How to Install Quake 4 and Join a Server

About a third of the way through Quake 4 you are captured, strapped to a conveyor belt, and fed into a machine that turns human prisoners into Strogg. It does not cut away. You watch your legs get replaced, you watch the armour go on, and then the process is interrupted before the part that removes your mind.

You get up and walk out as something in between.

It is still one of the most effective set pieces in any shooter, and it is the reason people remember this game at all. What they mostly do not remember is the multiplayer, which is a shame, because it is a competent arena shooter that arrived at exactly the wrong moment. Listings collect on the game's hub.

Two games in one box

Quake 4 is a direct continuation of Quake II's story, made by Raven Software on id Tech 4 — the Doom 3 engine, with the corridors better lit and squads of marines alongside you for a lot of it.

The campaign is genuinely good and holds up. It is a linear military shooter with a horror problem at the centre of it, and the middle third, which is the part everyone talks about, does something with the player's own body that most games would not attempt.

What makes it work is that you are rarely alone. Levels alternate between fighting alongside a squad of marines who talk to each other and sections where the squad is gone and the corridors get much narrower, and the contrast does more for the atmosphere than any amount of lighting. When the game wants you frightened, it takes your team away first.

It also breaks up the corridors with vehicles, which is not something the earlier Quake games attempted at all. Those sections are the weakest part and they are short. Everything either side of them is worth the time.

The multiplayer is separate and unrelated in feel. It is arena shooting in the Quake tradition: item timings, armour control, weapon pickups on the map rather than in a loadout screen, and a movement system that rewards people who have practised it.

The honest position on multiplayer

Quake 4's arena mode launched into a space that Quake III Arena already owned completely.

The competitive crowd had years of habit, configs and demos invested in the earlier game, and they did not move. What Quake 4 offered was the same design on a heavier engine with a different feel, and "different feel" is fatal in a genre where muscle memory is the whole skill. The scene never really formed.

That means two practical things. Finding a populated Quake 4 server is not something you should count on, and the people who do still play are concentrated into arranged sessions rather than spread across the day.

If arena shooting is what you want and you do not specifically want this one, the last section of this guide points at where that population actually is. If Quake 4 in particular is what you want, it is entirely playable — it just requires bringing people rather than finding them.

Installing it

If it is already in your Steam library, it installs from there like anything else. Old id Software titles have moved around between storefronts and bundles over the years, so check that you can actually buy it before planning an evening around it.

Our Steam installation guide covers the account side if that is unfamiliar.

The hardware requirements are from 2005 and irrelevant now. What is relevant is that this game was built for a monitor shape nobody uses any more. Set your resolution properly and raise the field of view, because the default is set for a squarer screen and playing an arena shooter through a letterbox is an unnecessary handicap.

Patch it fully before you try to join anything. Servers of this generation refuse clients that do not match, and Quake 4's multiplayer was changed substantially after release — enough that an unpatched install is a different game as well as an incompatible one.

The console, and connecting to a server

Everything about joining a specific machine happens through the console, which follows the convention shared by every id Software engine.

The command is connect followed by the full address:

connect 198.51.100.20:27650

The key that opens the console is set in the game's controls, and on games of this engine generation it sometimes wants a modifier key held alongside it rather than a bare press. Check it in the options menu before you need it, rather than while you are staring at a server address you cannot type anywhere.

Two things about addresses.

Take the port with the IP. A host running several servers on one machine cannot give them all the same number, and copying only the part before the colon is the most common way people fail to join a server that is working perfectly.

And take it from somewhere that queries the server rather than somewhere that repeats what an owner typed into a form. The listings on this site are queried directly, and our notes on what makes a listing trustworthy explain why that difference is not a technicality.

There is an in-game browser too. It works, it is slow, and for a game in this state it will often return very little — which tells you about the population rather than about the browser.

What the multiplayer actually asks of you

Arena shooters are a genre with an unusually steep entry, and it is worth knowing what the difficulty consists of before you decide you are bad at it.

