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First Look at Quake III Arena

by Blue
November 4, 1998

While in Dallas this past weekend for the FRAG2, I was invited along with a few others to visit id Software to check out the progress on Quake III Arena. The game is not near enough completion to be able to comment too meaningfully, but since so little is known about it, here are some brief impressions which probably better serve to describe the state of the game's progress rather than give a sense what playing it will be like.

Clean Slate
I really had no preconceptions about the state of the game's development, because in an effort to save some surprise for myself as long as possible, I'd managed to avoid the preview in PC Gamer, and the subsequent unauthorized posting of scans of the screenshots from the article. Other than what I've read in .plan updates and heard in John Carmack's talk at this summer's CPL neo-QuakeCon event, I didn't know what to expect.

Work in Progress
It's hard to estimate how done the game is. There are some areas that were just not implemented, most noticeably (since they are right there in front of you) there are no skins on the gun models. You are bombarded with placeholder sounds as well (the sound you made when getting shot was hilarious). But in general, I thought the playable state of the game was quite unusual. I've had the opportunity to see a few games in progress before this, and almost invariably you encounter features that are "broken." In this case, it seemed that almost everything that was implemented was quite solid. There were none of the situations where how some busted feature is supposed to work is explained to you. This occurs almost anytime you see a work-in-progress: the person showing you the game will ask a programmer if a feature is working in the latest build of the game. I don't know if there's a right way and a wrong way to do these things, but a few people I mentioned this to who work for game companies seemed to agree this was unusual as well.

Quake Gets Classy
There are three player classes, Light, Medium, and Heavy, each with different hit points and movement speeds. The movement difference is quite noticeable, it's meant to balance the trade-off in damage the classes take. Going from the medium player to the light player I was disoriented by how much faster I moved. It will be interesting to see how the classes ultimately balance out.

Return to Phobos?
On the subject of movement speed, there is also a haste power-up (a player will sprout visible wings for the duration of the haste after picking it up), and when you have the haste while playing the Light class you haul ass: Someone described the acceleration is about as fast as the Doom marine (which as I recall is estimated at about a relative 90 MPH). Zooom! More than once I took a lava dive because I picked up the haste and went zooming off the edge.

TeamPlay
There is already enhanced support for teamplay. In the team game we played (press the button, since flags for CTF are not yet implemented), there was a voice giving scores. The teamplay map we were on showed great attention to detail as far as angles and corners and their impact on strategy. I can't describe how much I look forward to a game full of deathmatch maps that are the main focus of the designers' attention, rather than as something done after the "real levels" are completed.

User Friendly
There are already some sophisticated touches, like an icon that pops up over your head when you are in "talk" mode. Someone can still frag you while you're typing messages, but they can no longer claim they didn't know (we didn't experiment with trying to see if you could use pretending to be talking as an ambush technique). There is now a welcome separation between general obituary messages, which run by as usual in the upper left-hand corner of the screen like in Quake and Quake II, and your personal frag messages, which are in the center of your screen. Player id like in Quake II CTF is in, so the name of the player in your crosshairs shows up onscreen.

Eye Candy
Though some of the graphics, like the weapon skins, were not in yet, and dynamic lighting is not yet implemented, there are also some items and effects that are already stunning to look at. Even though gameplay is stated to be the primary consideration when it comes to the feature set, the game is going to offer some eye candy nonetheless:

• The health packs are transparent globes with 3D red crosses inside (like big glass marbles). Words don't do justice to how cool this effect is.
• The invisibility is like a more effective version of the invisibility effect from the Predator. In a brightly lit room, you could make the invisible guy out from about six feet away, at ten or twelve feet, it was fairly hopeless.
• The most brilliant effect is the Quad damage, which engulfs the Quad carrier in a shimmering electrical field of squiggly lines. It's like an electrified version of the rotoscoping effect in the old A-HA video "Take on me."
• The spiral smoke trail from the RailGun was red, but I'm told it was temporary. At the present time the Railgun has a small, but noticeable, area of splash damage (I'm not sure I like that for weapon balance), though it is a subject of debate whether it will stay that way.
• The rocket trails were temporary as well, but had a pretty cool effect anyway.
• The skins and models are so detailed they are frighteningly lifelike. There are skins for many of the id employees and they were noteworthy for an absence of seams where they wrapped, and there were no noticeable sharp edges, flat areas, or corners on the player models. The result was a perfectly natural looking player. I can only imagine what user skins will be created.
• The player models being composed of different parts allows greater control over the character. You can bend at the waist, and we were shown what can only be described as a demonstration of tap dancing. Users making movies in Quake III Arena will have the opportunity to do some physical acting, rather than just rocking back and forth.
• Curved surfaces make for more natural architecture, the levels are scattered with curved pipes and such. This the only feature I can think of that was partially implemented, as you could not walk on them properly yet (you'd clip through them). One of the coolest things we were shown was doorway that looked like a gaping mouth with a huge wavy moving tongue protruding from between huge fangs, all made with natural curved surfaces.

In Conclusion
Gameplay was fast, furious, and fun. We played a little free-for-all, and then some teamplay, but no single player (I do not know if it is even in a playable state). Single player wasn't what I was curious about anyway. id's previous FPS have all been at their best in multiplayer, and with that the stated focus of Quake III Arena, it raises the expectations even more. But even with high expectations, I was not disappointed with what I saw: I am looking forward to this game more than ever.