Next-gen Quake Arena game shelved

Id Software is no longer planning to create a new, next-generation Quake Arena game after the launch of Quake Live.

"We did decide for a lot of reasons that we wanted to just push hard for doing Doom internally," technical director and co-founder John Carmack told the audience at QuakeCon 2008 this week.

"The door's not completely shut for another Quake project, and I would say that probably the success of Quake Live will determine whether we do another Quake project," he said.

However, "right now the publishers aren't all that interested in a multiplayer-focused game on there," he said, "and they're probably right. Quake for this coming year is Quake Live."

As for what a next-gen Quake Arena might look like on multiformat, all Carmack would say was: "It would have to be a 60Hz fast-action game."

Last year id Software announced that it was creating a second core development team that would begin by creating Quake Live - then known as Quake Zero - as a browser-based, stat-tracking, free version of Quake 3 Arena.

The plan had been to then push that team towards a new Quake Arena title, but Carmack's comments at QuakeCon 2008 put that project well on the back burner.