The map is a clock. Armour and health pickups respawn on fixed timers, and the better player is the one who is standing where the yellow armour is about to appear. Duels are decided by item control far more often than by aim. A player who knows the timings and has poor aim will beat a player with excellent aim who wanders.

Movement is a skill you learn deliberately. Strafe jumping is faster than running and is not explained by the game. Rocket jumping trades health for position. Neither is optional at any serious level, and both take a few hours of doing nothing else.

Weapons are map knowledge. The railgun rewards prediction and punishes nothing. The rocket launcher is the general-purpose answer. The lightning gun eats people at close range if you can keep it on them. Which of them you have is decided by where you have been, not by a loadout.

Powerups end fights. Quad Damage is the big one. A player who has it will kill you, and the correct response is to leave rather than to contest it — then be at the spawn point when it comes back.

The modes are the traditional ones. Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch, Tournament for one-against-one duels, and Capture the Flag in both a plain and an arena-flavoured variant. Duel is where this genre's identity lives, and it is also the mode that needs exactly one other person, which suits a game in Quake 4's position rather well.

Before you assume you need a full server, check whether your install offers bots in the multiplayer menu. What is available depends on how thoroughly patched your copy is, and a bot match is a reasonable way to learn a map's item layout without an audience.

Getting people together

For a game like this, the population is not something you find. It is something somebody organises.

The remaining players of any old arena shooter are concentrated into scheduled sessions arranged outside the game, and the arranging happens on Discord. One person keeps a server running, somebody posts a time, and a game that appears completely dead produces a full server on a Saturday. We wrote about how Discord reshaped these communities, and titles in exactly this position are the clearest example of the effect.

A duel needs one other person. That is a low bar, and it is the reason Quake 4 is more playable now than its server list suggests.

Hosting for a small group

For two to six people, running your own is straightforward and is what most people in this position end up doing.

The game will host from inside the client, which is enough for an evening and dies when whoever is hosting closes the game. If you want something that exists when nobody is looking at it, that means a machine which stays on — either one of your own or a rented one, and our notes on what hosting costs cover the sizing.

An arena shooter is an unusually cheap thing to host. There is no world to persist, no database, no inventory. The server's job is to move a handful of players and some rockets around a small map several dozen times a second, which is a modest load by any modern measure — the honest constraint is bandwidth and latency rather than processing, so put it somewhere near the people who will use it.

For anyone playing from a distance, connection quality matters more here than in almost any other genre, because a railgun shot is decided in a single instant and there is nowhere for the netcode to hide a bad connection.

Problems

"Server is running a different version." Patch mismatch. Match what the server runs, and get the patch from the community running it rather than from whatever a search engine offers first.

The console will not open. It is bound in the controls, and it may need a modifier key. Check before assuming it is broken.

Everything looks dark and muddy. Raise brightness in the video options rather than at the monitor. Games on this engine were mastered for darker rooms than most people play in.

The mouse feels wrong. Disable acceleration in Windows and turn off any smoothing the game offers. Aim conventions changed after this game shipped.

You lose every duel despite hitting your shots. Item control. Watch what your opponent is picking up rather than watching your own crosshair.

Where the arena crowd actually is

Quake III Arena is the game that took the oxygen, and it still has servers. It is the reference implementation of this entire genre, and everything in the previous section was written about it first.

Quake Live is the same design maintained and modernised, and it is the easiest place to find people playing arena deathmatch on any given evening.

Further back, Quake II and the original QuakeWorld both keep small, extremely committed populations who have been playing them for a quarter of a century.

And on the engine side, Doom 3 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars share id Tech 4 with Quake 4, which means the console works identically and everything you learned above about connect and version matching applies unchanged.

Buy Quake 4 for the campaign. Treat the multiplayer as a thing you can arrange rather than a thing you can join, and it stops being a disappointment.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Quake 4 servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.