Two players fighting each other in DM6: The Dark Zone
| “ | In a deathmatch, play is totally cutthroat. No monsters exist, and when you are killed, you reappear in a random spot. After you pick up an item, it respawns (i.e. pops back into existence) after a while. (Some items take longer to respawn than others.) Every time you kill someone, you get a Frag. The person with the most Frags wins, so wreak slaughter amongst your pals! | ” |
—Quake Manual | ||
Deathmatch is a Game Mode where the players must slay each other using weapons in the map. In Deathmatch, objects taken will disappear for a moment, but return later. Any Quake map can be used for Deathmatch. In fact, there are slightly different versions of all of the official singleplayer maps which are designed for Deathmatch, and six maps made specifically for it.
An alternate mode exists if the Deathmatch Console Command is set to 2. Similar to Doom, Weapons always stay, but can only be taken by a player that does not have the Weapon. Resources do not respawn in this mode, meaning taking it once shall remove it from play for the rest of the session. Some players preferred this mode since it prevented players from taking all the resources in the event that they had a better connection. Downsides include a smaller pool of Ammo; generally the newer Deathmatch was seen as the recommended style for smaller games, while larger arena battles tended to lean towards Deathmatch 2.
Features[]
- Teamplay, which may be set to “Friendly Fire,” “No Friendly Fire” and “Off.”
- A frag limit, meaning that the match terminates when a player acquires a certain amount of kills. The limit is always decadic and must range from 10 to 100.
- A time limit, where the match terminates based on the time reached. The number must be fivefold or tenfold and can range from 5 to 60 minutes.