Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Console Push
Id Software recently announced that its team-based multiplayer shoot Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will launch for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 May 27. The legendary game developer held a preview event last week and gave media members a chance to get their hands on the Xbox 360 version of the game.
With about 20 Xbox 360s packed into a hotel meeting room at the J.W. Marriott in San Francisco, officials from Id and Nerve Software, which handled the Xbox 360 port, provided a quick tour of the game. Id designer Kevin Cloud explained that a console version of Quake Wars had been in their minds from the very start. He said the developers have been working on the ports for several months with Nerve and Underground Development, which designed the PS3 version (Underground wasn't at the preview event last week, and we'll get into why later in the article).
After Cloud and Nerve designer Greg Stone offered a brief overview of the game, media members got a chance to jump right into the game and get a feel for the most recent build of the Xbox 360 version.
The first thing that's different about Quake Wars for the console is the addition of a tutorial, called Training Mode, that helps players familiarize themselves with each class and how the objective-based missions work. Even though I had played Quake Wars on the PC and was very familiar with the game, the Training Mode offered a quick, informative and easy-to-use tour of the game. The mode's "Bot Guide" gives players a chance to experience actual missions and class functions - with surprisingly strong AI, no less - before jumping into the real thing with live players.
After spending about 10 minutes with the Training Mode, we were able to create a match and get into some GDF versus Strogg action. One thing I noticed immediately was that the load times were long (I noticed similar load times with Team Fortress 2 on the Xbox 360), which delayed the action a bit. The second thing that jumped out was the game's visual design - the graphics certainly are above average for a next-gen console, but they're hardly spectacular and suffer from some of the same issues that we saw with the original PC version (namely, the Id Tech 4 engine delivered some clunky character models, stiff animations and occasionally messy textures for vehicles while Id's MegaTexture rendering technology provided beautiful, detailed outdoor environments). Overall, the graphics fall short of competing shooters like Team Fortress 2 or Call of Duty 4.
Now onto the controls: for shooter gameplay, the Xbox 360 controller worked surprisingly well. I'm of the mind that shooters are best played on the PC with the precision that a good mouse and keyboard offer. But for your basic shooting, aiming, weapon switching and grenade tossing, the console controls are about as good as they come for Quake Wars. The vehicle controls, on the other hand, need a bit of work. The ground vehicles tended to react a little too sensitively to the thumbstick controls, while air vehicles were even more chaotic.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for the Xbox 360 offers
Still, the console version of Quake Wars has a lot of nice touches, like an extremely user-friendly interface for matchmaking and stat-tracking and a multiplayer lobby system to help keep things organized and easy to find with the click of the button. Nerve deserves credit for making a console version of Quake Wars that feels like a quality conversion rather than a quick-and-cheap port. The build that Id and Activision offered up at last week's event was as clean as a whistle, with no obvious bugs or glitches. Thus, gamers should expect a quality game when Quake Wars ships for the PS3 and box 360 next month.
The only question is whether or not console gamers will appreciate the strategic, challenging gameplay of Quake Wars, which is a stark contrast to simpler run-and-gun multiplayer games that are popular on the Xbox 360 and PS3. Will the complex, objective-based gameplay of Quake Wars fly over the heads of most console gamers? Cloud doesn't think so.
We spoke with Cloud briefly during last week's event (stay tuned for the full interview Wednesday). He explained that the Training Mode and bot guides will help gamers unfamiliar with Enemy Territory get the hang of things. And it sounds like Activision and Id Software will be doing some heavy promoting of the console versions over the next several weeks to raise the Quake Wars profile.
But the Quake Wars console push has apparently come with a steep price. Shortly after the last week's Quake Wars console preview, Activision confirmed over the weekend that Underground, formerly known as Z-Axis, would officially close its doors once the PS3 version of Quake Wars was completed. Activision had acquired the developer in 2002, which was probably best known for the infamous BMX XXX as well as the commercial and critical bomb X-Men: The Official Game.
Was Underground a casualty of the Activision-Blizzard merger? Or had the studio simply reached the end of its rope after a string of forgettable titles? It could be a bit of both. But it's not a good sign when the developer in charge of a major port is scuttled just before the game's release. Hopefully, the PS3 version of Quake Wars will ship bug free, since there will be no Underground to support the game after its release.
Speaking of support, another troubling bit of news emerged last week: Activision has apparently ceased its support of Quake Wars for the PC and handed off all responsibilities to Splash Damage. According to the official Splash Damage blog, the developer announced that Quake Wars 1.5 patch was in the works but that Activision was not involved with the game's support any longer. Here's a quote from the blog post:
"First off, 1.5 is not an official Activision release like all the previous updates (this is actually the cause of the license troubles from a few weeks back), but instead something that we here at Splash Damage are funding ourselves and working on alongside our new project," the post reads. "As Activision's QA and localization departments are not available to help us out, we instead opted for an extended public beta phase to iron out any remaining kinks. The result is that things don't always move as quickly as we'd like them to, but we are committed to getting 1.5 finished and out to you."
Splash Damage said that it hopes to have the 1.5 update as well as the new SDK and the Official Competition Mod out in the coming weeks after internal testing is completed. Nevertheless, it's distressing to see the PC version of Quake Wars essentially cut loose by Activision in favor of the forthcoming console versions of the game. Stay tuned for more updates on Quake Wars.
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