Enemy Territory: Quake Wars - Ground Zero Gaming

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TOPIC: Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

stoneXsour

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Date: 19:57 Apr 27, 2007

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Following up the first part of our interview with Splash Damage boss Paul Wedgwood is - surprise, surprise - part two, in which he discusses the PC games market and explains why we won't see cross-platform play in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars any time soon. And if you missed our hands-on impressions with the latest Stroggified shooter then head on over via this link - it's possibly the biggest multiplayer game you'll play this year... Five years ago you probably wouldn't have seen this type of game come over to consoles - let alone a large part of the audience opting for the console version over PC. Why do you think we've got to that point now? Wedgwood: Well I think there are two or three reasons. Firstly, there have traditionally been a whole bunch of games that didn't succeed on consoles - real-time strategy games are a good example. With the Xbox I think that was one of the first consoles to have a really good first-person shooter interface where you could use your analogue controller reasonably to control your character. Until then third-person games were infinitely more successful. The second thing is first-person shooters are generally very immersive, but for the field of view to work correctly you usually sit with a keyboard and a mouse very close to the screen, and when you sit back from the screen in a FPS you can get the sense of it being disjointed. Again, with consoles moving to high resolutions and people getting bigger and better screens for playing their console games on, that experience isn't destroyed by your distance from your television. I think that's helped a lot as well. Then the third part of course is that things like Xbox Live have made it possible to have multiplayer combat on console games, whereas before you needed to know how to solder your own modem cable to have any hope of playing something against a friend. A lot of those problems have gone away; it's easier to get a console that you can get online and play online and it's easier to control your character in a shooter than it was previously. Why did you decide to opt out of including PC and console cross-platform play? Wedgwood: Firstly, it was never a focus of the game's design. We didn't start off a couple of years ago thinking 'we have to have players on the PC play against players on the Xbox', for example. There's a natural limit of resources we can focus on the game. At Splash Damage we had the feature set and those are the things that we focused on since we started. There are lots of other things we could include right? We could have a racing game rally mode but in the case of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, at this stage in console development I think there's too much disparity between the player on a analogue controller and the player on the mouse and keyboard on a PC. The guy on the analogue controller has an advantage over the PC with vehicle control because he doesn't have the 'on-off' acceleration and steering, and the guy on the keyboard and mouse is able to turn faster and slightly more accurately. So our thought was that at this point it might be a bit premature with the communities generally happy playing amongst themselves and having a level playing field. That was the general reason. Would you say you're a bit of a mouse and keyboard champion then? Wedgwood: I've seen professional Halo players on analogue controllers and seen them do amazing things that I haven't seen people do on a mouse and keyboard, whilst shooting and running around and stuff. So I don't think that one of them is necessarily better or worse, it just kind of depends on how the game's setup. What I do think is we would've had to have nerfed gameplay in some way or another to get it to a point where it was equally level for both sides, and that would've meant that both sides suffered because of our arbitrary goal of getting them to play together - which we weren't convinced they wanted to do in the first place. For future games it may well be the fact that that's the most important thing, that everybody's really used to the idea and you have guys on PS3 that drive the vehicles, soldiers running around on PC, but I'm not really sure. A lot of games in this multiplayer shooter genre and stuff like Battlefield are branching out into more story-based gameplay. Is that something you're interested in? Wedgwood: I actually think that Return to Castle Wofenstein multiplayer, which is the first in the series really of these games, was the originator of objective-oriented combat in a multiplayer shooter. So they were the first people to have an attacking team, a defending team, an assault force trying to complete a military objective and spawn waves. When Enemy Territory was being developed by Splash Damage we added in the notion of command maps and character advancement that again hadn't existed in other multiplayer combat games. So when we went into developing Enemy Territory: Quake Wars we continued this idea of having a plot, a story to really drive the reason that the map exists and that's been our continued focus since the start. So nothing's really happened as a direct result of what other developers are doing. It's not that we don't pay attention to them because we all play games like Battlefield, but they're just very different games and so the similarity doesn't really dilute what we're doing or what they're doing. They just happen to have vehicles, but Grand Theft Auto has vehicles and so does Gran Turismo and a bunch of other games. There are other games that have spy classes like RTS games. I think that in general you will find elements in any game that are similar to another game, but I think that Enemy Territory: Quake Wars stands out on its own because of its objective-oriented combat and combat not being dispersed across the map with people trying to find somebody to fight. CVG -- Edited by stoneXsour at 20:58, 2007-04-27 __________________

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