AP: Our immediate focus is on improving the performance, network code, and stability of the game and implementing our latest gameplay balances. Making the game more responsive improves the quality of play for all players, and it is important to implement our more recent balance adjustments for Champions and weapons before the Quake World Championships qualifiers begin June 29th. While we will continue to update the game and bring improvements throughout the summer, we will want to limit the amount of balance adjustments we make while qualifiers are underway.
Looking beyond this week, two of our largest priorities remain Onboarding and Progress Loops. Our onboarding efforts include additional tutorials, training maps, and UI/UX improvements to build a better user experience for all our future newcomers. The implementation of new progression loops introduces new game systems we’ve designed to keep players coming back throughout the week, every week.
Meanwhile, our art teams are hard at work at generating additional content such as costumes, weapons, and vanities, keeping your loot boxes full of new items to earn, and our animation team is hard at work on… some big surprises.

I would love to play him but next to Scaley and Sorlag he is like 2x easier to hit and his passive is sadly pointless (damage reduction)
AP: Coming soon: Clutch has a new passive, a hydraulic Dodge, as well as a second-stage trigger to his active ability, we call the Plasma Mining Drill. The combination brings some much needed mobility and offense to our power hungry robot. Rejoice.

AP: We have already made several changes to Sacrifice in anticipation of the tournament, and plan on making a few additional improvements before the Quake World Championships. Duel we are continuing to receive feedback and will be making adjustments to the mode as necessary, but in general we don’t want to make many major gameplay changes to modes, Champions, or weapons during the qualifiers. There will be opportunities to consider minor changes between regionals and QuakeCon, but most sweeping changes would follow the tournament.
Given that tournaments will always be a part of Quake’s life, in the future we plan on building that cadence of updates into our tournament schedule, such that we have a preseasons to test changes, and major additions such as new Champions won’t be made available in the immediate tournament seasons.

JB: Quake Champions will indeed be released on Steam. You will still be required to have a linked Bethesda.net account, but users playing the game from Steam will not go through the Bethesda.net launcher. During the current beta period the game will only be available through the Bethesda.net launcher.