Quake 4 Hands-On Preview

Multiplayer

While trying to capitalize on the success and familiarity of Quake II for the single player experience, they copied and pasted from Quake III Arena for the multiplayer side of things. If the intervening years since 1999 have given you more of a taste for the likes of Battlefield and Joint Operations, you might not like the arcade feel of the game’s matches. You’ll find none of your keyboard keys will allow you to go prone, lean, hold your breath, or call in air strikes. You will however, find plenty of teleporters, jump pads, quad damage upgrades, and armor shards all glowing in the familiar neon colors. You’ll also have to resort to scrambling for floating lightning guns, rail guns, and rocket launchers instead of laboring over which MP5 configuration to choose. It’s a trip back to the future that some will find hard to make. But for those of you still rocket jumping and strafe jumping in your sleep, you may find peace.

Though I spent countless hours of my life racing between teleporters in the past, I have to confess that it has been a while since I had Quake III spinning in my cd drive. I had become part of the multiplayer apostasy. But the lightning-quick brutality of the few CTF, Deathmatch, and Team Deathmatch rounds resurrected the old memories of the original feel and pace of the game.

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I was able to notice only some small changes. Running speed feels to be up a little from the original Quake III level, and the knockback from the rocket launcher seemed to be a little less noticeable. The number of teleporters felt the same, but the number of jump pads felt fewer and farther between. Admittedly, they are all hard observations to make in the limited time I played on the few maps I saw. I can tell you is they are planning on having a sixteen player max in each game and they will be using most of the old fan favorites when it comes to the weapons. I played briefly with rail guns, rocket launchers, a hyperblaster, nail guns, lightning guns, shotguns, and grenade launchers. But with the game still without a firm release date set, you can expect some changes are still in the works. But if I were a betting man, I would say that the minds at id and Raven will strive to bring Quake 4’s multiplayer even closer in line with the greatness that was Quake III. So my advice is to dust off your old Arena cd’s if they aren’t already in your drives and start practicing or you may get schooled by yours truly. I got my ass handed to me so many times that it became clear that a reinstall of the old shooter was in order. I plan on being at the top of my Quake III game when Quake 4 comes out later this year, ready to take on all comers.