In the interest of full disclosure right from the outset, I have to admit that I wasn't really interested in Enemy Territory - Quake Wars (ET:QW). Several of my gaming buddies were pretty geeked, but I wasn't. It seemed to me like nothing more than Battlefield 2 (BF2) with some different skins and gameplay tweaks. In short, I thought it would be just another team-based, multi-player shooter.
I was wrong. ET:QW is the hybrid successor both to the Quake franchise and the free Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (ET) game released some years ago. As I understand it, ET was intended originally to be an expansion pack to Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but due to development problems it was cancelled and the multi-player aspect was released, gratis, to the public. ET:QW takes the objective-based gameplay of ET and melds it with the frenetic action and milieu of the Quake universe.
As such, playing ET:QW feels like some wild cross between Unreal Tournament 2004's assault mode and the multi-player deathmatch in Quake 4 (Q4). The game mechanics aren't new in themselves, but their fusion does bring something new to the table. The question that remains is whether the resulting game is worth the effort.
I've read more than one review of ET:QW that takes exception with the graphics, but I don't get it. Granted, it's not going to put Unreal Tournament 3 or Crysis to shame, but it works well nevertheless. I don't understand the reviewers' collective beef with the graphics, nor do I understand their complaints about a limited, Quake-brown color palette.
Confusion aside, I think the game looks more than good enough to get the job done. It has nice environments, good textures, good animation, and some nifty special effects. I don't find the color palette limited, as some have complained, nor do I have any substantive complaints with the art direction. The game looks as good or better than BF2 but not quite as good as some of the games about to hit the market. It's not going to knock your socks off, but it's pleasing to the eye nevertheless.
The special effects are particularly welcome. It's quite a sight to watch an SSM explode harmlessly in mid-air, repulsed by a Strogg shield generator. The use of shaders for view distortion from fire, the static displayed on a Strogg HUD when injured, and other such neat bits are a lovely touch.
The best part, I think, is that the engine runs fantastically well for what it does. My gaming machine is now over two years old, but ET:QW runs well at 1600 x 1200 with all the goodies maxed. It pushes my dual, NVIDIA 7800 GTX graphic cards to the max—temperatures sometimes exceed 85° C, causing thermal throttling—but it runs nevertheless. I've got to believe it runs even better on the latest and greatest cards. Even if your system is out of date like mine, it will probably run ET:QW much better than many of the other multi-player games released of late.
The short summary is that the visuals aren't going to set a new bar for achievement. Were the game released a year earlier they might have, but not now. The graphics are more than good enough to suck you into the game. That's all the counts in my book.
The audio is more of a mixed bag. On the one hand, I love the music. I knew as soon as I launched the game that Bill Brown did the score. I love his work because he always writes exactly what fits the game. In ET:QW the music is perfectly suited to the game setting. The Strogg themes are industrialized, alien, and pulsing with malevolence. I haven't seen a soundtrack for sale, but I'll buy it in a heartbeat if I do.
Yet on the other hand, the voice work is somewhat off-putting. It's not that the actors did a bad job, not at all. I think the lines are all acted well enough. My gripe is more with the thematic direction. The Strogg are supposed to be these horrible alien things, but their voices come off as a most tired cliché. At least BF2 had the sense to record the lines in the appropriate foreign languages. The Strogg sound silly, growling away in gosh-aren't-we-amazingly-bad-guys English.
Worse, the sound effects for the weapons are less than impressive. I liked the sound effects for Q4, so I'm a bit confused at finding ET:QW lacking. Perhaps it's just that so many of the guns sound the same? I don't know. What I do know is that the weapons often sound more like something out of an arcade than a "serious" video game. I expect firing an assault rifle to have a substantial crack to its report, but the GDF's basic assault rifle sounds more like some funky industrial stapler than a gun.
Thankfully, the explosions do make up for much, as do the ambient details. Even better, the audio implementation seems absolutely flawless. It all just works. That's not always the case with games, but I've not encountered a single audio bug with the game. Could the audio be better? Yes, it probably could be. Does it detract from the game? Yes, but not all that much. I doubt too many people will even notice.
