Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Interview May 02, 2006 Jakub Wojnarowicz

First two questions

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Paul Wedgwood: We definitely believe our vehicles make ETQW better. Adding vehicles certainly has risks - you can end up with wildly unbalanced combat, or two or three completely separate battles all happening in the same area because the aircraft just fight the aircraft, the tanks just fight the tanks, and the infantry just shoot the infantry. Another problem with vehicle combat in some contemporary games is that when you jump into a vehicle, all that really seems to happen is that your avatar is replaced - instead of being a player on foot with a machine gun, you become a tank with greater mobility, fire-power and armour. The result is that you just feel like a gimp for fighting on foot – you feel like you’ve got decreased mobility, fire-power and armour.

We’ve solved this in ETQW by designing the vehicles with specific combat roles. The physics system goes further than simply emulating ‘rigid bodies’ moving snugly over smoothed ground. Instead, it heightens ETQW’s team play potential by allowing off-road driving, rock hopping, air stunts and vehicle jumps – all of which reinforce ETQW’s goal of providing specialist vehicles to provide great team play. ETQW’s vehicles can be thought of as an extension of the character class system – each vehicle offers basic transport, but more importantly can be used to augment the player’s battlefield role, giving them access to unique routes and combat tactics. This way, we tie the vehicles into an overall rock-paper-scissors dynamic – nothing’s effective against everything, everything’s vulnerable to something. Also, the vehicles are there to support the infantry so they can achieve their tactical objectives, not to own them outright.

We wanted to maintain asymmetry between the Strogg and GDF team by realistically modelling the Strogg and GDF’s differing approaches to vehicle propulsion. The GDF use fairly traditional combustion engines, augmented by ground-effect rotors and fast jets. GDF’s vehicles feature a wide-array of anti-personnel and anti-armour weapons, some featuring stealth technology, or providing re-supply and re-equipment capability in the battlefield. Conversely, the Strogg rely on their use of alien technology, including gravitonic repulsion, heavy walker pneumatics, bosonic orb and plasma weapon technology. Because of their propulsion types, they each feature advantages and disadvantages compared to the GDF vehicles. For example, The Strogg Hornet is powered by four gravitonic repulsor engines, allowing it to pull-off some insane moves, but the heat generated makes it an easier target at high altitude for the GDF’s lock-on LAW missiles (carried by the GDF Soldier, and used in the GDF SWARM Anti-Armour Missile Turret).

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Paul Wedgwood: ETQW will ship with about 12 maps: they’ll all be good, and they’ll all be different. We’re confident that players would rather have fewer maps that they’re going to really want to play on than more maps that aren’t up to the same standard or support the same depth of gameplay. Maps don’t catch on by chance, they catch on because they’re better. We could have had more maps in the box, but we cut them to concentrate on making the dozen we have the best we can make them.

Having fewer maps means that we can make them more distinctive. Rather than all maps in ETQW being based on a single style of terrain (such as jungle), there are three themes in development: Temperate, Arid and Arctic. These are then augmented by unique geographical locations, individual plots to the missions, and unique objectives. Each map (mission) in ETQW takes place in a completely unique environment, with a different time-of-day, year and atmospheric conditions. Each battle charts a critical moment of the Strogg invasion, much as Wolf ET retold the important missions of World War II.

Because the type of surface being walked over, driven over or shot at, can be determined from the MegaTexture, each experience of fighting within dense foliage, across arctic planes or arid deserts is unique – this is true of the vehicle traction, explosions and vehicle particles, and audio effects. Sand storms, snow and rain all affect visibility. Because ETQW can render right to the horizon, designers can choose visibility conditions that are right for the battle, rather than the technology constraining the design.

This combination of plot, geographical location, light, shadow, differing atmospheric conditions and audio effects makes each map feel completely unique. We think this is really important for game-play and player immersion, especially in the context of the campaign system, where each game takes place across three maps.

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