With id Software's Kevin Cloud & Splash Damage's Paul Wedgwood
8/6/2006Finger: We saw some recent screenshots of new maps in the works that haven't been shown previously. Can you tell me a little bit about one or two of the maps?
Paul: Our approach to maps, and I think this is something that worked really, really nicely from Return to Castle Wolfenstein, when id Software developed RTCW, for the very first time a multiplayer combat map had an actual plot and a theme and a reason for being. You were pursuing a specific military objective. This was evolved in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory where we added the radio news ticker that was going and you had this guy explaining the story for the map. One of the great things about really good World War II movies and games and books is that they retell the story of a famous battle of World War II. They recreate this experience so the player, and the Medal of Honor series is a good example, so the player is immersed in the fancy of having fought in World War II.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars charts the Strogg invasion of Earth around [the year] 2065. In that sense it's a prequel to Quake 2 and Quake 4, but what it means is that thematically we have an entire art style in the game and a direction for the game which is based on the natural disasters that they've undergone as they've gone up to this point. This sets a really nice theme for the map. We change each map based on geographic location, and this determines things like whether it's arid, or arctic or temperate, and then we have full dynamic light outside, a different time of day for each map, and we have precipitation like snow and rain and fog. Then we have the unique plot of the level, the unique reason for being as it came from Return to Castle Wolfenstein. In Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, we pay homage to a lot of story elements that Kevin wrote for Quake 2 (Kevin was the project lead on Quake 2).
For example, the humans are able to lead a retaliation against Stroggos by traveling through slipgates and then by landing in drop pods. And those two things, the availability of slipgate technology to humans, the way they cracked that technology, and prototyping drop pods and using them for retaliatory attack, they both feature as peaks in the Strogg invasion story in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.
So each map ends up being completely unique, except for the actions that you do to complete objectives which we keep consistent so it doesn't become too complex for players. Placing a heavy explosive charge is always placing a heavy explosive charge and that doesn't change - a Soldier knows exactly how to perform his combat role. But the map having one destruction objective, it could be an underground base under a crazed biodome in an arctic wasteland, and another one could be at the top of a hill where you're literally trying to get through a trench system to a specific location.
There are also generally three or four specific objectives on each map for the attacking team, and they are always unique from each other. The surrounding geometry is used as well, so every map ends up feeling like a completely unique gameplay experience.
Finger: You don't have different size maps for different numbers of players on a server. If you had ten people in a game, how is it still fun?
Paul: The thing that's really changed from Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, is that before you'd complete an objective and then you moved forward, your spawn moved, and not much else. In Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, we have this concept of a piece of territory that you start with as the attacking team and the enemy team controls two or three other territories. You have a linear progression by securing objectives that exist between the borders of two pieces of territory. So at the start of the map my first objective is generally on or around the border between my territory and the next piece of territory that I want to capture. This creates a natural front line between the two pieces of territory. When I complete the objective, it shifts to the next one, my spawns shift up, I get additional vehicle availability, more area to deploy artillery guns and the like.
So to answer your question, the reason why balance or size of map doesn't come into it too much, as long as you have a single front line that helps focus combat at any point during play, then with even eight people playing the server, that's eight people fighting against each other on opposing sides of the bridges. When you get twelve people together, you might start to see aerial combat. When you've got sixteen people on the server and there's a lot of fighting on the bridge, you'll find that people naturally take up combat roles like deploying anti-vehicle turrets because there are vehicles coming, deploying anti-personnel turrets because there are more personnel coming. The game organically grows as the player count increases to use more of the game's features that surround it, but fundamentally it's balanced as long as you have the same number of people on each side of the team.
We've had games where there's been 4 or 5 people on each side and it's still felt like a really intense combat experience because of the way spawn waves work and so on.
To counter that, with a lot of multiplayer combat games, what actually happens is you have a gameplay mechanism like deathmatch, capture the flag, or capture and hold, and what this means is that, especially with the Capture and Hold game type, you disperse across the map to try and capture individual locations, and in doing so, even with 64 people on the server, and if you had ten capture locations, that's 6.4 people per capture location (which is only 3 people fighting 3 people). So even on a 64 player server that's Capture and Hold, the potential for combat is generally only interactions between three people and three people at any given time; you don't tend to have masses of people all competing over one thing, except towards the end when you've got a lot of points captured. With focused combat, because everybody knows where the combat is and where the front line exists, they can choose to engage in intense combat around the front line, or they can play a supporting role like infiltration that might involve going somewhere else around the map.
Kevin: The objective system is more than just focused [combat]. Because they work out sort of like military missions, once they're accomplished, there's no return from that. So, like Capture the Flag, that's very focused and you go get this flag, you go get this flag, but if I take your flag you can always take another flag back and it's basically like a sporting game. The way the objective system works is that there's a huge amount of intensity and focus on supporting that location. And so the battles work out where when it's five on five, what happens is that those five people just begin to close in more around that centralized objective, to protect that area.
I will say that in your five-on-five match, or six-on-six, that's where your clan matches and your tournament-level matches would be; your players have to be.. GOOD. If there's an engineer who's not setting down vehicle turrets, [there's going to be a problem]. As far as a public server or the average guy getting into the game, that doesn't really know how to play, six-on-six is going to be a difficult challenge, but our balance for public games is twelve-on-twelve.
I'd like to thank Kevin Cloud and Paul Wedgwood for giving us such honest, complete, and enthusiastic answers to our questions. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is set for release some time in 2007.
