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id Software's free-to-play shooter Quake Live has been live to the public for the better part of a year now and this week the game gets all "good will toward men" with a holiday themed level and player skins. Beginning on Tuesday, you will be able to frag your friends online in a special Christmas-themed level titled (what else) Silent Night. The level is basically a remake of the Distance Screams map from Quake III: Team Arena but with lots of holiday decorations and lights.

And if you ever wanted to frag a friend looking like St. Nick, Quake Live has you covered as well. Tuesday also lets players pick a Santa Claus skin and use it in all of the game types. There's also a Vixen-themed female holiday skin for those of you of the opposite sex.

13 years ago today, id Software released Quake, the first game in a first person shooter franchise that continues to be one of the most well known in the PC gaming industry. With five full games based on the series, an number of official and unofficial expansion packs, tons of mods and total conversions and a currently running web browser online-only game, the Quake series continues to be popular even with major shift in emphasis.

On the day that the Quake series become a teenager, Big Download decided to look back at the entire game series. From it's start as a near-Doom clone to the Stroggos storyline to its multiplayer emphasis to its current incarnation as a free-to-play shooter, the series has had many different versions in a relatively short time span.

Click on the image to the right to continue reading Happy 13 Birthday Quake

id Software previously announced plans to release new maps for their recently launched free-to-play FPS Quake Live and this weekend they announced on their site that they plan to add a new map to the game every week for the next six weeks.

The first map, to be released on Monday, is actually a slightly revised version of Hidden Fortress, a level that was first created exclusively for the Sega Dreamcast version of Quake III Arena (which Quake Live is based on, of course). id promises that they will be adding a mix of classic and all new maps for Quake Live in the coming weeks.

id Software's launch of the free-to-play FPS Quake Live seems to be a success so far following a rather rocky launch period. Now that the inital launch excitement has died down, id is getting ready to launch some new updates to the game. In a new dev blog, id's Marty Stratton went into detail about their future plans.

id plans to add new servers for the game and will also host tournaments, competitions and other events in the future. They will be adding new maps, launch support for private matches, have Mac and Linux versions of the game ready to go and add training and tutorials for players to learn things like rocket jumping and strafe running/jumping. Also, leaderboards, which were taken down after the rush of new players for the Quake Live launch proved to be too much to handle them, will be back online sometime this month.

It's been a couple of weeks since the official open beta launch of Quake Live. id Software's launch of their free-to-play FPS (adapting their earlier title Quake III Arena) got so busy that people were waiting for over an hour to play after signing in. There were also issues with the game's collection of player stats that forced id to temporarily cut out those features.

A few days ago the game's official site posted up an update from id's producer of the project Marty Stratton. He states that after putting in some updates on the back end of the game's site it increased the game's player capacity. That means it, " . . . allowed us to remove the queue for the time being, so we hope everyone has enjoyed the more immediate access." Also stats recording is working once again although Stratton did say the specific stats "tied to each individual frag" are still disabled for now.

It's one thing to play an online only game with just a few thousand people playing at one time in a closed beta test. It's quite another thing, however, to play such a game on the first week of its open beta phase where everyone and his mother is trying to sign on at the same time. A couple of months ago we posted up some hands-on impressions of id Software's newest game project Quake Live while it was still in closed beta. But the experience of playing the game this week was something a little different.

We knew that there would be a great deal of interest in playing a browser based free version of id's 1999 multiplayer shooter Quake III Arena, However it appears that id wasn't expecting the sheer number of users trying to sign in at one time. On Thursday morning we logged into the site and were put into a virtual queue of over 20,000 other players. We waited for over an hour before we were actually able to begin playing.

As we have reported before the launch of id Software's open beta for Quake Live has been extremely popular and with that popularity came problems with loaded servers, long queue lines to play and other issues. id's Marty Stratton has already posted up an update on the game's status on the Quake Live web site but Big Download got him to answer a few more questions about this week's launch:

First, the first few hours of Quake Live's open beta has seen a ton of traffic, so much so that there are queues to wait to play the game that have sometime taken an hour or more. Did you anticipate this much interest and what is id doing to get the wait time down to a minimum

Trying to anticipate how many people we'd have was very difficult. What we're releasing here is very unique in it's accessibility (free and via the web) and brand name (QUAKE), so we've always hoped that made it as much of an impulse try as anything. We knew that we'd have a lot of people try to join, but the numbers have definitely exceeded our expectations. The other part of this equation though is trying to figure out how much back-end server capacity we can afford to throw at the problem. You don't want to significantly over-purchase/lease the hardware (as it's extremely expensive - particularly for a free title), but you want "enough" and a solution that is scalable. All that said, being able to support every person that wants to play is our top priority and we are working on solving this on all fronts - hardware, software, and db - as well as scalability and optimizations.

More important than all of that though is that the feedback from people once they are in has been overwhelmingly positive. Everyone is really enjoying the game and seems to appreciate the changes and all of the work that's gone into the website. So, we have confidence that as we solve the challenges that almost every online game service faces when first opening to the public, we do have a product that people really like and will continue to share with their friends.

It's been about 36 hours or so after the open beta launch of Quake Live but id Software's free-to-play version of Quake III Arena has not had a smooth launch, mostly due to the tremendous amount traffic the game has generated. Some people have waited for an hour or more to actually play the game once they sign onto the site and then get put into a queue.

id Software's Marty Stratton has posted up an update on the Quake Live message boards. Here is his statement on the long queue issues:

We obviously didn't intend for tens of thousands of people to have to wait in the queue, but it was put in place for a reason, and that was so once you made it to the site, it still performed fairly well and didn't crash under heavy loads, which for the most part has worked well. We apologize for the frustration a line causes, but it will be in place until we can scale and optimize our back-end to accommodate "everyone." This is our top priority right now and when we get to that point, there will be no queue. You can certainly trust us on this - for a game funded by advertising revenue, we don't want a queue keeping you out anymore than you want it.

Stratton also addressed the sheer number of people trying to play the game during the open beta launch. Check out his statement after the jump:

As promised, id Software has launched the open beta test for Quake Live. And as expected there has been a huge rush to try out the free-to-play (but in-game ad supported) version of id's multiplayer shooter Quake III Arena. The amount of traffic to the game's web site is so great there's an old fashioned UK-style queue that you are put in if there are too many people signing onto the site at the same time.

So the old saying of, "You get what you pay for," might be appropriate at this stage. We will let you know if we are successful in registering and finally playing the game.

After months and months of waiting, id Software has now relaunched their Quake Live web site with a teaser image stating that the open beta for their free-to-play version of Quake III Arena will finally launch this Tuesday, Feb. 24. The game has been in closed beta testing for nearly a year.

Just a recap; Quake Live (originally known as Quake Zero) is a version of id's 1999 multiplayer shooter Quake III Arena but available to play for free via a web site launcher (there will be web based and in-game ads). In addition to the game (which has a number of graphical enhancements from the original) Quake Live will have an extensive web based stats system for players. You can check out some recent hands-on impressions of the closed beta version here at Big Download.

[Via Shacknews]