Surprisingly, the interface seems overly complicated to me, at least in terms of its key bindings. Whereas the Quake games have always been models of simplicity, ET:QW requires a lot more keys than seem necessary. The use key, for example, works nicely to capture a spawn point, but it doesn't do a thing for gun emplacements or vehicles.
There is a completely separate key to enter/exit such things, even thought you can't "use" vehicles or gun emplacements for anything else. I don't get why the use key isn't appropriate. I was disappointed to run into similar "overload" with other aspects of vehicle use, tool use, etc. I realize that the use key switches positions once in a vehicle, but I guess it seems more consistent to me to have that be a separate key, rather than separating vehicle use from everything else.
Thankfully, the menus are great, once you get the trick. I blanked on configuring the most basic settings. There was something about it that wasn't intuitive, but that may say more about my personality defects than the game. The UI seems as informative as it is functional. And unlike the utterly preposterous red/blue bug in BF2, which continues to plague the game to this day as I understand it, ET:QW is actually capable of putting the proper color marker over every player's head—even when they're in disguise . True, I've still been shot and killed by teammates who don't understand the covert ops ability to disguise, but that's not the game's fault.
On the whole the interface is good enough. It doesn't break any new ground, and it seems complicated unnecessarily in its key bindings, but it does work.
In terms of its game mechanics, ET:QW is deeper than first meets the eye. There are two sides to the conflict, the GDF and the Strogg, each of which have access to five classes: soldier, medic, engineer, field ops, and covert ops (to use the GDF names). There are a few, minor differences between the two sides (e.g., the Strogg can trade off "ammunition" for health, the GDF are quicker to respawn, etc.), and there are a few, minor differences between the classes as well (e.g., GDF health/ammo are resupplied by two different classes whereas a single Strogg class dispenses both). But on the whole, the game balance is maintained (at least theoretically) by the two sides not being all that different.
The real meat of the game consists in the differences between the classes and their roles. The soldier is, unsurprisingly, the best fighter of the bunch, but he is also distinguished from the others by his ability to plant explosives. The medic is all about being a support class; tossing out med-packs, reviving fallen comrades, destroying Strogg spawn-hosts, and even calling down supply crates which both heal and supply ammunition. The engineer is the builder of the group; his role at constructing turrets and objectives, to say nothing of his ability to defuse enemy explosives or repair vehicles, is crucial.
I find the remaining two classes of particular interest because they're so different from other games. First is the field ops class, which doesn't really have an exact parallel in other team-based games I've played. The closest comparison would be the support class from BF2, because of his ability to resupply his teammates with ammunition, but in ET:QW only GDF field ops can resupply ammunition and neither side's field ops carries a more formidable rifle than the soldier. The real strength of the class lies in its ability to do massive, game-tilting damage. Both sides have essentially three options for deployables : light artillery, heavy artillery, and the big bad boom kind of destruction that levels everything in the blast radius.
The light artillery is all about killing infantry at a particular point with a limited radius. The heavy artillery is all about killing infantry or vehicles. The big bad boom is all about a massively powerful explosion with a large blast radius, which essentially destroys everything it touches. Making use of such destructive tools is a two step process: the player must first successfully deploy his toy, and then he must use a targeting beacon to call down its deadly fire, during which time he is quite obvious and vulnerable to attack.
The somewhat more subtle approach is to run up within throwing distance and toss the air strike marker or violator beacon. Within a few seconds after release, a GDF plane will appear and bomb the hell out of the target zone, or some wicked-looking, Strogg energy beam will rain down fire and death from the heavens. Either way, the result is the same: anything unlucky enough to be caught beneath it dies. Though such weapons aren't subtle, it's easy to miss the markers and get caught flat-footed. It is noticeably easier to avoid the Strogg's violator weapon on foot, but it will leave you just as dead if it forms nearby.
So the field ops class is, by nature, all about turning the tide. Whenever the enemy packs his turrets too closely together at a choke point, or masses his vehicles and personnel too closely, a single field ops player can kill them all in a matter of seconds. Such moments can turn the tide of a fight, if not the entire round. It makes the field ops class a lot of fun to play. It's more than a bit tricky finding the right moment and then being able to execute, but let me tell you it is really satisfying seeing that air strike blow a massive hole in the enemy's defense.
