Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Preview
Quakecon 2007
This might be AtomicGamer's third preview of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars from id Software and Splash Damage, but to hell with it. I love this damn game. At QuakeCon 2007 id Software has released a new beta build of Quake Wars which includes a single new map called Valley. This beta version is a big improvement over the first limited public beta, and while this one will have a larger version of the same style of beta, id Software's Todd Hollenshead has promised to give all Quakecon attendees access to the ongoing beta test as well.
This time around, the beta includes plenty of new features along with the new, larger (and more complex!) map. Now we get the ability to run our own dedicated servers, play LAN games, and even play against AI-controlled bots (which also work online as well). A new mode that is being dubbed "Hero Mode" is being thrown in with the bots where your teammates will not actually finish critical map objectives. Instead, they'll try and protect you as you are the one-man force doing everything vital to win. But for the more authentic online-style experience, I recommend going normal so that you can also have fun in supporting the bots.
More maps!
Valley is a much better map in my opinion than the first beta's map. That map, called Sewer, only had aircraft on the Strogg side and the objectives are a little more simplistic; a few good players with headsets and good teamwork can easily dominate Sewer whether it's a highly populated server or not. On Valley, more players will be needed to win. And like the last beta, the GDF is on the attack again with the Strogg mostly just putting up defenses and shooting down incoming GDF advances. This is the map that was on display for the public to see at Quakecon last year, and the change in the experience is vast. The interface is cleaned up even further from the first beta, the Strogg's zoomed view is less pixellated, and weapons and vehicles have been further balanced.
Valley is a much better map in my opinion than the first beta's map. That map, called Sewer, only had aircraft on the Strogg side and the objectives are a little more simplistic; a few good players with headsets and good teamwork can easily dominate Sewer whether it's a highly populated server or not. On Valley, more players will be needed to win. And like the last beta, the GDF is on the attack again with the Strogg mostly just putting up defenses and shooting down incoming GDF advances. This is the map that was on display for the public to see at Quakecon last year, and the change in the experience is vast. The interface is cleaned up even further from the first beta, the Strogg's zoomed view is less pixellated, and weapons and vehicles have been further balanced.
Getting XP
Now let's get back to campaigns for a second. When you jump onto a server, you'll be participating in one of the campaigns and can gain XP that leads to some really interesting perks like stat boosts, nice bonuses, and even extra weapons and tools. When a campaign is over, the XP gets reset and everyone starts over with no perks. And while kills do give XP when you do them in certain ways, just running around owning people with the basic Assault Rifle or Lacerator is not really productive in most cases, so you aren't directly rewarded for this. In this way, Quake Wars gives short-term benefits to people who participate well in teamwork, but doesn't reward long-term play. This became an issue in games like Battlefield 2142 where players who had been playing every day for months had access to the game's coolest toys while the new players were getting smoked constantly without even basic gadgets like grenades. While there are merits to both ways of doing it, I think Quake Wars is the better way to go.
More missions!
When it comes to online action games, there hasn't been a lot of innovation recently, so it's nice to see when a game developer does come up with some fresh ideas. One of these is Quake Wars' Mission system, which has recently been improved quite a bit. This is a complex game where both changing maps and changing sides result in a different set of goals, and so new players will find themselves often overwhelmed without a simple answer to the question "what do I do to help the team?" Quake Wars tries to answer that question by giving all players smaller, more manageable objectives that still help the team win.
With the Mission system, a little box on the top-left corner of the screen the game will assign you something to do that your character class (one of five on each side) can complete. If you don't like that mission, you can choose from others to be displayed, although you'll find that even contributing to the completion of a mission you don't have selected (or didn't even know you had) will get you credit and some XP.
The mission might be to capture a forward spawn point, repair an anti-vehicle turret that has been damaged, resurrect a nearby teammate, or destroy incoming vehicles. Players can use the included voice macros which will actually create missions for other players. For example, when someone is playing as a Strogg Oppressor and the Dark Matter Cannon he deployed gets damaged enough to be disabled, he can't go and fix it himself without changing classes and losing the use of the cannon altogether. But if he points at it and issues a voice order to repair it, the Constructors on his team will get a mission to fix it which will result in an XP bonus for those players. In this way, Splash Damage's Paul Wedgwood says that Quake Wars rewards players for making the game more fun for other players. It also distributes the order-giving powers among all the players instead of concentrating it into some kind of Commander role like what's seen in the later Battlefield games.
