Bethesda and id Software have announced the Premium Pack 12 update for their browser-based competitive FPS, Quake Live, which is now live on the service.

With this update, Pro Start-a-Match players get five new game modes, a new Start-a-Match interface that offers in-depth match customisation options, more than 200 customisation settings, and four new premium arenas.

To celebrate, all premium content is available to trial for free from today right through to Sunday, May 6 (so May 7ish for us), and any new Premium or Pro subscribers during this free week signing up will "receive one or two free two-week Pro Subscription Tokens which can be redeemed to extend their subscription or gifted to a friend".

No payment or credit card is required at all to get in on the free offerings which include over 50 Premium Arenas, six Premium game modes and all Premium in-game features.

as much as i enjoyed quakelive there is just no way i would sign up for a pay/month scheme for it. i got an email from quakelive a few months back saying that i needed to login & play regularly (free account) or my profile gets deleted :/ i couldn't even be bothered to do that :f & now that my profile & stats are deleted i can't be bothered creating a new account :p

Yeh i have just started playing in the last couple of weeks. It's fun, but it's just Quake 3. There's absolutely nothing in any of the premium stuff that really appeals to me, especially since whenever I look at the premium only servers, they're always empty. I guess I'll try it out this week but I really only like having it there to fire up randomly for a quick bash.

Another game ruined by centralised control and no user created content. Think of the vast amount of awesome Quake 3 mods that are going to waste here. Urban Terror, True Combat, Q3 Gridiron... there's so much stuff they could throw into this game with little work to make it appeal to a wider user base. Instead it's just a slim shade of Quake 3 with some graphical enhancements.

I reckon they could double their revenue by doing a once-off, first in first serve thing to let people by in-game names though. 'trog' was taken, I'd probably play a few bucks to reserve that to steal it from whoever has it!

Same as Demon, i got an email telling me to log in or lose my account. It was fun but not popular @ the times i played and although i love Q3 i now am addicted to other games like DOTA 2.

Trog, if you purchase the game you can take the name as it's not in use..but i dont like the way they've handled quake live at all (i could bitch for quite a few paragraphs).

Here's how i treat quake live:

If bored, play. If not bored, I'm playing something else.

For all intents and purposes, quakelive is free to me, and it's exactly like q3ra3 but with tonns more maps and players.

I'm sure if you take it seriously you could complain but i compare it to other free offerings like, tribes or, uh LoL and for a bang per minute perspective, qlive wins every time.

of course I don't play quakelive any longer than about 20 minutes a week so i guess that's another thing.

The good thing about Quake Live is that there is a lot more players around than if Quake 3 was still being played, that's for sure.

There are other things as well that aren't really mentioned, community add-ons such as Quake Live ranks ,where you are ranked for duels, clan arena, team deathmatch. Another is Quake Live Prism that has built in irc chat, ql ranks added to the browser, links to game streams, built in demo player etc.

it's exactly like q3ra3 but with tonns more maps and players.

where you are ranked for duels, clan arena, team deathmatch.

ex - Fxr - "ra3 is for retards" participating in Rocket Arena 3 shennanigens!? Surely not! :p

The new mods seem interesting