The covert ops class reminds me of the sniper class in BF2, but the comparison isn't quite fair. In too many games, the sniper role just isn't viable beyond a very limited set of circumstances. The ET:QW covert ops class, however, is far more flexible and more fun to play in my estimation. Covert opts is important because it's the only class that can deploy radar, which shows all enemies within range. It's also the only class with smoke grenades and a third-eye camera, which can be terribly useful in protecting explosives or objectives. Better still, because the covert ops isn't limited to the sniper rifle, he can hit with all the punch of a normal soldier up close, which makes him quite versatile.
But that's not even the best part, namely, the ability to hack and disguise. By "hacking" a fallen foe, the covert ops player clothes himself as an enemy. This makes it possible to fool players, turrets, mines, and everything else in the game—even Strogg force fields, which makes it possible for covert ops to go where no others can go. While disguised, it's still possible to kill the enemy, albeit through the melee weapon alone. I've snuck to an objective in disguise more than once before knifing the guards and hacking it. I've never managed to pull off that complete trifecta (I usually get killed while hacking), but it's still pretty cool.
Point for point, I find every class ability has a counter, so I never feel like it's impossible to handle one strategy or another. There is no one uber-class that can't be stopped, any more than a team composed of a single class can dominate a map. That was always the problem with BF2 in my view: a team full of medics could be darned near unstoppable. No matter how many of the buggers you shot, a team full of medics can always field one medic ready for revival duty. A team full of medics in ET:QW can make for potent fire teams, but they'll always lose without the classes necessary to complete the requisite objectives.
The basic mechanics are all right on the money. I know some find the running speed a bit too fast, but I much prefer it to the slow alternative of slogging along on foot from the spawn to the objective. True, players can move unnaturally fast, and I suppose it isn't all that realistic, but it doesn't bother me. I must also point out that the weapon accuracy is very nice. ET:QW isn't a game that adds so much random bullet drift that firing at range is pointless; quite the contrary, weapons generally fire right at the aiming point. Their accuracy is nicely adjusted for movement, though regrettably not enough to prevent bunny hopping from being a valid and useful tactic, and they "feel" right.
The one weapon mechanic that I find irritating is the drift on the sniper rifle. I've played plenty of shooters that have a gentle up and down drift, nicely modeling the player's "breathing", but the drift in ET:QW seems entirely random. It drifts up, down, left, right, up, right, down, left, and so forth. It's really quite irritating. It greatly complicates nailing a tough shot at range. To be fair, though, sniping in ET:QW is extremely powerful; a single round to the upper chest or head is almost always a clean kill. Perhaps the random drift is necessary for balance? It wouldn't be hard to convince me of it.
It also wouldn't be hard to convince me in either direction as regards the vehicle mechanics. On the one hand, I find it irritating that even small arms fire can damage a tank. Yet on the other hand, games that model armor more realistically (e.g., BF2) trap the players in their classes. Against armor in BF2, only anti-tank or special operations forces have any substantive hope of victory. In ET:QW any group of players can engage even the toughest vehicle with a reasonable hope of success.
As to the game modes, the campaign mode is quite refreshing. Each campaign consists of three maps, all of which are located on or around a single continent and each of which has its own unique objectives. It really helps keep the game interesting. Even if you don't care for the structure of the current map, the next will likely be different and may be more to your taste. It helps tie the maps together in a way that most games do not; they no longer feel like isolated battles but part of a larger conflict.
The experience system, strange as it is, also helps this feeling along. Unlike BF2, or various other multi-player shooters, the rewards for experience in ET:QW come in two flavors. The persistent rewards encompass a series of medals and awards, all of which may be viewed through the persistent stats screen. Unlike the unlocks in BF2, though, none of the persistent rewards make any difference on the battlefield. Within the scope of each game, be it in single-map objective play or a three-map campaign, the player's experience counts toward rewards that persist until the end of the objective/campaign.
None of them will dramatically tip the balance of the game, but they're all worthwhile. They're divided into two categories: class-specific rewards and more general rewards. The class-specific rewards depend upon the experience accumulated while playing each class, whereas the more general rewards accumulate for more general achievements. It encourages the player to behave more intelligently, though it's true that the experience system leads some goofballs to focus on gathering experience rather than pursuing the objectives required for victory.
