MachineGames may have hinted at a new Quake game during the Developer Direct – WGB

The Developer Direct that took place and gave us a strong look at what Xbox has planned for the rest of the year, including Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, which is launching quite soon. But the star of the show was MachineGames showing off their upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, confirmed to be coming out later this year. Aside from giving us a glimpse at Indy’s latest adventure, MachineGames may have dropped a major hint.

As spotted by the eagle eyes of JigglesBunny on ResetEra, a whiteboard is shown during the presentation. There are a few things on the board that seem to be quick doodles of puzzles, but the most interesting thing is a Quake logo, along with what seems to be part of a word ending in “..AKE6.”

The word and the logo would suggest MachineGames hinting at a new game, presumably Quake 6. The whiteboard in question pops up at 11:34 in the presentation.

There is one small hiccup: there isn’t actually a Quake 5, so MachineGames would be taking a leaf out of Microsoft’s Windows playbook and skipping a whole number. However, Quake Champions is generally classified as Quake 5 and could internally be considered as that. With that said, I do feel that any new Quake game at this point would likely be a reboot similar to what I’d have done with the new DOOM games, or indeed what MachineGames has been doing with the Wolfenstein series.

Rumours of a new Quake game have been circulating for years, with most of them agreeing that it will be a project worked on by id Software and MachineGames. The DOOM reboot was hugely successful, and while the Wolfenstein series has struggled more, both of the games are fantastic, in my eyes. I’m not counting the fucking awful Wolfenstein: Youngblood, mind you. And it would also mean Microsoft gets to taut owning 5 of the biggest names in FPS: Quake, DOOM, Wolfenstein, Call of Duty and Halo.

The first two Quake games also got new “enhanced” versions in 2021 and 2022. While we don’t have any solid financial details to go on, both releases were received well by the public and critics. Quake 2 holds a pretty impressive Opencritic score of 89, for example.

Before that, the series was on something of a hiatus. Quake Champions arrived in 2017 as a multiplayer-focused free-to-play shooter that people seemed to like but struggled to maintain a good playerbase. Before that was 2010’s Quake Live, also a free-to-play game.

Is it time for Quake to return?