Quake Champions

Return to the world of Quake with the gameplay of Quake III Arena, the monetization of Overwatch, and the player count of something nowhere near as successful as any of those. Ah well.

Following a closed beta period, the game was released under early access on August 22nd, 2017, before quietly exiting it nearly five years later, as well as becoming a free-to-play game. Quake Champions once again went pay-to-play on September 23rd, 2026.

Unused UI Graphics#

Character Graphics#

The first three champions in internal order — Ranger, Scalebearer, and Visor — have additional graphics stored in their UI sprite sheets. These each include thumbnail renders of parts of their cosmetic sets and a piece of concept art described as a "loadout image".

Ranger:

Scalebearer:

Visor:

Unreleased Characters#

UI graphics exist depicting three unreleased champions, giving glimpses at characters at various stages of completion. Portraits of untextured models for Xaero, a returning character from Quake III Arena, and a newcomer named Beastmaster can be found. Their sprite sheets only contain these unfinished portraits, and other graphics such as ability icons do not exist.

A sprite sheet for Wrack, also a returning character from Quake III Arena, also exists. Wrack begun development in 2025, far later than previous unreleased characters, and was expected to release sometime around 2027 before reductions in workforce at id Software made it uncertain if he will ever become available. He was scheduled to be the 17th playable champion, and the first to release since 2018. Wrack's portraits depict a finalized character model and icons for his passive and active abilities are included in his sprite sheet.

Beastmaster	Xaero
Wrack

HUD Graphics#

Alternate HUD

Graphics for an alternate HUD style can be found in this sprite sheet referenced by hud_player_info.gfx. The alternate HUD is designed to be centered around the lower-middle portion of the screen, unlike how the default HUD occupies the lower-left side, and is more similar to the HUD layouts of past Quake games. It primarily consists of sprite graphics, while the default HUD is mostly composed of generated shapes. A full layout for the alternate HUD exists as a spawnable UI object and there is a valid attach point to load it with. However, attempting to spawn it without modifications to the HUD manager code will crash the game due to various hierarchical differences to the default HUD, as well as the alternate HUD's use of graphical sprites instead of generated shapes for its health and armor bars. Some animations on the HUD are also slightly unfinished; a glowing flame effect appears behind the health and armor bars when their base caps are exceeded (such as when a major item is collected), but no animation state exists where this flame effect may be active while the "taking damage" effect plays at the same time.

The same sprite sheet also contains two small unused graphics associated only with the default HUD style used in-game: a "MAX" label that would be placed next to the health and armor bars, and a graphic that would appear with a brief animation whenever the unimplemented key item was picked up.

POI icons

Certain items in Quake Champions have POI (point-of-interest) markers that appear on the HUD to show players where they are, even through walls. There are some extra POI icons that go unused, either because they're for items that are far too common to need POI markers or the item they represent no longer exists. The cooldown POI uses an early design for the item. Random powerup spawns were removed from the game very early in its lifetime in favor of a fixed cycle of powerups, making its POI redundant.

The weapon pickup POI is notable for having a text field associated with it that tracks your distance to the weapon it points to. The flag POIs in the Capture The Flag mode are the only others to have such a feature. The graphic used for the weapon POI is red, but color-shifted variants are created inside hud_marker_lib.gfx for all other weapons — including the gauntlet for some reason, despite the fact it cannot be dropped. The Tri-bolt does not have a color variant specified in the file, meaning the feature may have been dropped before the Tri-bolt was added to the game in June 2017.

Berserk ability pentagram overlay

These two pentagram graphics are bundled with the rest of the general HUD icons like crosshairs. They're meant to slowly spin over the screen while the Doom Slayer's Berserk ability is active.

Scorebox Graphics#

Runes

These runes appear alongside the graphics for the Deathmatch mode's scorebox, coming in neutral, blue, and red team colors. UI code seems to suggest that these runes may have been used to signify team ownership of obelisk control points in the Sacrifice mode.

Key icons

These icons for ownership of the unimplemented key item per-team can also be found in the same sprite sheets.