Finally, I should note that the game's diverse set of objectives provides a lot of latitude for players. There are spawn points to capture, towers to build, barriers to demolish, and so forth. The various types of objectives provide experience to different classes and real, in-game benefits. Building guard towers, for example, supplies snipers and others with machine-gun positions and high ground to occupy. Every death provides a medic with a revive objective; many deployables provide objectives to disable or destroy them, whereas their damage provides engineers with repair objectives. The system provides multiple opportunities for earning experience that provide a feeling of accomplishment and help with the main objectives.
On the whole, I have very few complaints with the game mechanics. The classes, weapons, tools, and so forth are all interesting and well balanced, yet different enough to make the two sides feel different during play. Personally, I prefer to play as the GDF, but the Strogg can be an interesting challenge. Suffice it to say that the game mechanics are deeper than they first appear, and mastery will require no small amount of play.
Story has never been a strong point for the Quake series. The first game was a freaky mishmash of medieval and futuristic stuff, mostly brown, providing more of a fun technology demo than a meaningful game experience. The whole point was to be amazed by the truly three-dimensional fragging environments. It was accessible, fast, and fun. The environments and bad guys existed only for us to run through, guns blazing.
The sequel was a complete departure and the first game to introduce us to the Strogg. It was also the first video game that made it worthwhile to buy a video accelerator card—I myself bought a Voodoo 2 card if I recall correctly—because it looked and played so much better with one installed. Whereas the original Quake didn't have anything recognizable as a story, Quake II tried to provide a coherent motivation for the game elements, even if most of them were brown.
Then Quake III Arena (Q3A) introduced us to a completely new lack of depth: somebody has plucked you from your own world and wants you to fight against all sorts of other beings plucked from their worlds. In strangely techno-retro-futuristic, brown environments. With weapons, ammunition, and health power-ups conveniently placed. Hey, I enjoyed Q3A as much as the next guy, but it wasn't exactly an accomplishment in terms of its story.
Q4 tried to provide some story to unify all the brown stuff, but it wasn't exactly a standout. The only bit of it I even remember was the whole Stoggification process. The game was otherwise completely forgettable.
So what's the point to ET:QW? Well, if I understand it correctly, the Strogg want to harvest and process us into "stroyent", the one substance they need. It isn't clear to me why they couldn't get this stuff somewhere else, nor is it clear to me why folks technologically advanced enough to have slipgate technology can't seem to grow or otherwise make the stuff on their own. The story is yet again completely forgettable. At least the GDF have a good reason to fight (i.e., not being eaten).
Frankly, I've written more about the story in this review than all the story that exists throughout the entire Quake series.
Let me start with my number one complaint, namely, that ET:QW can't decide whether it's a serious game or not. On the one hand, the opening cinematic tries its best to convince you that the Strogg are a serious threat to earth. I realize that story has never been a strength of the Quake games, but ET:QW seems like it wants to be different; it seems like it wants you to take the Strogg invasion seriously. But then so much of the game seems to wander beyond cartoon into absurdity. It's simply impossible for me to take notions like a "Stroggifier" seriously. The result is a game that seems like it wants to be taken seriously, yet does any number of things to make that impossible.
My secondary complaint is that it seems to me like some of the maps are so defense-heavy that they cannot be won by one side. I'm all for asymmetric game play, but I'm too motivated toward victory to be able to enjoy a no-win scenario. The official statistics site currently reports that the GDF have won 112,383 games compared with 144,713 won by the Strogg. For those math challenged individuals, that means the GDF wins 43.7% of the battles compared to 56.3% won by the Strogg. Is a difference of almost 7% enough to say the game is unbalanced? I don't know. What I do know is that there are several maps that feel utterly hopeless.
Take the "slipgate" map, for example. The GDF must first hack the slipgate, which is a short run from where the Strogg spawn, is totally open to fire from practically all sides, requires maybe ten seconds to hack, and will reset back to zero within a minute or so of the last failed attempt. In my experience, it's pretty rare the GDF make it past that point. My gut estimate is that the GDF can't achieve the first objective roughly 75% of the time.
