I am not convinced that the battle royale idea is good. But i think it was a good thing if we could go back to Q3
because then we would be able evolve the game. QL is closed source.

The big problem in bringing back Quake 3 is that there is Quake Live which de facto is Q3 because there are all the players. To bring back Q3 we would need to take back control from QL. But how we do it? How do we convince all the QL players to come back to Quake 3?

In my opinion, i think people want to continue to play QL style Q3. Because that what they are invested in for the last 10 years or so. So i think what we would need is to recreate the whole QL experience in a mod. Same menus, same maps, same physics, same rulesets, etc. That way people can switch without having to get used to something new.

Let’s imagine there is such a mod. Now imagine you wanted to switch to it. What would you expect to find? Empty servers yes. So there is this next problem that is the problem from before that all the people are still in QL and don’t want to switch.

Next question is, how to fill the servers?

We could organize tournaments to slowly gravitate the audience to the QL mod. But that takes time and it is not sure if it even works. I think the killer feature here was if the QL mod allowed to connect to QL servers. Then it would be really easy to switch for QL players. But still now, why would people want to switch to the QL mod? For a QL mod you would need a legal copy of Q3, download the mod and install it. For what? For no advantages?

Thus the next question is, how to get people to use the QL mod?

You would need to stay compatible to QL servers as long as the people are still using the QL client. So you can’t change anything engine-wise like physics or rulesets. I don’t have a plan here but the QL mod could be better in the community features though. All the things that were said why QL failed. Let’s say that is the way to go. So now we have to build features into the QL mod that are better than the ones from steam and let’s say QLstats. You see the problem?

Summarized i think it’s pretty unlikely that it can go back to Quake 3. Creating a QL mod that is compatible to QL servers might not be only technically challenging, because you have to blindly reverse engineer the closed source parts but also legally because i guess connecting to a QL servers without the original QL client won’t be allowed. Now take the time into consideration to do that. I guess like say 3 years? 5 years? 10 years? I mean it’s closed source and its only a community development, nothing fulltime-ish.

And if you have that perfect QL mod, still nobody is using it, your work just starts by evolving the QL environment, because you can’t evolve the game itself by now.

And imagine you made this, all the people play the QL mod. Now you want to let’s say increase weapon respawn time to 15 seconds. What would happen?

Everything a highly unlikely story. I guess the only authority that can evolve Q3 is id software. But they will make Quake Champions titles from now on and left us with this stalemate of a situation regarding Q3.

So what can be done?