Enemy Territory meets the Doom 3 engine ... Quake Wars seems like a for-sure success. Maybe we've just seen this before already.
Is it all its cracked up to be?
As I'm sure many of you have noticed, the Quake Wars beta is over on Fileplanet to those lucky enough to get a key. I will admit I was pretty excited about Quake Wars. John Carmack is a big name in gaming and hearing about what they did with the Doom 3 engine to produce Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was exciting.
After playing the Beta though, I can say I am somewhat disappointed. Maybe I expected too much, or maybe they delivered too little, or maybe they are still working on it, it still has a few months until it hits shelves so we shall see. Now enough boring talk, let's get down to the nitty gritty details about what this game is all about.
For any of you that have played any of the Battlefield games, you will be right at home, load up, join a server, and you will be able to figure it out in seconds. ET:QW really seems like a carbon copy of Battlefield in many respects. There are two factions. The Humans and the Strogg. The Strogg as many of you will remember from Quake 2 and more recently Quake 4, are the biomechanical zombie looking creatures. Something reminiscent of the Borg.
The player's heads up display, or HUD, looks pretty much the way the one in Battlefield 2 did. Also noteworthy are the class breakdown on both sides. Five classes each filling a special role. Fire Support, Basic Soldier, Field Medic, Engineer, and Special Ops. Very similiar again to what we are used to in Battlefield. The only thing added to ET:QW over BF2 is that certain classes have the ability to deploy defensive or offensive turret emplacements on certain areas of the map. The Spawn interface and battlefield map are exactly what we are used to seeing in the Battlefield franchise as well.
But all is not doom and gloom for this game just yet. I have found the netcode to be far superior to Battlefield games, with less all around lag, making it possible to effectively snipe people from a distance without having to predict them too much. Still the net code isn't on par with what we have come to love from pervious titles like Quake 3, and even Half-Life 1 and 2. The defining feature of ET:QW will be to see if it succeeds where Battlefield games always seem to fail, and that is Patching. I don't remember a Battlefield game to date that didn't have a multitude of patches, and none of them ever went smoothly.
My final verdict is that this game is the same old same old, and unoriginal in nearly every aspect. I was thrilled when I heard about this game, but after playing it, I am sorely disappointed by its lack of freshness. It doesn't even really improve on the Battlefield game play all that much. I didn't see much difference with the macro textures that Carmack hyped last year, the maps still don't look that incredibly detailed, maybe the map designer took some shortcuts, maybe not, but the engine itself doesn't seem all that great in practice. It just might be the age of the Doom 3 engine starting to show, but I see superior graphics quality out of games like Half-Life 2: Episode 1.
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