Splash Damage on why Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is taking so d— long…

Forgive them. Because to whom much is given, much is expected. Compared to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, the workload in Enemy Terrotory: Quake Wars (PC, PS3, Xbox 360) is huge. By Splash Damage estimates, each map in Quake Wars is around “four times as much manpower as a single (Wolfenstein) map,” creative director Paul Wedgwood tells Gamespot in an interview.

Essentially what we were doing is we were taking the Doom 3 engine, which is a linear, first-person, single-player, indoor shooter and creating an outdoor-terrain-rendering multiplayer game with vehicle physics. As a team we were very familiar with id technology but what we really needed to do was something completely new.

Ken and I have talked about this quite a lot. I think if we wanted to we could have put the game out in 2006 and had every map be quite similar. But the problem was it wouldn’t have given you that unique gameplay experience at the level of the objective, not just the map itself, but every objective feeling like it’s a really different, interesting take on the way that you play. And that was something that we really wanted to achieve.

Different and interesting. Paul’s description of the gameplay possibilities in Quake Wars suggests the strategic and replayability depth they really want to build into the multiplayer-only game – again explaining the “when it’s done” mantra. Of course, “when it’s done,” Quake Wars will definitely have to make its mark in a shooter-heavy industry – particularly against fellow multiplatform fragfest Unreal Tournament 3 and, in the Xbox 360, Halo 3 – but you get the drift from here, right?

If it takes that long to make a shooter of distinction, then it takes that long, grumblings aside. Read more at the Read link.

Forgive them. Because to whom much is given, much is expected. Compared to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, the workload in Enemy Terrotory: Quake Wars (PC, PS3, Xbox 360) is huge. By Splash Damage estimates, each map in Quake Wars is around “four times as much manpower as a single (Wolfenstein) map,” creative director Paul Wedgwood tells Gamespot in an interview.

Essentially what we were doing is we were taking the Doom 3 engine, which is a linear, first-person, single-player, indoor shooter and creating an outdoor-terrain-rendering multiplayer game with vehicle physics. As a team we were very familiar with id technology but what we really needed to do was something completely new.

Ken and I have talked about this quite a lot. I think if we wanted to we could have put the game out in 2006 and had every map be quite similar. But the problem was it wouldn’t have given you that unique gameplay experience at the level of the objective, not just the map itself, but every objective feeling like it’s a really different, interesting take on the way that you play. And that was something that we really wanted to achieve.

Different and interesting. Paul’s description of the gameplay possibilities in Quake Wars suggests the strategic and replayability depth they really want to build into the multiplayer-only game – again explaining the “when it’s done” mantra. Of course, “when it’s done,” Quake Wars will definitely have to make its mark in a shooter-heavy industry – particularly against fellow multiplatform fragfest Unreal Tournament 3 and, in the Xbox 360, Halo 3 – but you get the drift from here, right?

If it takes that long to make a shooter of distinction, then it takes that long, grumblings aside. Read more at the Read link.