Quake III Arena on Excessive Plus

The mod does not need downloading

You do not have to find, download or unpack Excessive Plus anywhere. A clean Quake III Arena is enough, the one Steam or the original CD installs. When you connect to our server, the client fetches whatever it is missing on its own and you are in the game a few seconds later. It is the fastest route into a Quake mod there is.

If the download does not start

Quake III has historically shipped with downloading turned off for convenience. If it refuses you on connect with a message about missing files, open the console and set the value that enables downloading to one, then connect again. It is the only thing you may have to flip by hand, and you do it once.

Joining without hunting through a list

Public server lists for Quake tend to be incomplete and slow. It is faster to open the console and type the connect command with our address and port. You will find the address on the servers page, where it copies with one click. If the console will not open, it is usually the key below Escape or a combination with Shift.

What Excessive Plus actually means

Weapons hit harder and fire faster than in the original, so a fight lasts seconds rather than minutes. Your own rockets also throw you further, which turns the rocket jump from a trick into ordinary movement. The result is a game that is quicker and less forgiving, but one where death puts you straight back in. If you only played the original, the first ten minutes will feel like drowning.

Movement matters more than aim

In an arena the person standing still loses. Strafe jumping, building speed through a series of jumps with sideways movement, is the basic skill without which you cannot keep pace. The rocket jump opens routes the ground does not. Both can be practised alone on an empty server in a few hours and will do more for you than any mouse sensitivity setting.

An old client on a new machine

The 1999 client does not always cooperate with modern Windows: no widescreen resolutions, crashes on alt-tab, awkward mouse handling. There are newer engine builds based on the released source code that fix all of that and work with our server exactly the same. If the original gives you trouble, this is the first thing to try.

Settings worth ten minutes

Raise the frame cap above the default or the game will feel choppy even on a strong machine. Turn the brightness up; these maps are darker than you are used to now. And set mouse sensitivity so that a hundred and eighty degree turn is a movement that physically fits on your mousepad. These three do more than everything else combined.

Ping and connection

The server sits in Europe, so from most EU countries your ping is in the tens of milliseconds. Quake is more sensitive to lag than modern games because hits register faster and fights are shorter. If the game feels rubbery, look at your wifi before you blame the server. A cable makes a difference you can feel here.

Voting and the rules of the arena

The team can vote on the map and on game settings from inside the game. The same rules apply as everywhere on the network: cheats, scripts that aim for you and exploiting bugs are grounds for a ban across the whole network. Farming newcomers by spawn camping breaks no rule, but it is a reliable way to end up alone on the server.

First time here? Expect a beating

Quake III is almost thirty years old and the people still playing it have been playing it a long time. You will lose the first few rounds and that is normal. The gap between a newcomer and a regular is mostly movement and knowing where and when the armour appears. Both are a matter of hours played, not talent.