Building comparison
head to head
Quake III ArenavsQuake Live
Neither is meaningfully harder - they pose close to the same test. The widest gap is execution, and it is a single point.
Quake III Arena
Execution · Pure Mechanics
Pure aim and movement skill tested against adaptive human opponents competing for spawn-cycle dominance.
Quake Live
Execution · Pure Mechanics
Browser-era refinement of Quake III, the benchmark for raw arena FPS skill.
Quake III Arena leans Execution (Pure Mechanics); Quake Live leans Execution (Pure Mechanics).
Quake III ArenaQuake Live
Axis by axis
Execution9 vs 10
Quake Live leans a little harder on execution, though the gap is small.
Quake III Arena
Rail and rocket aim at speed is the entire game
Quake Live
Rail aim and strafe-jump movement are the purest hand test
Reads6 vs 7
Quake Live leans a little harder on reads, though the gap is small.
Quake III Arena
Human opponents adapt their routes and timings in direct response
Quake Live
Duels are mind games against an adapting human opponent
Variance2 vs 1
Quake III Arena leans a little harder on variance, though the gap is small.
Quake III Arena
Spawn locations have mild randomness but are quickly mapped
Quake Live
Symmetric arenas, full information, almost no randomness
Optimization5 vs 6
Quake Live leans a little harder on optimization, though the gap is small.
Quake III Arena
Armor and weapon timing routes are learnable and highly leveraged
Quake Live
Item timing and map control are deeply solvable
A matching score does not mean a matching test. Two games can both sit at 10 on execution and demand completely different things of you - which is why the reasoning above matters more than the number beside it.