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Enemy Territory: Quake Wars pits the armies of Earth against the invading
alien Strogg in the ultimate online strategic shooter. Featuring strategic
team play, persistent character promotions, day and night time combat missions,
and the universe's most powerful weapons and vehicles, the game transports players
to the front lines of an epic new war for Earth.
As the invasion begins, players choose to battle as one of five unique classes in
either the EDF (Earth Defense Force - humans) or the barbaric alien Strogg armies,
each augmented with specialist weapons and combat hardware. Troops utilize over
40 conventional and futuristic vehicles, deployable structures, and defense systems
like quad-bikes, tanks, and alien walkers for epic ground assaults; or helicopters
and anti-gravity ships to lend firepower from the air.
Throughout each battle, teams establish bases, deploy defense structures, artillery,
radar, and advanced forward-command systems into enemy territory while constructing and
demolishing obstacles to speed progress and gain a tactical advantage over the enemy.
Players can take on class specific missions or join a fireteam to utilize advanced command
and communication options, including voice-chat and the game's context sensitive mission
order system.
With bitterly contested multi-battle campaigns, each soldier fights not only for victory,
but to gain valuable skills, special rewards for team-play, and persistent military
promotions and medals.
ID Software
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After finishing work on Doom 3 MP for ID Software
and getting familiar with the new
ID engine
and tools, it was time to start work on prototyping Quake Wars. While the
GDD (Game Design Document) was being setup by the design team, various code prototype
levels were created to test the basic Enemy Territory mechanics. (Player
classses and buildable structures)
The initial concerns from the level design team was that most of the original D3 maps were
basic in geometry detail / structure and indoors. The vast majority of outdoor sections
in D3 were set up as window dressing for the indoor scenes. The premise of Enemy Territory
was always large, outdoor environments and this seemed like the complete opposite to what D3
tech was about at the time.
The initial prototype map involved large sections of terrain in high wall canyons with
portals and various vis structure tricks. (mostly sharp angles) Even with underground
sections and high connectivity between the various sections of the map, it still felt
like a series of corridors. With the terrain using the D3 texture system
(diffuse, specular and normal map) the FPS was not good and another system
had to be found.
One idea was to split the whole terrain into small model sections with various
LODs (Level Of Detail) so that terrain at distance was cheaper but this needed
careful planning to reduce the amount of visual popping.
Other ideas were to switching off various stages of the terrain textures at
distance but this produced artifacts with texture detail.
Eventually after many months of various map prototypes the
Megatexture technology
came from ID Software
and a whole new way of making terrain was devised. A new
set of development tools were created for the management of the Megatexture resources
and then merged into the current in-house editor.
At this point in the project I moved on to Raven Software
and waited for press releases for glimpses of how the game was progressing.
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