Quake Champions was announced at E3 this year by Bethesda, making it the third classic id Software IP that Bethesda and id Software are looking at reviving, after their successful reboots for DOOM and Wolfenstein. However, puzzlingly enough, it was announced only for PC, and not for consoles, unlike those other two games.
Speaking with Finder, creative-director Tim Willits discussed the reasons for not bringing the game to consoles- simply put, it is because something like that simply would not work.
“Well we can run Quake Champions on consoles now because, you know, it’s just code,” Willits said to Finder. “But we want to run it really fast, we want to have the full twitch aiming, and we want rocket jumping, which is really hard on consoles – really hard. So we feel that for a competitive game to play at events like QuakeCon, the PC platform is the best. Although, and I mentioned this at E3 where it all got blown out of proportion, I am not completely shutting the door on consoles. It’s just not what we are going to do now, because we would have to change the game. Consoles cannot do the same things [as a PC].”
He was asked if this might change with the upcoming Xbox One Scorpio and PS4 NEO- they are more powerful consoles, so surely they should be able to run the game at the speed that matches id’s vision? However, Willits specified that the limitation with consoles wasn’t necessarily their power, but rather, their controllers which impose limitations on a shooter’s design.
“[This decision] is not about the hardware. It’s about how hard it is to play this type of game with a controller,” he said.
So no, it looks like even the Scorpio and NEO can’t improve the odds for Quake Champions on consoles- if you want to play this game, looks like you’ll have to play it on PC.