Funny how Blizzard won’t make a new Starcraft or Warcraft and this old game comes out of nowhere having a 80k+ tournament with 50k+ viewers and probably even more concurrent players as the latest Starcraft 2.
The aoe2 community is amazing. The game was on life support, well behind major esports, barely kept alive by random arbalet events and the like. They started developing mods, somehow convinced Microsoft to take over and now there's a series of AoE games and AoE2 expansions. Superb stuff.
And this is despite the game being, as cool as it is, not adapted for esports, with drawn out earlygames where very little happens and the like.
I see some similarities to Quake here. Old classic game. In a niche which requires skill. No professional support left. Owned by Microsoft. Still a loving and never retreating community.
We could easily develop new or q3 mods. Many games were made though and they didn't particularly attract attention, and people don't tend to fully agree on why, so it's hard to see that as likely to work.
I guess what's truly different is we can't make new content, new expansions the way AoE folks as long as we're sticking to the perfect abstraction of no classes, same abilities for every player. We're probably too bitter and stuck in our ways to do that.
I still think Quake could much bigger than it is, but it's much more likely with a developer that has some clout. If Valve did a good Quake game, it'd be at least sc2 sized imo.
I met someone who wanted to make a QC mod for QL. I explained to him that it’s not possible, only possible for Q3. Then he was not interested in doing so anymore. My guess is that he does not want to base his mod on a game which is not played. That is the bad part about it. The Q3 standard is QL which is closed source.
It's based on the Excessive Mod which kind of tried to offer an alternative to QL. But all it could do was to create another sub community, not replacing QL. I guess Q3plus will only achieve the same. As is wrote in the other thread, QL will not be replaced through a mod, not even an exact QL mod, that is pretty sure.