During QuakeCon 2005 I had a chance to interview id's Kevin Cloud and Splash Damage's Paul "Locki" Wedgwood about the upcoming PC title Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Powered by a modified version of the Doom 3 engine, Quake Wars allows you to fight as either a member of the EDF (Earth Defense Force) or as the alien race, the Strogg. At first I thought it was nothing more than a Battlefield clone, but upon further examination I realized that it's going to take the multiplayer genre in new and exciting directions.

Chris Buffa: What's the basic overview of this game?

Kevin Cloud: Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is an id Software game being developed by Splash Damage. It's set in the Quake Universe but it's not associated in any way with Quake IV so it and that game are two separate developments. As far as the time setting it's actually a prequel to Quake II. It's the story of the Strogg invasion of Earth. It's a first person multiplayer game with vehicles. We have this very unique universe with two very different teams fighting each other, the Strogg with their alien technology and the EDF with their conventional technology. We're trying to stay true to the Strogg universe and what their powers are like, so we really have two different teams fighting one another. We don't have the same teams with different skins and voices.

The technology is also very unique and different. Splash Damage started off with the Doom 3 engine, and working with John Carmack they developed something called Mega Texture. It's one massive texture that's used to represent the entire playing field. Paul can give you some examples of that and the benefits.

Paul Wedgwood: As John Carmack said in his keynote speech, we have a 32,000 by 32,000 unique texture that covers the entire terrain, so visually you have a unique landscape. You can have rocks, cliffs, and tarmac blending into sand, grass or gravel. And we can also draw all the way to the horizon.

You know how other developers will fog a big terrain so they can include more stuff? We don't do that. We Brute Force Render right to the horizon as far as you can see. You can stand at one end of the map and look across it diagonally and see for a mile and a half. But what's really cool about this is, besides the visual benefits of having what is effectively a very high resolution texture with full dynamic lighting, is that it has an effect on gameplay. We're able to derive a number of other masks that control such things as vehicle traction, so you can be driving along an asphalt road, slide up onto sand, dig in a bit, get onto travel, start power sliding and it affects the particles that are kicked up. You'll see a different type of effect emitted from a hand brake turn while on asphalt than you would on gravel where you'd be able to see stones being kicked up. This also affects audio, so you'll hear those stones hitting your vehicle while you're on the gravel. Also, because the physics have been built from the ground up to support a multiplayer game rather than being ported across from something else there's no middleware technology. It's all original id technology. The vehicle physics are more akin to what you'd see in Gran Turismo or Grand Theft Auto. They're not the typical multiplayer simple rigid body model that just hugs the landscape and moves around very smoothly with lots and lots of prediction. You can do all of the things that you can expect in whatever vehicle you're operating, so if you're driving fast enough and you think you can jump the ravine you probably can. If you want to do a barrel role in a helicopter it would react exactly as you would expect. If you shot the wing off of a fixed wing plane it would spiral and hit the landscape.

Kevin Cloud: We really tried to tackle this challenge of making a multiplayer game with vehicles in a serious way. We didn't want to just give lip service to putting in vehicles where the vehicles are just fast ways to get from one place to another, so we spent a lot of effort getting the physics and the controls down and the result is hand brake turns, 360s, and trick jumps.

Since it's set in our universe, which from a time frame perspective we're looking at 50 years in the future, it gives us the advantage of having a type of technology that we think will exist. Now we're serious in keeping real world physics, so if it's a four wheel vehicle it behaves like a four wheel vehicle. One of our flying vehicles, the Anansi, it's not a helicopter with a prop on top.

Paul Wedgwood: It [the Anansi] has a set of thrusters on the side that give you reverse thrust. You can be hammering down a valley, put it into a spin and maintain that backwards momentum because you've maintained velocity. If it was just a simple type of hover vehicle it would stay where it is and things would get pretty boring. Plus you're a big target in the sky. But to get away from that the Earth Defense Force added these reverse thrusters, so you can travel down a valley, go into a hover, look down, then engage reverse thrusters and then flip over backwards. The moves you can pull off once you've practiced are just really cool. You can have great fun with it.

For the Hornet, which is a Strogg flying vehicle, it uses a technology called gravitonic repulsors, so the way we modeled the physics for those is exactly as if the vehicle could control gravity, so when you're riding in it the four gravitonic repulsors on the side will find the nearest pieces of land to push against. When you do rolls and other maneuvers in that vehicle it feels different than when you perform those same maneuvers while in the Anansi. Therefore, when you're dog fighting you have two very different styles of play from the tricks you can pull off.

Another great example is with the Goliath Heavy Walker.

Kevin Cloud: The Strogg have the Goliath Heavy Walker. There's no equivalent to that on the EDF Side. The EDF have, basically, an upgraded tank that we're calling the Titan. Now the Walker is just a super powerful force. It's massive.

Paul Wedgwood: One of the players comes up to the foot of the vehicle.

