Where to begin.
Firstly UT4 was not left in a good place if you want to talk about “skill”.
The mechanics required for either game is significantly higher than modern shooters. This is actually one thing that fortnite is doing acceptably – building adds a significant amount of mechanical skill to the game. I haven’t watched the OP video but I would bet that is the main aspect they concentrate on, playing that off against better gun mechanics in PUBG.
In quake and ut movement is very deep in comparison to modern shooters. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt99wfDKP9U) This a movement tutorial for reflex, which is heavily influenced by all three versions of quake. While not specifically quake this guy does an excellent job of laying it out in simple terms. You could consider this harder and adding more mechanical depth than aim.
Aim wise weapons are varied. Quakelive has three main types of weapons that require different aim and an additional two that are used sparingly. Fortnite and modern shooters have what, different variations on hit scan? Breaking this down a bit more we have (High damage, low rate of fire hitscan – rail), (low damage, high rate of fire hitscan with limited range – lightning gun), (High damage, low rate of fire projectile with splash – rockets). These are the three, the holy trinity in order to be as effective as possible. On top of this you have (high rate of fire, low damage projectiles – plasma gun) and (High damage, low rate of fire projectile with splash on an arch – grenade launcher). You need to be able to use all of them.
Twitch/reflexes are not super important in the grand scheme of things. At least not on the same level as modern shooters with fast TTKs.
In modern shooters controlling your weapon recoil/bloom/whatever mechanic the developer picks vs a slow moving target that cannot avoid. In arena fps the player needs to aim while at the same time avoiding their opponents shots/juking to put off their opponents aim. Both players doing this at the same time while considering positioning – so this is not a simple matter of just randomly strafing back and forth. This all occurs at fairly high speed adds further depth to combat.
The last point I will touch on is the primary competitive gametype in quakelive – duel. Positioning is an important skill in these games and because of the gametype (duel) is also highly dynamic. To understand this a quick rundown of duel and how it is played is required. In QL players fight over items, armors and megahealth being the primary ones. These respawn a set amount after they have been taken and keeping track of these is another skill that I won’t touch on. This makes the game extremely dynamic but also gives it an underlying structure and reasons for players to fight.
Positioning ones self in order to contest the important spawns is key. However this goes beyond just being at the correct place on the map at the correct time, which in itself is challenging. We also need to consider some things:
– Personal stack. If you are too weak you cannot contest, or cannot contest directly. Perhaps instead go for some chip damage on the other player as they pick up the item.
– Enemy stack.
– The combination of both (You vs their stacks).
– Your weapons (and ammo). Depending on what you have in your kit dictates what sort of positions you can take.
– Their weapons
– The combination of the two allows you to potentially leverage holes in their arsenal to your advantage.
– Your location. Obvious, I am at X and need to get to Y – however I need to take into account :
– Their location in order to do so.
– Positioning in relation to the next spawn to give yourself the largest advantage possible.
– Future spawns. eg A player might want to contest/take Red Armor but we know that mega is up next in 5-7seconds, so they want to make sure to leave via left hand passage with faster route to mega rather than right hand passage which takes longer.
Some of these are known to the player and others are implied. What is my stack? Its on my HUD. What is my opponents stack? Well, that is harder to answer. What weapons do I have? Well.. again its on the HUD or in my memory from picking them up. What about my opponents weapons? What time is the mega spawning, if you missed the last spawn you can make an educated guess, if you missed the last two spawns you need to hang around nearby to get a spawn time then you can contest on the next spawn.
The two important items in quakelive are the Red Armor and the Megahealth. However there are also lesser armors that are useful. The RA (and armors) has a 25 second spawn and the Mega has a 35 second spawn. With just those two items we see that all the above are being considered and weighed up ~3 times per minute. Both players do not need to contest all items but you need to be conscious of what is going on.
When people say that quake is fast they usually mean the movement is fast or the weapons kill quickly or similar. The “fast” aspect is actually following the game around the map and being at the relevant position.