It looks like Nightdive Studios – a developer known for its work in video game preservation thanks to its remasters of classic titles – might be working on bringing back classic Quake games in remastered form. While the studio hasn’t made an official statement about this year, a pinned comment during one of its recent livestreams included a tease of, at minimum, Quake 3 Arena getting a remaster.
As spotted by Reddit user kjurban, the pinned comment during a recent Twitch livestream by Nightdive was “All eyes, I mean Orbbs will be on that announcement lolol,” referring to the studio getting ready to announce its next project. For context, Orbb is one of the playable characters from Quake 3 Arena. The character is essentially a large eyeball on a small metal body and a pair of organic-looking legs.
This report would indicate that the announcement by Nightdive Studios will likely happen at the upcoming QuakeCon – a yearly event that celebrates games made by id Software, but modern as well as the classics. Traditionally, QuakeCon has served as a home to quite a few classic game announcements, including the Nightdive-developed enhanced release of classic shooter Quake 2, which was unveiled at QuakeCon 2023.
Considering Nightdive’s history with bringing back classic games to modern audiences, complete with quite a work going into making sure that these games work well with modern hardware, the studio seems like the obvious choice to bring back the multiplayer-only Quake 3 Arena.
When it was originally released all the way back in 1999, Quake 3 Arena broke the trends set by its predecessors by being multiplayer-only. A single-player game mode was available, which pit players against AI-controlled characters in the various multiplayer maps and modes that the game launched with. As was tradition for id Software at the time, Quake 3 Arena also served as the introduction to several graphical technologies that would go on to become commonplace in game development shortly afterwards. This included spline-based curved surfaces, allowing for more varied level design, as well as advanced AI with more difficulty options.
Quake 3 Arena was quite popular when it first released, eventually spawning a dedicated player base that these days lives on through Quake Live. It would get quite a bit of support over the years, both from id Software thanks to the release of the Quake 3 Team Arena expansion, which brought in a host of team-based game modes and maps, as well as from the community itself, which made several maps and mods for the game.
Nightdive Studios is relatively fresh off the release of System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster, which came out on PC back in June. The console version of the game – available on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch – was released just a month later in July. For more details about the remastered classic sci-fi horror game, check out our review, where we gave it a score of 9 out of 10, praising the gameplay, narrative, pacing, and revamped visuals, while criticising weapon degradation and some skills being poorly balanced.
