QuakeCon 2026 is just two days away at the time of this writing!

Just like QuakeCon 2025 where I wrote an article and with both Quake and QuakeCon having marked 30 years, now it should be a good time to write out my predictions.

Sadly the future of QuakeCon appears to be uncertain. Microsoft had started a reset of Xbox as a platform as their previous strategy did not go as planned. The first steps they did involved some lay offs 'a very common occurance for various companies in recent years.' and unfortunately id Software was one of those affected. A total of 136 employees were let go, reducing the work force by 50%. The company has now been reduced to about 45 to 50 employees, and it has seen some doom & gloom amongst most fans.

It has also led to some dire speculations involving the future of id Software like becoming a "support studio", future games moving to Unreal Engine (was later debunked), and at worst the company could be entering its "twilight days". My current view appears to be that while yes, I believe id has entered a rough time period following this "Xbox Reset", I believe it is too soon to say "RIP id Software" but I do believe things are looking grim for Quake Champions.

The game was originally to be stripped out of the live-service crap, but the only person who maintained the game was let go, so I would not be surprised if the game shuts down shop with no way to play the game afterwards. The mid to late 2010s was a shitty time period for me personally because I felt that game and the upcoming Unreal Tournament was a sign that my love for modern games started to take a step in the right direction after the suffering amount of Call of Duty ripoffs dropped during the late 2000s to early 2010s.

Ultimately the shitty decision making from the weird inclusion of hero shooter elements to using a hybrid engine due to the game's association with Sabre Interactive preventing modding from happening. Keep in mind that Quake since it's first entry in 1996 thrived heavily with community-made content and without games like Quake, franchises like Team Fortress would have never existed and the seeds for what would become Counter-Strike would have never been planted. Because we would've never gotten mods like Navy SEALs and Action Quake II.

Quake Champions was doomed from the start and it was upsetting and I was even more upset to see the downfall of the new Unreal Tournament. When Fortnite took off, Epic ultimately shelved the project and the servers would be gone by the end of 2022. It pains me because I can reflect the upcoming UT was the reason why I wanted to get a better PC in the first place, and I will never understand why people thought Fortnite was the next big thing. Better yet, Fortnite was nothing but a clone of games like Player Unknown Battlegrounds (PUBG) and the concept seemed less innovating to me.

You are taking the concept of Last Man Standing but you made it large-scale that shrinks overtime? How is that innovative is beyond me. Then I bring up MOBAs, I find it hard to believe it was very innovating because all it did was take an already interesting concept of real-time strategy games that saw an interesting evolution (from Dune II to even StarCraft) and butchered the fuck out of it. I mean sure the growing concepts of MOBAs originated from RTS games starting with StarCraft "with a user map called Aeon of Strife" and later Warcraft III with Defense of the Ancients (DotA), the latter would get popular, became its own thing and the RTS genre soon declined later on.

I've grown to become pessimistic about the games industry as a whole because certain clowns will have no problem taking genres and butchering them into something that claims to oversimplify a formula for grandmas to enjoy through hand holding. (games like COD is known for this) But at the same time, the shit inhalers in suits gave birth to toxic cesspools where one simple mistake is enough to getting hounded with hate speech. (League of Legends is a notorious example of this).

The AAA games industry is a mess and is why I view indie games to be the only saving grace despite not being as popular. I'd rather enjoy some obscure Team Fortress clone nobody plays than to play some weird live service game like Overwatch. (If anything the only redeeming quality the game has is D.va clapping her asscheeks e.g. Rule34.) I will be glad once a game crash finally goes into full-effect.

Anyway enough ranting, QuakeCon's future remains uncertain, so if this turns out to be the last QuakeCon ever then let me say that despite never likely to attend the convention in person (it was one of my dreams to go) I will never forget the excitements that happened in 2021 when Quake got the remaster treatment.

When we got the remaster, it was a surprise to me and my group and even more so realizing it was still based on NetQuake but added in some form of client-side prediction. I mean sure it was rough around the edges, from the questionable 50 health cap in the Nightmare difficulty (with lack of a toggle to restore the original behavior) to the limited amount of mods to play. 2022 did see a major update for the remaster which added Threewave CTF

Then 2023 followed and we saw a Quake II Overhaul (kind of a remaster, but so much of the game logic was changed) and that was fun for awhile. Then both 2024 and 2025 saw remasters for Doom, Doom II, Heretic, Hexen and the best highlight of these in my honest opinion has to be the ability to upload and play user content through Bethesda.net. This feature was what the Quake remasters lacked and this is where I want to talk about this year's predictions.

Initially me and my group had sights for Quake III Arena to see a remaster as a follow up to the Quake II remaster, but following the topic that involved a lunatic who uploaded "historic" footage of a unreleased Quake 4 expansion that was r*ped with a gigantic watermark, it leaned to the possibility that a Quake 4 remaster could happen instead. This stems from the revealing that the people at Nightdive had a newer build of that said expansion.

If there isn't going to be a remaster for anything Quake just like the past couple of years, then eyes could be at either Hexen II or Heretic II. However sometime after the lay offs came about, people saw some changes to the Steam pages for both Return to Castle Wolfenstein and that weird 2009 game with some indicating that the latter could see a remaster.

A remaster for a delisted 2009 game seems super weird and out of place for Nightdive in my honest opinion, so I place bets on either a Return to Castle Wolfenstein remaster or perhaps a Wolfenstein 3D remaster. The latter I believe would be interesting to see considering the only latest console port of the game itself has to be the Xbox Live Arcade port. Not only this could surpass that, the offerings could be much more. We could see the Macintosh-exclusive content, a combination between the base game and Spear of Destiny, maybe the same modding treatments as Doom + Doom II, we could even see a built-in level editor.

Anyway that's all I got to say for this one, I hope to see what's in store this Thursday and may update back.

Stay tuned! ^^