Loadouts
Oh yes they did. This is the addition I hate the most. It makes me want to rip out someone's intestines and strangle them with it. You can now choose two starting weapons: a primary and a secondary. Both categories consist of four different weapons. Primaries include the Heavy Machinegun (a new weapon), the Rocket Launcher, the Lightning Gun, and the Railgun, while Secondaries include the Machinegun, the Shotgun, the Plasmagun, and the Grenade Launcher. With this change, you no longer have to search for a good weapon at spawn, because you already start fully armed with your favorite gun.
Part of the skill in Quake is that when you spawn, you have to avoid confrontation, memorize weapon spawn locations, plan your routes, and know when to rush out of cover to get the weapon(s). Now that you spawn with a good weapon, there's really not much of a need to memorize the weapon spawns aside from the BFG on certain maps (which is now the only weapon you can't start with). Another way this ruins the game is that you are no longer penalized much for dying. Whenever you died in classic settings, you lost all of your weapons and you were then stuck with the shitty ass Machinegun, which only functioned well as a long-range finisher weapon and sidearm. This meant whenever you managed to kill someone, you'd also be slowing down your victim, as they would have to gather each of their weapon(s) all over again which takes some time to do. Here, death had more meaning. Now when you kill someone, they can easily jump straight back into combat and score some quick kills without any delay at all. It's stupid and makes Quake more mindless than it's ever been.
Heavy Machinegun (HMG)
This is an all-new weapon they added in this patch. It's essentially just a buffed-up Machinegun that fires every .75 seconds and deals 8 damage per shot, approximately dealing 112 damage per second (give or take 8 damage). It's borderline overpowered despite it's higher spread, and is way too powerful for a hitscan weapon. At least the LG sways when you turn while firing, restricting you to simply aiming with your movement. With the HMG you can just spray and pray without any strategy required. Not to mention it doesn't even have its own unique niche/role. Every role you can think of to give this weapon is already filled by another gun. I wouldn't even want it as an extra weapon for unranked servers, it's not even balanced enough for that. Personally, I'd rather have them just buff the MG to 7 damage per shot, for a total of 70 damage per second, to make it more useful in it's role without overpowering it (just like vanilla Quake 3).
Spawn Timers
Yes, you no longer have to memorize spawn times either. This goes for all "major" items, including yellow armor, red armor, powerups, etc. The game used to take a lot more skill when you had to memorize the spawn time and keep track of the timer in your head during all of the chaotic, fast-paced action. Need I say more? Without emphasis on memorization, you're taking away a huge chunk out of the skill gap.
Auto Bunnyhop
You can now hold space to continuously jump and gradually gain speed over time. The longer you keep jumping forward, the faster you go, with a maximum of 640ups (twice the standard running speed). This I don't really have much of a problem with, because it takes quite a while to gain any speed using this method. You'll always rather be strafejumping like the pros instead of auto-bunnyhopping like the noobs. The only situation where you'll want to auto-bunnyhop is when you don't know how to properly strafejump, which is why it isn't really a big deal for me.
Unified Ammo
Weapon-specific ammo boxes are now replaced with unified ammo boxes, which give you ammo for all of your weapons rather than just one. I have a couple problems with this. Firstly you no longer need to memorize ALL of the ammo spawns, rather all you need to do is keep coming back to the same one over and over again, seeing as it refills all of your weapons' ammo. There is no more need to move between different ammo spawns, rather you can just keep sitting at the same exact spot until your entire arsenal is completely refilled. There's way less incentive to move around, once you've collected all the weapons on the map. My second problem is that there are too many. If these items are going to supply so much ammo, there should be less of them around and the respawn time should be made longer. Overall it's not as big as a problem as the first three, but it's still a problem nonetheless.
Conclusion
These changes were made to make the game more accessible to newcomers, as id Software feared that beginners would get their asses kicked and leave the game. This is undeniably horrible. You see, I don't mind them making the game more accessible, but I don't want that getting in the way of competitive depth. A shooter without competitive depth is only a mere toy rather than a professional eSport, and the former isn't something that Quake should turn into. I personally hope they revert the update.
It's not like they HAVE to reduce the skill gap, rather there are simply better ways to go about making your gaming more accessible. Include CPMA bots, which had a wider set of difficulties compared to Vanilla Quake 3's (CPMA has 99 difficulties, VQ3/QL only has 5 and they're all completely dumbass to the point where a 6-year-old could actually put up a fight against the hardest one). I never grew up with Quake but when I started practicing against CPMA bots, I began doing halfway decent in standard matches. They should also improve the skill-matching so newbies aren't pitted against high-level players (lol problem easily solved). Last but not least, include some "newbie" servers for lower-ranking players, which would have a good portion of the lobby filled by bots, so there'd be easier kills for those who aren't yet skilled enough to kill average players. All of this would make the game more accessible without screwing over the core gameplay.
Later on, I'll also be starting competitive servers every Saturday/Sunday using the Turbo ruleset, with a 7dmg MG and no HMG to be found. Gametypes will usually consist of FFA, CTF, CA, and Duel, and will be named "CPM [gametype]". I'll post an announcement the first week these servers begin.
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