Reviews - QC: Doom Edition mod for Doom II

Has single player and coop. Many seem to forget about it.

Incredible work has gone into making this mod and there is a great community that plays it.

imagine playing doom with the arsenal of quake, choose the class that fits your style, tons of maps since 1994, deathmatches at crazy speed, variety of options to mix and build your own experience, this mod has everything

Instant Mod of the Year without any question. Seriously, the quality of this mod is so insane that you can say it plays better than the real Quake Champions. Play this now!

this mod is just great.

Simply the best, QCDE is iconic

A very dynamic and interesting mod in which everything is good, graphics, gameplay and optimization.

This is the best doom mod I've ever seen. It has multiplayer, a single player campaign and a horde mode. The multiplayer is worth the price of admission alone. You are able to switch between Quake style and Unreal style and both feel true to their inspiration along with competent bot opponents and a working server browser, it's just super duper fun.

The weapon models, player models, levels, soundtrack are all amazing.

New version requires an weird *** port. What happened to the compatibility?

I'm a huge fan of Quake Champions. I recently hit 1100 hours played on Steam there and continue to play it. Both its innovations and its loving tributes to older Quake (and Unreal) games simply outweighed all of its shortcoming by a huge margin for me and I rated it firmly as my #1 favorite multiplayer game of all time.

But then I tried QC:DE, and after some deliberation I simply have to give QC:DE the edge overall.

Now, if you're out of the loop, Quake Champions took the old Quake 3 formula and added 16 different selectable player characters, each with a different movement style from different AFPS games, different armor class, hurtbox size/shape, a few passive traits and an active ability on a timer such as teleport, an extra weapon, a grappling hook, a few seconds of invisibility or a force field or wallhack etc.

These champions were not totally different classes with different weapon loadouts like in Overwatch or TF2. They were still fundamentally the basic Quake Guy running around collecting the same health, armor, ammo, weapons and powerups, but their differences revitalized the franchise and added even more strategic depth to it.

QC had many faults, but it looks like the champions idea took hold - it's currently by far the biggest AFPS game by population. QC:DE is an attempt to expand on QC's strengths and to fix its faults, a very successful one if you ask me, but it has not attracted a big population yet.

QC:DE's pros:

1 - Twice as many champions as vanilla QC, representing not just the Quake franchise, but many other classic FPS titles like Blood, Hexen, Heretic, Duke, Shadow Warrior, Dusk etc. with more interesting mechanics giving overall even more strategic variety than QC has. Even the obscure 1996 shooter and great favorite of mine, Eradicator, is represented by 4 champions here. Now, this huge roster is hard to balance properly, especially given the smaller population here, but QC:DE lets you change champs on respawn, even in duel - if your strategy just isn't working, change both your champ and your strategy to throw off your opponents. I think this is a better format and I wish QC had it in duels and didn't penalize it in other modes by resetting the ability timer each time you switch.

2 - Huge variety of well made maps, including many of the classics from Quake/Unreal and other AFPS games, refreshed with the textures or art style of different games than the originals. The "arena" is in the very genre name "AFPS" for good reason, and QC:DE simply wrecks QC in this regard. QC currently has a meager 18 maps and one new one currently in testing. Its centralized always-online model in combination with its AAA graphics on a weird hybrid engine which makes life hell for mappers means that players are lucky if they get 1-2 new maps PER YEAR there. Only a couple Q1 and Q3 classic maps are represented there too.

3 - Faster movement and smaller hurtboxes than QC. This makes QC:DE's fundamental play more similar to older Quakes, and it makes it a much better aim-trainer for all games than QC is.

4 - Better online experience in every way. QC is a meme at this point for its small number of servers, poor matchmaking, lack of a server browser, forcing you to play online even if it's solo vs bots and forcing you to vote from a random pool of 3 maps when some players who will end up being put into that match won't even be able to vote etc.

5 - There is practically an infinite variety of single player content here when QC has none. QC:DE is compatible with any Doom WAD that doesn't mess with the basic weapons and enemies of Doom. It also rewards 100% kills and secrets on each level with a randomly chosen powerup, weapon, upgrade, stack or capacity. Even better for variety and replay value, it lets you replace default Doom monsters with ones from Q1, Q2, Q4, or Doom 2016, or even mix them from different games randomly. The bots here are also way better than the ones in QC which are not smart and often just get stuck and ruin your games.

6 - Sick skins for each weapon to keep things fresh, which you don't have to do Skinner-box RPG grinding for.

7 - Has BFG which vanilla QC doesn't.

QC:DE's cons:

1 - QC:DE's major fault, and the only reason I still do come back to vanilla QC, is simply that the population is not big here. It's hard to get any big games going without using media like Discords, friend lists etc. I'm doing my part in changing this by constantly nagging my buddies in QC to move over to QC:DE.

2 - Joshua from Turok 2 and Zan from Hedon are not in the game yet!

Overall, this an amazing game you should definitely try. Even if you're not an AFPS player or don't even like PvP games, going through old Doom games and mods with the huge variety of QC:DE weapons, champs and monsters is always great fun. Version 3.0 now even has its own campaign.