In about 2 hours, the Quake Live Open Beta will begin on www.quakelive.com . What is Quake Live you ask?
Well, from DailyTech:
Quake Live is available for free and will be supported by in-game advertising, id Software said prior to the game’s open beta launch today. The game is built upon the id Tech 3 engine and will have an ultimate focus more on gameplay speed instead of graphics.
“We’ve given it t the accessibility you would expect from a Web game,” id Software executive producer Marty Stratton said. “That enables us to do a lot of things you would expect from a sports site, in the way we present the statistics and information, and a social networking site, in the way we connect people and let them know what their friends are doing.”
Cliff notes version: Quake3 Arena on the Web, with built-in Social Networking features. I’m not sure what exactly they’re running this on client-side, but it would have to be Java, Flash, or SilverLight. No matter which of the 3 it is, it’s impressive that Computers & Web Browsers have progressed to the point to make this possible.
Update Well, it’s online but I can’t tell you much about it unfortunately. They’ve enabled a queueing system so that when I created my account I was marked #28,000 in the queue. It took about 45 minutes to get to the front of the queue, at which point I was told to download a special browser plugin in order to play. The browser plugin is Windows Only (No Mac support). Apparently they’re not using any of the standard technologies, and have instead decided to further fragment the market with yet another proprietary plugin system.
