Quake Live "open beta"

Quake Live has just launched, which is nothing less than a browser based, free to play online first person shooter, Quake III Arena with extra bells and whistles! I have tried it, being a die hard quaker back in the old days and I got a seriously good feeling about this one. Been long since I held a rocket launcher or a rail gun in my digital hands, but the fragging is still oh so sweet!

About the "open beta" tag, the game is pretty much done. Apparently ID Software werent sure just how they would release the thing like a normal title so they just put that tag on to have their backs covered if something goes awfully wrong. It will still be free to play when it goes out of beta as it is called, but there will be an option to pay for premium giving you server and clan hosting and lots more.

Setting it up is easy, you visit the site and register, download a 3 mb browser plugin, restart your web browser and you are good to go. The site and servers are hard pushed currently though so there may be quite the queue to get in. When I went in this afternoon there was a 22.5k line, this evening it had climbed to 50k. It goes a lot faster than your average wait time on a full WoW server though.

The futuristic rocket launch-em-up style of Quake III may not be everyone's cup of tea, and if you go in expecting Crysis graphics you will be in for a let-down. But for anyone else looking for a good, fast-paced online gibbing time, go!

Update:
Queues are down to 1k-5k when I have been on so it takes a minute or two only. Proof of the plagues online FPS's, aim bots have surfaced though and apparently quite many are using it.. Why oh why do people invent these things, thought the point of games are, you know, playing them and not have someone/something do it for you?

Update 2:
Queue times are gone completely, and the game plays very well, no noticeable lag at all even on servers with 150+ latency. Not run into obvious aim bots in a while so I'll assume that's dealt with. Also Player skill ranking seems to be working now, which basically lets you very easily join servers with players on your own skill level, quite neat. :)