Recently, Creative Director of Quake Champions Tim Willits spoke to Polygon where he revealed that Quake Champions will have both a free to play and for pay option for players.
The free to play option only gives players access to one of the Champions, Ranger. If they want to increase the number of champions available to them, they have two options. Players can decide to buy the Champion Pack to unlock all the Champions to play, or they can use the in-game currency to play other Champions, albeit for only a set period of time. So the free to play version of Quake Champions will only ever give players permanent access to one Champion. So far how much time players pay to have access to anyone Champion is still being decided.
While that may turn off some, the good news is that Willits says they are trying to reduce the feeling of grind that a lot of other free to play titles have. The in-game currency, Favor, will be easy to earn and players should be able to trade it in to play champions frequently.
Favor can also be spent on backpacks, which give players something called Rune Challenges. What those are is not entirely certain yet, but completing one successfully will give players reliquaries, which are loot box like in that they can be opened to reveal skins and new Champions. What it means to reveal a new champion isn't explained either.
Free to play players and those that buy the game will also be playing in the same player pool and map pool; there will be nothing sectioned off. And this ties into part of id Software's reasoning for offering multiple ways to play the game:
But then we also understand that we want to get as many people into the game as possible, especially outside of North America and Western Europe, where we have a massive fan base. So we want to have the flexibility to have a free-to-play option for those people.Quake Champions was announced at last year's E3 and is still in development. You can now sign up for the closed beta here, which will be starting soon.
What do you think of this approach? Do you think that limiting free to play players to one Champion may flood some matches? Let us know in the comments below!
