For those living under a rock and just recently released, Quake III Arena (Q3A) is the third in the Quake series of games from Id Software. To establish my bona fides, I still remember playing the original DOOM when it was released. Heck, I remember playing the original Wolfenstein 3D when it was released. I played all of the games in those two series, and I've spent more hours playing Quake and Quake II than I can count.
Having said that, it pains me to say that Q3A simply doesn't cut the mustard. It does not continue the Quake series in a spectacular fashion. Yes, it does set the standard for gaming graphics—and probably for some years to come—but in terms of the game itself, it's old news. We've all been there. We've all done that. For hours. I'll try to explain why I find Q3A to be an excellent technology demo but a poor game in the sections that follow.
Wow-factor. That's what Q3A is all about. Q3A has the most detailed mapping to date in any first-person-shooter (FPS) game. It has the most detailed textures as well. It has a ridiculous assortment of engine tweaks from enabling anisotropic filtering to changing the rendering of curved surfaces. The special effects are fabulous. The entire game is one non-stop eye-candy festival.
Amidst the jaw-dropping splendor, one item stands above all, namely, the modeling and animation for the characters in the game. Gone are the blocky and jerky days of the original Quake. Q3A brings significantly higher polygon counts to the table, proper weapon modeling, and even wonderfully smooth bipedal animation. It's a thing of beauty to see Sarge running in one direction while his torso and weapon point smoothly in another. In terms of gameplay, it tells you what your enemies are carrying and where they're looking, both of which are rather important details.
Not surprisingly, John Carmack has yet again gone beyond the state of the art. More to the point, he has again defined the state of the art. The engine of Q3A is clearly the engine to match or beat if you're working at a game development company today. I expect a lot of companies will simply license the Q3A engine; they'll likely end up with something far prettier than they could have accomplished otherwise, and it will save a ton of time. I can't wait to see what Q3A-powered games come down the pipe in the near future.
The audio in Q3A is pretty good. It's not great, mind you, but it's pretty good. The weapon sounds are pretty good, but I think they're inconsistent. Whereas the shotgun, plasma rifle, and railgun all sound very satisfyingly beefy, the rocket launcher falls rather short by comparison. It sounds more like a carefully executed passing of gas than a rocket launcher. Maybe the original Quake spoiled me, but I expect a big powerful BOOM!
What annoys me more than the weapon sounds, I think, are the character noises. The various characters all get different noises, but they seem largely lackluster to me. Maybe it's because there is not much variety. If you've heard one or two footsteps, then you've pretty much heard them all. That gets old fast. So do the yells of glee, or taunts, or whatever they're called. I think if I have to listen to Major crow after killing me one more time, I just might uninstall the game completely.
The music would make up for these defects. That is, it would make up for these defects if the music wasn't as uninteresting as it is sparse. I realize this is a FPS game. It's a dedicated shoot-em-up. It's not deep. It's not complicated. It's all about twitch reflexes for the mouse hand and copious keyboard mashing for the other. But some kind of more interesting soundtrack would do much to propel the game forward. Competitive players would surely disable it (to better hear the sounds of their enemies), but it would make everyday fragging a lot more interesting for the rest of us.
The one really high point to the audio, in my estimation, is the attempt to do high quality positional audio. Honestly, I have had lots of trouble getting this to work correctly and consistently. I don't know why, but the positional audio for other games seems to work better with my sound card (a Soundblaster Live! X-Gamer from Creative Labs). When it works, though, it's brilliant. Hearing the doppler shift of a rocket moving past your head is something that must be heard to be believed.
Q3A wins the battle for simplicity, but it clearly loses the war as far as I'm concerned. Yes, the controls are all simple to use. Yes, the keyboard and mouse can be remapped easily to suit even the fussiest players—though for the record I've had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get the fourth and fifth buttons on my mouse working. But this is where the expressive power of the interface ends.
Q3A is intended to be a multi-player only game. It does have a "single-player" mode, of course, which turns out to be nothing more than multi-player games with bots (more on that in a moment). As such, you would expect Q3A to supply some impressive features for finding servers, sorting them, maintaining a list of favorites, hooking up with other players, and so forth. This expectation goes almost entirely unmet. You can sort a list of servers, and you can add servers to your list of favorites, but that's where it ends. Too many other games provide much better features in this regard. Id Software should be ashamed for releasing the game with such minimalist menus.
The Team Arena expansion pack helps with this somewhat, but it still falls far short of what it needs to do. It allows filtering by game type, but it's still very limited in its sorting features, and it doesn't allow any customizations. It's a lot prettier interface, of course, and that's a welcome change. But more eye candy isn't what's really needed.
It's a Quake game, what do you want? Seriously, it plays like every other FPS game from Id Software; i.e., fast and furiously. In fact, it seems to me that Q3A is too frantic in its mechanics. In the previous two games in the series, it seemed to me that the gameplay was noticeably slower. And I think that's a good thing insofar as it allows players the time to think about strategy. Q3A is a twitch-gamer's wet dream by comparison. Q3A moves faster than the speed of most persons' thoughts. You learn to react instinctively, or you die. Period.
This makes for highly adrenaline-soaked games, of course, and it also makes the game very easy to pick up and put down. You can dabble with Q3A for a few minutes or a few hours as time permits. This isn't a role-playing game where you can spend half an hour just fussing around with your character's inventory! Q3A reminds me of the pictures I've seen of Tokyo, Japan; i.e., it's very fast-paced and flashy, but it's not somewhere I'd ever want to spend any serious time for fear of losing my sanity amidst the pressure.
