AusGamers had the chance to get a detailed look into the final retail version of ET Quake Wars. Review below.
First Person Shooters, particularly on the online multiplayer side of things, have evolved incredibly in recent years. No longer are punters satisfied with a vanilla deathmatch game - we’ve been spoiled rotten with countless user-made modifications for every half-way popular shooter to a point where, when a new game comes out, it not only has to compete with, for example, the original Half-Life 2 and it’s deathmatch and capture the flag variants, but also the likes of Day of Defeat, the mighty Counter-Strike and dozens of other popular community-created mods.
If a shooter is to succeed in today’s market it needs to be polished on release or there’s a good chance we’ll forget all about it before they can patch it enough to be a great game. With that presumably in mind, Splash Damage (best known for their work on the freely downloadable Wolfenstien: Enemy Territory) and id Software (you know, those guys that brought us Doom, Quake, more Quake and more Doom) have joined forces to bring us Enemy Territory: Quake Wars - a game aimed squarely at the team-based multiplayer scene. The gameplay being a natural progression of Wolf: ET with the addition of Battlefield-esque vehicular combat, all wrapped up into id Software’s Quake universe.
You may think that a multiplayer only game doesn’t even need a story at all, but it works quite well here, providing a common theme for the maps and purpose to the conflict. It’s set as a precursor to the events in Quake 2 and once again sees the humans fighting the parasitic alien race known as the Strogg. In Quake 2, you played as a human space marine taking part in an invasion on the Strogg’s home turf. Quake Wars is all about the build up to that - the point where they first hit us at home, here on Earth. Each of the game’s multiplayer maps are described as a re-enactment of key battles from the Strogg invasion. It’s a touch cheesy but doesn’t take itself too seriously. At any rate, it beats the old ‘two teams destined to fight each other something, something… engaged mortal combat’ gig.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars demo will be out tomorrow. The demo is single player (with bots) and multiplayer and features the Valley level from the second round of the public beta. If you didn’t make it into the beta you’ll probably want to check this one out. You can check out the website here.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (ET:QW) is a first-person shooter video game, and is the follow-up to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. However, it is set in the same science fiction universe as Quake II and Quake 4, with a back-story serving as a prequel to Quake II. It is the second multiplayer-focused game in the Quake series (after Quake III Arena).
Quake Wars will feature similar gameplay to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, but with the addition of controllable vehicles and aircraft, asymmetric teams, much larger maps and the option of computer-controlled bots. Unlike the previous Enemy Territory game, Quake Wars will be a commercial release rather than a free download.
