With Id Software gutted by Microsoft's mass layoff plans after the release of their excellent Doom: The Dark Ages expansion, it felt like it was only a matter of time before the axe fell on their twitchy throwback arena FPS Quake Champions. Fortunately, it seems like the executioner's blade turned at the last moment, as the game is still up and running. Better yet, a final update to the game has stripped it of all the free-to-play fluff. Every character and skin is unlocked; battle passes and challenges are gone, and if you played the game at all previously? All that's yours now for nothing.

The full Version 1.31 patch notes are available to peruse here, but the short version is that the game is now just a cheap, self-contained retail game. Progression mechanics are out, daily rewards are out, loot boxes are out, premium currencies are gone - everything that you'd expect in a free-to-play game to artificially extend engagement has been surgically removed. It's exactly the kind of thing I want to see happen to F2P games at the end of their natural lives. More of this sort of thing.

There are also a few extra goodies, with some new cosmetic items, including the weapon skins shown off at QuakeCon a couple of months ago. There have been some quality-of-life improvements, an upgrade to a better FPS stabilizer, some tweaks to the network code, and a few improvements made to the bots, so people can better learn the ropes against AI opponents. But most importantly, they have finally added a voting system to let players on a server kick out abusive, AFK, or otherwise problematic players if they're hogging spots on a server.

Honestly, it all sounds pretty dang good to me. Quake Champions was never the big hit that Id, Bethesda, or Microsoft hoped for. Despite Quake 3 really defining that entire era of twitchy, competitive arena FPS, studios have struggled to make that lightning strike twice ever since. That's not to say that Quake Champions is in any way bad. It's fantastic stuff, but it's a genre that's inherently niche. But at least it'll keep on trucking for the foreseeable future.

If you played Quake Champions at any time in the past, congratulations, you got the game entirely free. Everything should be unlocked on your account now. Otherwise, it's £9/$10 on Steam now. And as an aside, check out Quake Champions: Doom Edition, a fantastic fangame that replicates the style of Champions in the time-tested Doom engine.