Weapons Part 3

Railgun

The camper's weapon of choice, the Q2 railgun makes its way into the Q3 arsenal. Like Q2, the Q3 rail is a hitscan sniper tool that hits the enemy for 100 points of damage. It has a somewhat slow reload time, so using the rail in close-in fights is usually not a good idea. But when you want to "reach out and touch" your enemy from long distance, there's no substitute for a railgun. The "projectile" fired by the weapon will actually penetrate more than one opponent. If you can somehow line up two or more enemies, one shot will tag all the targets for 100 points.

Sarge is modeling the rail

I got him!

Adding to the gun's effectiveness at ultra long range is the zoom mode that id included. Like Tribes, pressing the zoom key quickly ratchets your view up, in a telescopic manner. You have to hold it down to keep homed in on the target, but if you need to switch back to regular view mode, then all you have to do is release the key. We feel this is probably the best way to implement a zoom mode in a fast paced shooter, although another key to select zoom level (like Tribes) might have been nice. As it is, there's only one level of zoom, although this can be adjusted via the console. Type in /cg_zoomfov x where x is a number. The lower the number, the farther you zoom in (default is 22.5).

Plasma Gun

You have to go all the way back to Doom 2 to find an id shooter that included a plasma gun. The Quake 3 variation is also a rapid fire projectile weapon, but the firing rate is not nearly the same as it was Doom/Doom2. The reasons lie in performance issues as much as anything else - too many plasma projectiles on screen at once would slow network connections down to a crawl. So don't expect to create the same "walls of death" that you did in Doom/Doom 2, but make no mistake: Quake 3's plasma is still a deadly weapon (it hits for 20 per plasma ball along with a small amount of splash for a near miss) despite lacking the insane fire rate of its ancestor. The plasma gun can get quite nasty, especially you pair it up with the Quad.

Plasma

BFG-10K

Both Dooms and Quake 2 had a BFG - basically the "uberweapon" of the game. Id's big motivation for including a BFG in the game is so that newbies have a gun that they can at least get a couple of kills with. What makes the BFG in Q3 different from that of Q2 is that you actually have to aim now! We've heard some people complain about "the BFG losing its finesse" from Quake 2, but if you ask us, using this BFG at least takes a little bit of skill, namely aiming it at your opponents. Think of the BFG as a rapid fire rocket launcher with faster and more powerful rockets and you've got the general idea. For pro competition, we still think that having any kind of BFG outside of the Doom implementation is ludicrous, but this one is good for laughs when you're just messing around in a free for all.

Big friggin' gun