But assuming they do, they must then drive their MCP into the gate. There's only one route it can take, and that route is easily choked by anti-vehicle turrets. Worse, there are rooftops, mountain terrain, and pretty much every bit of high ground necessary to guarantee every enemy soldier a clear shot at the vehicle. Given that it takes a mere couple of rockets to disable the MCP, it's pretty simple to shut the GDF down completely at this point. From the roughly 25% of games I've seen make it past the first objective, I'd wager that roughly 75% of them end before the GDF can drive the MCP into the slipgate.
But assuming they do, their next task is to drive the MCP all the way to another easily defended outpost in Antarctica. If it survived the trip into the gate in the first place, you can just about bet the farm that it's not going to make it to the next outpost. At least this time there are two routes to the outpost, but the terrain is even more open, making it even easier to stop the GDF cold. Of all the dozens of games I've played on the slipgate map, I've seen the GDF reach this point once, and then with less than a minute left in the game. Still, let's estimate that if the GDF makes it to Antarctica, they have a 25% chance of getting the MCP to the outpost.
As I understand it, there's yet another objective that must be completed, which is the most easily defended of all by the Strogg. I've never seen it, of course, but maybe that's because there's about a 1.6% chance of the GDF ever getting that far, based on the suggested probabilities. I could say something similar about a couple of other maps for the Strogg and some maps for the GDF. I like a protracted battle as much as the next guy, but when the odds are so stacked against you from the outset, it makes the whole thing seem pretty pointless, and that just isn't fun.
My numbers could be wrong, or perhaps the fault lies with my own play or that of my teammates. I know this much: when I see certain maps in the rotation, I can predict their outcomes with almost perfect reliability. That suggests to me that the maps aren't balanced. Take it as you will.
Aside from those complaints, the content that ships with ET:QW is pretty impressive. It features a healthy number of maps set in different environments, several different classes to play, multiple objectives, plenty of weapons and tools, and so forth. The roster of vehicles is worthwhile and not so ridiculously overpowered that one guy in an airship can dominate the whole map (ala BF2's attack choppers). The set of toys to play with is more than large enough to be interesting and fun, and the game clearly has sufficient depth to provide good value in its content.
Since the game essentially has no single-player aspect, I'll use this section to comment on the multi-player networking and support features. As to the networking code, it seems to work as smoothly as one might expect from a game in the Quake series. I've experienced jerky play on a few occasions in high-lag circumstances, but with a solid Internet connection butter-smooth game play is the norm.
The game browser, however, is broken. It's hard for me to believe that Gamespy has been supplying code to game developers now for more than a decade, and they still don't have it right. The filtering in ET:QW is painfully bad. Configure your filters to reject servers with bots, for example, and you'll still be seeing them in your server list. That's merely the first of several such issues, but it's the most painful from my perspective. I've seen that kind of nonsense in dozens of games over the years, and I find it pathetic that such issues still haunt the Gamespy libraries.
As to the community, it will ultimately make or break any multi-player shooter, and ET:QW is no different. Once I discovered a combination of browser filter settings that actually worked, I found that I could pretty consistently rely upon finding a couple of dozen, ranked servers with a decent number of players in the campaign mode. Those servers tend to fill up pretty quickly each night, but finding a place to play hasn't been an issue. It's unclear at this point whether the game is going to be a flash in the pan or not, but I expect it to have some legs from my experience.
It's funny, but as I proofread my review, I couldn't help but notice all the negatives. And yet despite those negatives, the game still succeeds on the most basic level: it's fun to play, fast paced, varied, and generally entertaining. I don't find it to be much fun when playing certain, seemingly un-winnable maps, but even then the diversity of objectives makes it possible for me to find something worth doing.
So the short version of the verdict is that folks looking for a new, class and objective based multi-player shooter should definitely try the demo. But be prepared: you just might find yourself ponying up the money for the full game if you do. I paid full price for ET:QW via Valve's Steam service, and despite the issues I've faced I don't regret it. I know I'm going to get my money's worth out of it, and I suspect most other gamers would as well.
11/21/2007