Quake Champions has added a new game mode called Slipgate, an ultra-mobile Quake 2-inspired champion called Athena, and an Arcade, which will host matches with wacky rule sets that rotate every week.
Athena's calling card is her grappling hook, which makes her the most agile character in the game. When hooked onto a surface, you can press and hold 'F' to start swinging from it, which gives you lots of options for getting around aerially. You can just zoom straight to the hook without swinging if you like, which will be very useful on the ground for getting to power-ups ahead of enemies.
Hitting a foe with the hook directly will deal 25 damage and knock them back, or if you hit an enemy while swinging, you deal 50 damage. You can use the hook three times in succession, and each use will cool down independently.
Her passive ability is called Ramp Jump and, as the name suggests, it gives you extra height when jumping from near the top of a ramp or step.
To counter her mobility, Athena has just 100 health and up to 50 base armour, to go along with her 320 speed. You can check out a video all about her at the top of this post.
If you don't own the game's Champions Pack then you'll have to pay to unlock Athena—or, you could hope that the community collectively plays one million rounds of the new Slipgate mode before the end of the month, at which point she'll unlock for free for everybody (and existing owners will get a bonus skin).
As for Slipgate, it's an attack vs defense mode that sees two teams battle over a Slipgate portal. Everybody spawns with all weapons, full health and full armour, but just a single life. It's the defending team's job to protect the portal, allowing a tentacled demon to be summoned, while the attacking team tries to destroy it before the beast arrives.
Finally, the update adds a new Arcade, which will house a regularly-rotating list of rule modifiers. To start off with, it has four separate rule sets, including an Athena-only mode (called...ahem...Swinger Party) in which every direct grappling hook shot is an instakill, and a Scalebearer-only free for all where Bull Rush is a one shot.
You can read the full list of Arcade modes, along with all the bug fixes and map tweaks that arrived with the update, in the patch notes.
