This is our last chance at a decent, modern arena shooter.

UT4 is abandoned by Epic already in favor of Fortnite, newcomers like Reflex Arena and Toxikk have pathetically low player numbers - basically ghost towns. If any arena shooter has a chance to make it in today's oversaturated multiplayer scene, it's Quake.

To people complaining about the champions and abilities:

They don't matter, in the end it's your skill that matters, just as Quake should be. You can destroy people with the worst champion if you're good enough, and you'll still suck with the easiest champion if you can't aim good enough. Sure, abilities give a few cheap kills once in a while, but it never affects the outcome. They cleverly utilized different movement mechanics with different champions; CPMA air control with Anarki, Quake 4 crouch slide with Slash, UT style dodges and walljumping with Clutch and Nyx respectively, Painkiller bunnyhopping with Sorlag, Doom 2016 style double jumps with Doom Slayer. It also gives new players a chance to get a few kills at least - and yes, they're important. The game may be trying to appeal to the Overwatch crowd, yes, but there's a reason for that. Wake up: no one wants to play your dad shooters anymore. The glorious days of Quake and Unreal are bygone. If you remember, Quake also tried to appeal to the Battlefield crowd 11 years ago. It's called Quake Wars. And it didn't damage Quake or was a disgrace to the name, as you guys try to argue. Quake 3 Team Arena also already had pseudo-classes with different speeds/damage rates, so saying this is a disgrace to Quake is overdramatizing it. And if you keep kicking out newcomers directly like in Quake Live, you'll end up with the same 50 people over and over again, and then you complain the queue never finds a game.

Speaking of which, the matchmaking:

Not as ideal as a server browser, but hey, it works. I've been playing since the very first burst test, and yeah, the waiting times were long back then. But now? Every day of the week, every hour of the day, it doesn't take more than a minute to find a game here in Europe, especially since the April patch. It's only going to get better when the game goes F2P. I don't even have the chance to open my backpacks most of the time.

Speaking of which, the microtransactions and F2P aspect:

You get Ranger as the F2P champion, which is one of the best overall champions anyway, has a good active ability, a good passive ability and classic movement. After completing the tutorial, you also get Scalebearer and 200000 Favor, which means that you're just a couple of days away from your third champion. You don't "need" any other champion to enjoy Quake Champions. Eventually you'll get all the champions from the free chests/reliquaries you get when you level up/finish a match, and you can buy a champion forever for 250000 Favor, which is the currency earned from matches you play. There's also a weekly rotation of one free champion. But if you want to have all current/future champions at once, think of it like when you bought Q3A and go buy the Champions Pack. The remaining stuff is just cosmetics, Q1/2/3/4 gun models (and one from Doom 2) and different skins which you can get with shards you gain from selling your dupes, weird colors for your skin, which you'll accumulate quickly through backpacks you buy with favor you gain from the matches/challenges. No maps or gamemodes are paywalled like Quake Live back then.

Speaking of which, maps and gamemodes:

Campgrounds (as Blood Covenant) and Blood Run make their triumphant returns alongside a low (but high quality) number of new maps. There's nothing to complain about; classic Quake geometries with tone and style similar to Quake 1. Hopefully we'll get more maps as the game nears release. As gamemodes, classic FFA and TDM are there, along with a new mode called Sacrifice, which is a mixture between CTF, Domination and Harvester. Pretty fun when you can find a game (which doesn't always happen because everybody just jumps into TDM pretty much). As ranked you can play a new incarnation of Duel with 3 champions per person per round. Ranked 2v2 TDM is basically a Team Duel. There's also Instagib, but with abilities: which makes it quite random with some abilities (like Clutch and Strogg) getting overpowered as hell. This is the one negative aspect of the game I can name (you can disable the abilities in a custom game if you have the Champions Pack, though). CTF is supposed to arrive in the future and hopefully the likes of Freeze Tag and CA follow.

Music:

It's done by Chris Vrenna (ex-Nine Inch Nails, also did theme tracks of Doom 3/Quake 4 and had some input in Quake 1 soundtrack according to Wikipedia), but unfortunately it's no Mick Gordon or Sonic Mayhem. That's not to say it's bad, it's just lackluster compared to what I was expecting it to be, especially after Doom 2016. Oh well, you'll mute the music to hear the enemy footsteps anyway.

Overall:

Even though there are departures from the previous titles, the core Quake experience is still there - godly aim at neckbreaking speeds in a badass atmosphere. You may or may not enjoy some aspects, there are also some aspects that I don't particularly agree with, but you have to understand that there's no other option in today's gaming world. It's never going to get as big as Overwatch or Fortnite or PUBG, but it can stay as the number one choice of this niche market. If Quake can't make it, no one else is going to even try it, and you'll end up with Quake Live, which has a total of 2 Clan Arena servers with players who'll kick you in 5 seconds because your ELO isn't close to Rapha's. So stop complaining, embrace it and get fragging.