retain a broad audience. He also noted that many players do not want to spend significant time in mandatory training before they can start playing.
- An E3 demonstration showed how difficult Quake could be even for avid players of other games. According to SyncError, the team eventually had to demonstrate only Instagib because attendees could not handle TDM — and even then they struggled to hit opponents. He described the attendees as “avid gamers of other games”.
- SyncError believed the “arena” part of arena FPS was a particular obstacle for new players. He said Quake's speed and constant need for spatial awareness differ significantly from many other shooters. Enemies are not necessarily directly ahead on the same level, and players must deal with attacks from several directions and different elevations.
- Creating detailed tutorials for every champion would have consumed significant development resources. SyncError estimated that a proper tutorial for an individual champion could take roughly three months to create. With around a dozen champions, he argued that making those tutorials would mean other things already present in the game would be missing.
- Players did have ways to test champions without permanently buying them. SyncError pointed out that champion rentals existed and that, particularly early in development, players could use freely earned Favor to temporarily rent them.
- SyncError viewed Quake Champions primarily as a game about competition. He argued that even casual multiplayer remained competitive, whether players were competing professionally or simply against friends. In his view, an MP-only Quake would naturally revolve around competition; a single-player game would be needed for it to fundamentally be about something else.
- He described playing primarily for rewards as a “curse”. SyncError argued that reward systems can make people obsessed with completing rewards rather than enjoying the game itself. He also argued that gameplay can become unbalanced when systems are changed primarily to drive engagement.
- SyncError contrasted modern reward systems with the effort players once put into Quake simply because they enjoyed playing it. He recalled that the original Quake did not initially have an integrated multiplayer server browser and that players could connect through the console using an IP address. According to SyncError, a browser arrived with QuakeWorld, Quake II had one, and Quake III at least had a master-server list. His broader point was that players were willing to put considerable effort into playing a game because they were invested in it.
- He originally opposed holiday cosmetics but later changed his mind about some of them. SyncError said he did not want the holiday-themed content initially, but came to like items such as the top hat and chef hat. He said he enjoyed both serious lore content and deliberately ridiculous “complete cheese”.
- SyncError thought Quake Champions' first CGI trailer worked well as a teaser, but the game lacked strong follow-up videos. He described the original trailer as “great”, but said it needed other good videos afterwards: “And we never got those.”
- Marketing Quake gameplay created a difficult trade-off. SyncError noted that inexperienced players could make Quake difficult to show off effectively, while skilled play is extremely fast and can be difficult for newcomers to follow. He also argued that trailers for fast games have become more common over the last several years, saying that showing something resembling modern ULTRAKILL combat in a 2015 marketing video would have been unheard of.
- SyncError considers an old Quake Live trailer one of the best examples of how to show Quake gameplay. He said he was the person who contracted the Quake Live trailer and described it as the best job they had ever done at showing their gameplay. He acknowledged that the video had issues — specifically saying the frag messages should have been removed — but still held it up as a better example.
- Quake Live also had a major advantage when it came to producing gameplay footage. SyncError pointed to the difference between capturing a game that already had roughly a decade of established frag-video tools and capturing Quake Champions while it was still actively being developed.
- The early Quake Champions gameplay trailer was recorded under awkward restrictions. According to SyncError, the footage was captured by someone spectating with a gamepad, while the people actually playing were asked to do so without the normal UI or HUD — including without crosshairs — because those elements were not wanted in the video.
- SyncError said the Quake community has divided with every sequel. During the broader discussion about the franchise, he wrote that the community had “blown up — and divided — with every sequel”.
- SyncError suggested that very few people know the full story of what happened with Quake Champions. Reacting to the “What the hell happened?” wording on the video's thumbnail, he wrote: “I literally think I'm probably the only person that knows.” He added that Tim Willits probably knew as well, but “doesn't recall it at this point.”
- There are still parts of Quake Champions' development that SyncError says he cannot discuss. Early in the stream he said that his NDA “never expires” and explained that violating contractual obligations could have consequences such as forfeiting his severance.
- More details about Quake Champions' design may appear in Retro Gamer. SyncError said he had recently taken part in an interview with Retro Gamer that discusses some of the same design philosophy, although at the time he did not know which issue it would appear in.
The full discussion can be found in the LeadHead stream VOD.
