Straight Jacket Type Fun
Quakecon 2006
8/3/2006
Quake Wars: Enemy Territory
This year's Quakecon was announced late and the location itself -- downtown Dallas -- leaves something to be desired in terms of easy accessibility and parking ($15 per day? No thanks). So, such things and the fact that my buddy couldn't come down this year for the BYOC, sealed the deal for me not going for the entire event. But, with the imminent release of Quake Wars next year, I definitely wanted to be there to learn about as much as I can about that game.
And so my effort to learn the rapid transit system to get downtown will now benefit you all. On Thursday, Paul Wedgwood of SplashDamage and Kevin Cloud of id software presented what to expect from Quake Wars: Enemy Territory. So let's get right down to it.
The demonstration being shown at the presentation was of one map for the game called Valiant. In some ways, this map was reminiscent of the original demo map for Enemy Territory called FuelDump, in that one side starts by trying to build a bridge to go across and through a tunnel while the other side attempts to stop them. The end objective for the Earth forces (human) becomes stopping the Strogg from launching or deploying a poison gas system which will wipe out most of the population in the surrounding area. An important aspect of these maps is that they are divided into unique zones which are clearly shown on the overall battle map. Each zone is designed to deliberately funnel forces into main battle areas. The reason for this, according to Mr. Wedgwood and Mr. Cloud is twofold. First, with the game optimized for around 24 players a side they wish to minimize the amount of time a person might wander across a map looking for a fight. Instead, the players should be able to easily determine where the battle lines are and head directly there. Second, as a result of the first reason, the battles at those chokepoints should be quite frantic. They did not, however, mention the possibility of firefights bogging down or becoming too static because of this funneling. I am guessing that becomes an issue of level design more than anything else though. Once each zone is taken, they may not be recaptured by the opposing side (no flag hopping whores a la Battlefield 2).
The graphics were of course top notch and Mr. Wedgwood stated that while they did not have system specs completely determined, they were trying to make the game have the same specifications as those required by Quake IV. Those specs, by the way, state that the minimum is a P4 2.0GHZ, 512Megs of RAM, and a Radeon 9700 or GeForce 6 card running on at least Windows 2000. With the MegaTexture system on display, they demonstrated how you can see all the way across the map in a process they've dubbed "brute force rendering." The benefit of this is that you will not have a graphics limitation like in most games where if a vehicle, jet, or person gets beyond a certain point, they simply disappear into a graphical fog. The only time such a thing should happen now is if the level designer actually puts in fog or other atmospheric events into the map on purpose.
For the modders and map makers out there, Paul discussed their geometric texture distribution system which allows a person to set textures with specific characteristics. For example, assume the level designer makes out their basic map layout. They then go to the various parts of the map and using this distribution system they can pick various themes for the terrain in that area. If, for example, you're on a mountain side and you want grass to be able to grown up the texture to a certain height, you simply choose the appropriate template and the engine will fill in the terrain, hence no need for tiles. It almost sounded like a form of graphical rendering that you can then save and distribute.
On the physics end of things things look very exciting. First of all, Paul stated that you will NOT need a physics accelerator card for this game so you can spend that money on something else like food, booze, or hookers (Paul didn't say that so I'm suggesting it). At one point, Paul demonstrated how a vehicle, when shot, would begin to perform differently. He took his character into a six wheeled troop carrier and placed it on an incline. He then hopped out of the vehicle and begin shooting the wheels off the vehicle. While the wheels did deflate, this also lead to the vehicle tipping. As he shot out the front tires the entire vehicle heaved forward while the tires deflated. After repairing some of the wheels a little bit he hopped back into the vehicle and demonstrated how even though some of the wheels were repaired, the vehicle drove and handled differently without all of its wheels. However, since the vehicle was also amphibious, when he took it into the water the propellers took over and since they had not been damaged the vehicle handled just fine.
Unfortunately, they didn't delve deeply into the various classes or the more minute details of the gameplay but hopefully I can fill in all those gaps tomorrow when I go to get some hands on playing. But, from what was seen in the demo and mentioned by Paul and Keving I will attempt to list some things I noticed while watching the gameplay:
No stamina limitation, run to heart's content.
Parachutes appear to drop you into the battlezone
There's a 4-wheeler ATV that they called the "Husky QuadBike" for the Earth forces. Paul stated that because of the physics engine design they specifically added jumps and other fun features into the maps to let those vehicles fully utilize the physics engine to perform some amazing jumps or other tricks.
Covert Ops have satchel charges again but this time it appeared that when a satchel was laid the Covert Ops could turn on a camera view that appeared attached to the satchel charge so they can see what is near the charge before detonating it.
There will still be the ability to steal pants
Field Ops soldiers may call in various support such as artillery or air strikes but the Strogg are able to counter those systems. For example, if the Field Ops call in artillery, the Strogg may deploy some sort of shielding system to stop the artillery.
There's an Earth tank called the Titan which may hold three people.
They did not demonstrate any Strogg vehicles.
Engies appear to be able to build or deploy portable gun turrets
There's a first and third person viewing mode
The discussion then opened up to Q&A. The first question was about a public beta. While they do want to do that in order to avoid the various bugs of the BF2 series, they do not comment when the beta might be released. The second question was regarding bots but Paul and Kevin stated they were undecided on that issue. Damage on a person would be similar to Enemy Territory meaning you wouldn't have to unload three clips to drop someone but it also wouldn't be one shot one kill like in Counter-Strike (unless it's a sniper of course). The scoring system will provide campaign points but those points would not be global across all servers. There would be, however, some sort of prestige system which would be rewards of some sort that would persist across servers. Unfortunately, they did not expand on this explanation. Spawn timers are staggered similar to Wolfenstein
Finally, and most disappointing was the confirmation that GDF forces would not be able to use Strogg vehicles and vice versa. The stated reason was that would cause too much confusion and subtract from the overall gameplay pace since people would be unable to decide whether to shoot or not without finding out who's in the vehicle. Personally, I don't see why with the view to the sky and the graphical detail of this game how identifying friend or foe would be that difficult.
Tomorrow for Friday: Quake Wars hands on, id Software Q&A, and modding Quake Wars.
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