Quake Champions will be free with a for-pay option.

Quake Champions will be a free-to-play, but with a for-pay option says Creative director Tim Willits.

In an interview last week, Willits said that players who want to can play a single character, a Champion named Ranger, for free. Or they can buy the Champion Pack and get unlimited access to Ranger and all his other friends for a fixed price.

“At its core, it’s a free-to-play game,” Willits said, “with the option to buy the Champion Pack and just get in and play with all the Champions. There are a number of Quake players that just want to play their Quake, right? And they are familiar with the business model of our previous games, and they are totally fine. ‘I want to buy the game. I want to start playing. I want to have access to all the Champions.’

“But then we also understand that we want to get as many people into the game as possible, especially outside of North America and Western Europe, where we have a massive fan base. So we want to have the flexibility to have a free-to-play option for those people.”

Both for-pay and free-to-play players will share the same maps, and compete in the same brackets, Willits said. The only difference will be how they access Champions other than Ranger.

Players who buy the Champion Pack will get Ranger and all the other Champions that the game launches with. Everyone else will be able to pay the in-game currency, called favor, to play other Champions for a finite period of time.

“I don’t want to use the word rent,” Willits said. “You do spend favor to have access to them for a limited amount of time, yes. But you don't spend any real money on it.”

The goal is to minimize that sense of grind that comes in other free-to-play titles. Favor will be easy to earn, and trading it in for other Champions will be a frequent and fun way to spend it. But, there’s other ways to burn off excess currency as well. Players can spend favor on backpacks, which will enable them to take on rune challenges. Succeeding at a rune challenge will grant players reliquaries, which they can open to reveal new Champions and new skins.

Ultimately, the free-to-play community will be competing on an even playing field with paying players. Each Champion’s skills will be different and complementary in a rock-paper-scissors kind of way, but they’ll be available to everyone. 

Sign up for the closed beta at https://quake.bethesda.net/en/