Kevin Cloud: It's a great power but just like any walker it lacks the maneuverability of something like the Titan. The Titan can turn very easily where the Walker has problems turning because it has to step down as it turns. This gives the Goliath some disadvantages of how it'll defend itself especially from air attacks, and how it deals with that problem is it can transform itself into a hover down mode where it sets a lower profile but it cannot move forward. It's like a placed turret but the turret can spin around. It's just an example of how we're not making a gun a bit bigger or a character's armor a bit less, which is stuff that doesn't really matter until the player gets into tournament play. The differences between a Goliath and a Titan are immediately perceptible, and how you play and enjoy those is very different.

The other thing to touch on is the team play. We've taken the concept from Wolfenstein Enemy Territory and evolved that and brought it into Quake Wars. Rather than looking at the game as just a death match or capture the flag we're looking at military objectives, so each map has a mission and a set of objectives, and it has a very focused front line. Rather than having teams enter the game spread out across the map, which results in several different battles going on at the same time, we have the players interacting with one another. Everyone knows where to go and everybody is working together as a team to accomplish that objective. What ends up happening is it's a lot easier for people to figure out how to work together as a group and it feels like there is a group there. It's not about something that gets claimed and reclaimed and taken back. The objectives are generally things that, once you accomplish them you progress forward. The battlefield takes a linear approach to how the game progresses.

Paul Wedgwood: The map that's featured in the trailer is called Canyon, and it's an arid deserty map. At the start of the game the EDF needs to establish an outpost at the center of the map so they can bring forward all of their forces and start laying a really decent attack against the Strogg. To accomplish this they have to get a mobile command post, which is this drivable vehicle, through to the center and deploy it and when it deploys it actually does deploy. The radar sticks up and the pistons come down. But to get it there they have to get over this bridge that's been destroyed by the Strogg, so they need to construct and reinforce the bridge to get this mobile command post to the center. What they might do is dispatch engineers to construct the bridge and the rest of the team may drive and escort the mobile command post while fighting the Strogg who would be placing defense posts along the route. And although each map has bearing objectives like in Wolfenstein Enemy Territory there's always a consistent method of progression, so it's always very clear what the team's next objective is, exactly how they have to do it and where they have to go to fight. This front line that you see is always on the border of your territory and the enemy territory, and because you know where this front line is you don't have to have all of these people running around trying to find someone to kill. You know exactly where the combat is, but you don't get bored because that front line shifts as you play through the map.

Kevin Cloud: That brings up a good point. The game design is built around what we think is a sweet spot for player numbers at 24-32 in play at the same time. Obviously, like any of these games, bigger servers can run big games, but the game design isn't built around that. Because we have a centralized objective, if we were to put more players into the battles things would devolve into a street fight. Individual effort wouldn't pay off. People would just become fodder, and we've seen this in other multiplayer games. Once you exceed a certain number you're just getting gunfire from everywhere and you can't get close enough to an objective to do something.

Paul Wedgwood: In those games it becomes like a lemmings thing where you just run and die, run and die. It can be fun for an hour or two, but we're strong believers that you can a lot more fun working together and playing as a team than just running around and fragging things. A result of that we have an experience point system that rewards you for team play, so your points when you play are based on your team play actions and supporting the team. I mean you get points from kills and from doing other things, but if you want to really be at the top of the scoreboard you need to have been helping the team progress. The satisfaction that comes from working as part of a team is really high. If you want to just run in and blow stuff up you can. On the same note, this is a class based game so there are different combat roles and one thing that was important to us is we didn't want people to be daunted when they jumped in. One of the good things is you can pick a class, and even if you don't have an idea of what that class is supposed to do or what its weapons load out is, when you first start playing as a newbie, you'll get two or three core missions at each stage of the map which will give you something to go and do, it will tell you exactly where to go and do it, what you have to do when you get there, and what your rewards will be for accomplishing it. That system fades away once you become an experienced player, so there's no risk of the server forcing a team to lose by giving it silly things to do. It will ensure that you'll always find combat when you first start playing and you'll learn how the different classes work.

It's exactly why we're not doing an offline training mode. You know how you go into these typical training modes and you have this sergeant talking to you, and you want to shoot that gun but you can't because you're locked into a position? If we take that same time and effort and use it to teach you in the field it's a lot more rewarding. If you jump into a vehicle, for example, you'll get a tip on how that vehicle works and which buttons you can press. If you're an engineer you get a 3D way point that tells you how to destroy the bridge.

Kevin Cloud: We assume that when players first jump in they want to do something fun and experience what the game's about, so if you want to hop into a hover craft you can have fun doing that. But after a while people want to help the team win so this is just guidance on how to do that.

Chris Buffa: What's the weapon total?

Paul Wedgwood: [laughs] Exactly the right number!

Kevin Cloud: We haven't come to a conclusion on that yet.

Chris Buffa: When does the game ship?

Kevin Cloud: We're looking at a ship time of around 2006. Paul and I have been working on the game design for about two years but it's only been in full production for a little over a year.

Chris Buffa: Is this for the PC only?

Kevin Cloud: It is PC only but we'd be excited to bring it to the next-gen consoles, but we're just focusing on the PC now.

Thanks for your time, and good luck with the game!