The Quake Champions Guide for Serious Players
If you are just starting to test the seemingly unforgiving waters of Quake Champions, take heart! While the legacy of Quake may seem daunting, it’s all based around a few fundamentals that, if learned, separate the hapless victims of railguns and explosive bolts from the perpetrators. I’ve organized a list of ten tips for you, in order of importance, that are simple and effective ways to top free-for-all scoreboards and ranked ladders. Once you come to grips with how Quakers operate, you’ll be continuing a videogaming legacy that has lasted for over two decades.
You'll start out looking like this guy, standing still and trying to plink away with your awful machine gun.
Tip 1: Learn Your Hotkeys
One of the most common causes of death in a match of Quake for new players is simply being inflexible. Having an appropriate weapon is important, and knowing how to select the weapon you want seems simple, but it isn’t directly explained in the tutorial. Learning which weapons are assigned to which number keys is simple enough, but pressing anything past “5” is going to cost you precious time in the middle of a firefight. To put it simply, the keys you must learn are Q, E, and R. Q selects your Rocket Launcher, E selects your Lightning Gun, and R selects the mighty Railgun. These are the three most useful weapons in the game, and being able to whip them out immediately is vital.
Tip 2: Always Have a Solid Weapon
So, you’ve just been reduced to a perforated mess, and after a couple of seconds, you hit the spacebar and respawn; what should your first goal be? Right now, to those other players cavorting around with their powerful guns, you are a walking pile of points that they want to add to their own hoard. You should be headed directly to the nearest weapon pickup. Don’t make the mistake of fighting players along the way, either; it’s tempting to think that your immaculate skills will let you dominate with your awful starting weapon alone, but those are to be used only as a last resort. Grab something reliable before anyone finds you and get back to separating enemies’ spinal columns from their brainstems as quickly as possible.
Tip 3: Learn the Map
There are only a few maps in any Quake game’s list, and this is for good reason. Quake Champions has updated versions of classic maps, and these are all twisting pretzels of teleporters and jump pads that are easy to get lost in. It may seem like background knowledge, but death comes swiftly in Quake, and you’ll always need to know your escape routes, as well as how to avoid getting stuck in a corner with some robot shoving a buzz saw in your face. Always be making mental notes of which teleporters lead where, and the fastest route between the weapons and powerups. Thankfully, the developers have been releasing map guides like this one.
Blood Covenant, a great map with an edgy name. There are about 6 different ways to get to that rocket launcher.
Tip 4: Check Your Aggression
It’s tempting to try and roll across your enemies with unchecked zeal, laughing and shouting with glee as you smash through enemy lines like a runaway train. However, this momentum is going to run out fast, as your remaining 10 health can be taken away by even a single starter machinegun bullet. If you are suffering, always retreat and try to get your mojo back; Quake Champions is a score-based game, so avoiding death is just as important as getting kills. Only a team or player with a positive kill/death ratio is going to win, and if you just saw that Galena grab the mega armor you were hoping to get, back off!
Tip 5: Learn Your Spawns
While Quake Champions as an overall game is quite a finely balanced affair, and individual fight is rarely a fair one. A very important part of Quake’s gameplay is making sure to load up on as much health and armor as you can while hunting for kills. The two impulses feed on each other to create momentum—the guy with the most health and armor is going to survive the most fights, and winning fights will in turn give you more space to keep grabbing these precious items. Pro Quakers are always counting down in their heads until the next spawn, but a good place to start is to start getting a sense about how quickly these items respawn. The Mega Health and Mega Armor pickups respawn 30 seconds after being grabbed, small armor and health take 15 seconds, ammo boxes take 20 seconds, and hourglasses (they lower the cooldown on your ability) take 30 seconds.
Getting both that Quad and the mega health will almost guarantee you many kills. Even that eyeball looks like it wants them.
Tip 6: Learn How to Go Fast
So, by now, you’ve learned how to put yourself in the right mindset to start succeeding, but you’ve started to notice those players who move like they’re on pogo sticks (and cocaine). Knowing item spawns is one thing, but now you need to get to those spawns faster than anyone else, and there are two important elements to moving at this speed: bunny hopping, and strafe jumping. Bunny hopping is easy in Quake Champions—by holding down the jump key, you’ll keep hopping forever, and in Quake, jumping this way means you’ll never lose speed. However, to increase this speed, you need to strafe jump. This tutorial should have this subtle type of movement covered for you.
Tip 7: Know Your Champion
You’ve been practicing Quake Champions for a while now, and you’ve found that your style of play matches another character better than the starting Ranger character. Knowing how that champion’s main ability works should come first, but every character has some sort of passive that noticeably alters how they move or react to danger. For instance, Scalebearer is unique in that he won’t lose speed while walking and can even run faster and faster if you don’t turn too sharply, Sorlag and Anarki can turn very sharply while bunny hopping which lets them move like agile hunters, and the Ranger takes less damage from his own rockets, letting him rocket jump without sacrificing as much of his own HP.
Not pictured: the hungry players down below waiting for someone to fall into their jaws.
Tip 8: Understand Your Weapons
You probably have a favorite weapon at this point, as well as some weapons you can’t kill reliably with, but it’s important to know the best usage of each gun. Projectile weapons are good openers, and are best used in tight corridors, where enemies have trouble avoiding the fan of death-dealing pips moving towards them. Rockets are especially useful for controlling enemies’ movements as well, which leads into the next style of weapon: finishers. Hitscan weapons like the shotgun and railgun are great for finishing off opponents who are either about to escape your murderous intent or are stuck moving through the air after a rocket blew up at their feet. This relationship leads us to the next tip, which is about combos.
Tip 9: Learn Some Combos
Most of the weapons have varying degrees of control over enemies. Things like the rocket launcher and lightning gun have powerful knockback, which lets you physically put an enemy where you want them to be. Aim is important, but it’s always better for enemies to be easy to shoot. Knocking an enemy into the air and blasting him into the void with the railgun as he sails through the air is immensely satisfying and will likely make your opponent fear you in the future. Real humiliation, however, comes from pushing some uppity Visor into a corner with the lightning gun as you approach, until they fall upon your melee gauntlet with no way of avoiding it.
It's clear that our robot friend will be losing this duel, as he is not moving.
Tip 10: Practice, Practice, Practice
Quake as a series has always had a very devoted following, and this devotion ultimately comes down to the fact that you always feel yourself getting better at something like Quake while you play. The more you play, the more you’ll learn, and the finer intricacies of Quake Champions will become visible to you. Once you feel competent, there’s nothing quite like strafe jumping at high speed around a corner, swapping to your rocket launcher, popping someone into the air, and seeing their giblets rain down behind you, all while still zipping by without stopping. It’s not all reflexes; knowing when it’s safe to attack, knowing where it’s safe to attack, and knowing who’s dangerous are all more important than reacting quickly. These are skills that transfer to just about any videogame out there, so if you learn them well, they’ll stay useful.
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