Quake Champions "might have something to show" at PAX West

Quake Champions had some of the spotlight at QuakeCon this past weekend, showing some new content and becoming free-to-play, and after the keynote we caught up with community manager Joshua Boyle to talk about the move to free-to-play, and how this will work with champions.

"Yeah, so for right now if you get it and you download it, you have, I believe it's seven days, you have access to every champion, so you can basically try every single champion out, you can jump into any kind of game mode [...] and in doing so basically it sort of sets everything out to see who you like and who you don't like, so when the rotation is over for that week, at that point you have Ranger as we all know [...] but there's also a weekly rotation each week of one champion that will be a free-to-play champion," he said.

"You can always grind in the game to earn favour, and spend that to actually gain more champions over time, but if you are... like some people like myself who's a little bit more old-school and you just want access to everything so that you don't even have to make the decision of 'oh, who do I have and who do I not have?', for a limited time right now there's an offer for the Champions Pack [...] you get every champion in the game right now and every champion we'll ever release for the entirety of the game."

The Champions Pack right now costs £19.99, and one champion we saw at QuakeCon was Death Knight. We asked about this rather intimidating character, and Boyle told us:

"Ah, Death Knight is, as some of you might know who played the original Quake, was a pretty fearsome foe. He's an undead warrior who... his ability in Quake Champions is, when he swings his sword, it's called a Flame Strike. So you have three projectiles of fire that go out which actually trace flames on the floor, all of which are sort of like spit where, if you walk through them you're then on fire and get that damage over time, and then you can actually hit that ability again and all of those flames converge, so he's super nasty. He's actually really, really fun right now."

As for how many champions are in the game, "right now it's 14. So we talked a little bit about it in the dev stream, we're gonna try to do one more this year, and I think at PAX West, or PAX Prime as some people know it, we might have something to show, we'll see."

What do you want to see from Quake Champions in the future?