Customization Graphics#

Icons for unimplemented features

Several customization features were planned and never made available. Icons for these features still exist.

Pre-rendered shader thumbnails

These pre-rendered icons for champion shaders were used in early versions of Quake Champions but have since been replaced with thumbnails that generate at runtime. The red-crossed "no shader" graphic is used, but all others are not.

Customization mock-ups

These two mock-up graphics are referenced by customization_screen_lib.gfx, an unused early layout for the customization menu. They show a selected champion's base statistics and any modifiers currently applied to them. Based on their presence in the unused customization layout, these mock-ups may imply that equippable outfits and vanities were planned to affect a champion's stats at some point.

Heading A	Heading B

Post-Match Graphics#

This set of mock-up graphics for the post-match rewards sequence belongs to postmatch_assets_lib.gfx, which is never used in-game. The visual style of these graphics differs considerably from the rest of the game's UI design. All medals in the fullscreen mock-up image are placeholder designs.

Interestingly, some early character art can be seen in these images. Nyx's portrait is based on an early render of her character model. Clutch's portrait is drastically different from his final design, seemingly being based on either concept art or an early player model. His head is black instead of red, his eye appears wider, and the shape and colors of his torso are different.

Champion challenges mock-up	Weapon challenges mock-up	Fullscreen mock-up

Included in the same sprite sheets are these emblems for profile levels and champion levels, which would be drawn on top. These would be used in animations whenever you leveled up during a match. Profile levels are a feature in Quake Champions, but champion levels are not.

Profile level icon	Champion level icon

These icons represent placeholder designs for experience and the removed Favor currency:

Finally, this otherwise-unused render of the default rocket launcher serves as a placeholder for any cosmetic rewards a player earned from their performance in the match.

Shop Graphics#

At one point, it was possible to destroy duplicate cosmetics in your inventory in exchange for shards, a currency which could then be spent on other cosmetics. This system has since been removed and now duplicate cosmetics are simply converted directly into shards when obtained, leaving this "dismantle" icon unused.

This "detailed view" icon is set up to appear in the lower right corner of a shop listing, but doesn't.

Likewise, this "NEW" label is meant to appear on the top right corner of shop listings, but doesn't. Instead, a different yellow label appears on the top left of shop listings, where "NEW" is written with a text element instead of being part of the sprite.

The removed "favor" currency was used to rent champions temporarily, which is no longer possible. This timer sprite would appear alongside anything available for rent.

Rune/Elder God Graphics#

Early in Quake Champions' life, a long-term progression system existed themed around runes and elder gods from the game's mythos. The system revolved around difficult, unlockable challenges available per-champion and awarded exclusive elder god-themed cosmetics upon completion. This system was scrapped and replaced with a much simpler progression system early in the game's life, but all the graphics for the runes and the menu they occupied still remain.

These "pledge icons" appeared in the customization menu as part of the same system:

These icons were meant to sit on the left of this specially-designed button.

elder_god_lib.gfx contains graphics that served as a progress tracker for the rune system, showing how many challenges you had completed for each elder god.

Goroth	Cthalha	Volkerh	Ithagnal

This button and special border combined to form the progress bar on top of each of the four backdrop graphics.

Miscellaneous#

default_lib_as3.gfx contains several basic, reusable UI elements like buttons and scrollbars. This sprite sheet is the only noteworthy graphic it references, containing an unused mouse cursor design, a duplicate crosshair similar to one from Quake III Arena, and an 'A' button prompt for controllers. Only the A prompt is present, but the .gfx file also makes reference to missing B, X, and Y prompts. Given the history of Saber Interactive's game engine on consoles, the presence of these prompts is not necessarily an indication that Quake Champions was ever considered for a console release or that controller support was planned.

Unused Audio#

Character Announcer Callouts#

Present in the audio files are recordings of the Closed Beta placeholder announcer reading off the names of characters. Presumably, these were intended to be played when selecting that character. This includes all the characters in the initial release, several released in subsequent years, and a number that never reached public release. Names in italic denote unreleased characters.