Classes
The Valley map has really shown how important it is to have a diverse set of character classes. While both sides have 5 similar classes, they each have unique tools and abilities. Strogg Technicians can create "Spawn Hosts" out of dead GDF bodies to allow a Strogg buddy who uses it to then spawn there the next time they die, while GDF Medics are able to call in a supply crate to get ammo to his buddies. The Medic also is able to use his shock paddles to instantly resurrect people who just got taken out, while the Strogg have to spend a couple of uninterrupted seconds to revive his buddies. And that's just what it looks like with no upgrades; there are many perks that are pretty different between these two classes as well. Going further, that's just one of the five classes, all of which have their own unique weapons, vehicles, and abilities. This makes the two sides in this game very different - far more than in most of these games - and while they have a lot of analogous tools and weapons, just about all of them act uniquely enough that playing all twelve maps as one side and then all twelve again as the other will feel like a whole new experience.
Bot issues
Beyond that, there are still a few flaws. The most obvious one is in the bots, which were put together by Nerve Software (developers of the Xbox 360 version of Quake Wars and contributor of maps and other code to all versions of the game). While the bots are capable of doing a lot of the high-level stuff - teamwork, understanding objectives, completing useful tasks, and more - the low-level things still need work. For example, their aim at times will suddenly become impeccable yet their pathing needs some work.
These problems are not really new with game AI; anyone who's played against bots in a first person shooter before has come across these issues, and we all find it a little ridiculous when a bot snap-shots you with a Railgun from halfway across the map but can't figure out how to get into a vehicle properly or run around a corner without flipping out and getting stuck. I asked Nerve Software's Brandon James about this issue and he assured me that in the two or so months before the release they'll be working specifically on these problems to make the bots work more smoothly. The current beta does have a "single player" mode where you get to choose some options for the bots like the number per team and their difficulty, but unfortunately in the Beta 2 of the game the menus were there but nothing would happen when I tried to start a game. I did get something similar going by running a dedicated server on one machine with 23 bots and jumping onto it with my gaming computer as the 24th player. Other than the bot issues, I can't really think of much else to complain about.
On the Xbox 360
On display was the Xbox 360 version of Quake Wars by Nerve Software as well. One thing that was stressed to me was that all the functionality and complexity of the PC version is there on the 360, and it's got a new limbo interface that I actually prefer over the PC version. Unfortunately the "official" player limit of 24 players on the PC version (which can be easily lifted, as many servers have a 32-player capacity) has been reduced to 16 on the 360 version. But because the game focuses on keeping people together and fighting over the same stuff, it really doesn't make a server much less hectic and action-packed at all. I've actually had 3-on-3 matches on the PC that were still really fun. Anyway, the 360 version's release date is going to lag behind the PC's, and in the meantime they'll be working on the frame rate (which needs a little work) as well as the bot issues that were seen on both versions of the game.
One of the interesting features that's going into the 360 version of the game is the "party" system. You can create a group of players while in-game, by adding players you work well with, or right out of your friends list to a team. Then this group can move with you from one server to another and get on the same team. Unfortunately the 360 port, like most online 360 games, won't have dedicated servers and so online games will be hosted on one of the player's consoles. This can cause problems when the host's roommate starts downloading porn in the next room, but hopefully we'll see the advanced "host switching" features when the host starts to lag.
Wrapping it up
id Software has also nailed down a final release date for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars in the US: October 2nd, 2007. The Euros are going to get it a few days earlier on September 28th. There is still a deal going on where you can reserve your nickname if you preorder at participating retailers, which may or may not be vital to your internet ego. Either way, I've been playing this game for the most part of three days now and I can say that this looks to blow away pretty much all of the team-based multiplayer games out there. As long as nothing gets horribly broken in the next two months (or the eight maps I haven't seen are just somehow terrible compared to the four that I did play on), this is going to be a world-class shooter that online gamers are going to really enjoy.