My only serious complaint with the gameplay is that many matches devolve into nothing more interesting than weapon-camping. The machine gun with which one initially spawns is simply pathetic. The shotgun is better, but it's essentially useless at anything more than point-blank range. As with the original Quake the rocket launcher reigns supreme, though the railgun is probably a close second. It's a pity so many of the weapons seem underpowered compared to those two.
The expansion pack adds a couple of new weapons to the fray, and it adds some interesting power-ups as well. They add to the gameplay, but they're not a serious leap forward. They provide merely a few bits of novelty, and I'm not convinced that they're worth the price of admission—particularly in light of the relative paucity of servers running the expansion pack.
Let's see, I know there's a story in here somewhere... Ah yes, you've been kidnapped by some aliens, and they're apparently of the bloodthirsty variety. This isn't Carl Sagan's Contact. This is more like the original Star Trek's "Gamesters of Triskelion". Yes, I just showed my true geek colors with that remark. Nevertheless, I will wager ten-thousand quatloos on Xaero! Ahem. Excuse me for a moment while I remove my pointy-eared appliances.
Ok, that's better. Anyway, humor is the best I can do here. The story is essentially nothing more than a few barely coherent sentences. Honestly, I don't know why Id Software even bothers. The dreck they come up with is so silly that you'd be better off without it. If you're the kind of player who needs at least some coherent story to be happy, then avoid this game. You won't find anything here.
Q3A does pretty well in this regard, though it stumbles in a few areas. First, there is no single-player game. Yes, there are tiers with nifty little cut-scenes introducing the bots. Yes, there is an interesting set of bots to play on each of the various maps. But here's the question: who cares? You can create any of these sequences simply by creating your own private multi-player game. I guess it's kind of handy to have the various "missions" already pre-configured, but that could have been done as a series of configuration files for instant-action scenarios. Seriously, the "single-player" game might as well be absent.
There is a pretty nice selection of maps, however, and some of them are in the very best traditions of Id Software. I don't think I will ever in my life, no matter how long I live, forget the layout of Q3DM17. I've played that space-based map for literally hundreds of hours. There's just something about it that keeps me coming back for more. The same is true of a couple of the other maps. Truly there are some gems here.
Nevertheless, something needs to be said: the designers really need to get out more. Though there is a pretty nice selection of maps, they range "broadly" from techno-futuristic to techno-gothic. With an engine as fabulous as the engine that drives Q3A, I think it would have been really neat to see what it could do in other settings. How about a purely science fiction environment, say, a spaceship circling the event horizon of a black hole? How about a medieval setting? How about something out in the desert? How about something really dark and moody like some of the original DOOM maps? Other games have much more variation to keep things fresh.
A final complaint is with the bots. They're pretty good as bots go. My complaint, however, is that they go from complete idiots to Deadeye Dick far too quickly. Playing against Xaero on the nightmare level is well named, for I think he can blow the left testicle off a fruit fly on a dead run at a thousand yards. With his eyes closed. Using only a rubber band and a spitball. His accuracy is inhuman to begin with; when he's cranked up all the way, it's just ridiculous. It would be a lot more fun to play against bots that seem more human.
Not surprisingly for a game that focuses almost completely on the multi-player aspect, Q3A is brilliant in networked play. John Carmack has clearly come a long way since the old QuakeWorld days. The net code in Q3A is as good as I think any multi-player game is going to get. You're still at a disadvantage if you're playing on a modem, but it's still a pretty good experience. I expect these kinds of considerations will go the way of the dodo once broadband Internet access becomes more common, but for now the Q3A network code is clearly the king of the hill.
The big downer for multi-player gaming in Q3A is the interface. If you're going to play Q3A much, then you should do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of GameSpy 3D (or something similar). There are so many servers out there, that it's really important to have some kind of tool to filter them, sort them, save them, and so forth. If the Q3A mod scene turns out to be half as prolific as the mod scene was for the previous games in the series, just finding your desired game mode will be a serious hassle without such a thing.
The expansion pack deserves special mention here insofar as it seems largely shunned by the multi-player community. There is a pretty good selection of Q3A servers running at any given time, usually a few thousand, but there are only a few hundred servers running the expansion pack. That's a real pity insofar as some of the new game modes it introduces—I particularly like headhunters—are pretty interesting. If you're still motivated to purchase Q3A after reading my review, don't spring for the Team Arena add-on unless you can get it on the cheap.
Q3A sets the new standard for multi-player FPS gaming, but it does so only in terms of the aesthetics. The interface is woefully inadequate, and the gameplay is so very simplistic that it begins to grow stale. Even the Team Arena expansion pack fails to address these issues completely. It does make the interface a lot prettier, but it still falls short of what it needs to offer while adding very little serious material to the mechanics of gameplay.
In short, I take Q3A to be a technology demo, not a game. It shows the game developers of the world exactly what is possible with the hardware of today. It simultaneously hints at an incredible future for gamers, one in which thousands or even tens of thousands of polygons will be effortlessly rendered to screen. I have no doubt that many of the best games of the next few years will be powered under the hood by the Q3A engine. But none of these things makes Q3A a fabulous game on its own.
In conclusion, if you're a hardcore FPS nut, then you really shouldn't miss out on Q3A. If you're a gamer who enjoys deathmatch, capture-the-flag, etc., then consider the game if you can find it at a good price. It can soak up a few free minutes enjoyable here and there. If you're the kind of gamer who's looking for something deep, or even something to which there is much to master despite relatively simplistic play, then look elsewhere. Unreal Tournament does a better job overall, even if it isn't quite as pretty in some respects.
12/30/2000