One of the last of the Id Software old guard is parting company with the studio soon. Tim Willits wasn't part of the original team of founders, but was there early enough to be credited as level designer on 1995's Ultimate Doom and have a credit in almost everything since. After working as a designer and creative director on the likes of Quake, Doom 3 and Rage, and acting as studio director through the release of Rage 2, he's left a mark on the FPS genre as we know it. After QuakeCon next week he'll say his goodbyes and announce his plans for the future.
]]>Google's DeepMind research division have made a pretty solid argument that the future of game AI is in self-teaching neural networks. Not content with destroying chess forever (credit to the BBC), their most recent project was to have a team of AI agents learn how to play a Quake 3-derived game of Capture The Flag from scratch. Not only did they master it, but after nearly half a million simulated games, these bots aren't just better than human players, but more cooperative than a human if paired with one as a teammate.
]]>I do not believe that I shall ever come to terms with the fact that Quake III's announcer was not, in fact, voiced by Michael Dorn. I believed that to be the case for so long, having been told it was so by someone at university. Watching this trailer for upcoming online shooter Quake Champions [official site], my heart leaped when I heard the familiar refrain in that familiar bass voice: "Excellent." Worf! You're back! No. It was never Worf, Meer. It is not Worf now. But maybe it is the original Q3A announcer returned. That would be something. You can hear Not-Worf for yourself in this first in-game footage of Champions, which rather looks like Quake III and Unreal Tournament had a baby. The speed of the former, the more vibrant palette of the latter.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Urban Terror was a Quake 3 mod that aimed to marry realistic weaponry and maps with the physics and speed of Quake 3, which made for both a strange anachronistic experience and also something that, in retrospect, resembles modern Call of Duty.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Specifically, Quake III DM17: The Longest Yard, which is what I think of whenever I think of Quake III. Every Q3A player has their favourite map, and I'm not even making a claim to DM17 being the 'best' map, but it's my map. It's the one which encapsulates what Quake III is about, to my mind.
]]>I learned to strafe-jump the hard way back when games were games, my keyboard made of broken glass, and my mouse an actual mouse biting my fingers as I clicked. I still welcome Quake Live adding an automated slower substitute. Everyone should get the experience the joys of zipping around like a rubber ball. Though exploiting wacky movement physics bugs is central to Quake in my heart, some have been less keen on it.
Even John Carmack, the chap who inadvertently created all those glitches, once tried removing strafe-jumping from Quake 3. "I hate having players bouncing around all the time," he said.
]]>Remember the bit in Fight Club where Ed Norton is sitting on a plane and he explains to the guy sitting next to him his theory of “single-serving friends”? Well, something similar is true in multiplayer games.
]]>All that movement chatter brought to light that classic Quake 3 mod Urban Terror is now Urban Terror HD. It seems that the game, which I believe has been a kind of standalone mod for a couple of years now, thanks to ioquake3, will become a standalone Quake 3-licencee in its own right. It will however remain free-to-play and is going to continue to develop as a free shooter support Windows, Mac and Linux variants. Good news, I think, as this is a minor manshoot classic. The installers are over here.
]]>My weekend consisted in playing a bunch of games from different points in the past: Quake III, Unreal Tournament 3, Battlefield 2, and Mirror's Edge. It all got me thinking about movement.
]]>After eighteen months or so of beta, Quake Live has finally announced its subscription plans. You can still play for free, but you can also sign up for $1.99 a month, or $3.99 a month options (although these are "billed annually"), which give different levels of access the clan management systems, freeze tag, match stats, and so on. The full details are below the cut. In some ways I wish I still had enough time for Quake III for this to be attractive to me, but my monthly hour with the railgun doesn't really justify it. And, while it's interesting to see such an old game repackaged and sold like this, much of what made the original so attractive to me - IRC pickup games, specific maps (Spider Crossings!) and mods - hasn't made an appearance here.
]]>Ten years. Ten piggin' years. And still no-one's topped Quake III: Arena in terms of raw, pure deathmatch FPS solidity and grace. Id's last great game turned a full decade old yesterday - even though it was born into an era of Voodoo 2s and 15" CRT monitors, it's fearsomely alive to this day. Frankly, it's not going anywhere any time soon - it lives on both in its original form and as the free-to-play, browser-based Quake Live. And also in an endless legion of mods, modders, maps and lifelong gamers, all inspired by the precise majesty of its high-speed bloodshed. Gentlethings and ladycreatures, yesterday was our Thanksgiving.
]]>Playing Quake Live is a troubling experience. It feels like a kind of monetised nostalgia. A browser-based themepark, or a visit to a mummified stately home. It's wonderful to find servers heaving with people again after all this time - even though finding a game was seldom a problem - at least for a quick and dirty free-for-all. I still adore Quake 3, and my install has not left my hard-drive in a decade. But playing it like this made me realise what a mutant creature I actually fell in love with in the earliest years of this decade. What's missing, particularly for an obsessed capture-the-flagite like me, is one particular map: Spider Crossings, or Q3WCP9. Without it, Quake Live cannot earn my love.
]]>If there's one area within gaming that I'm genuinely inclined to be unreasonable to the point irrationality, it's in the FPS deathmatch games - the Quake III / UT axis. For me Quake III was almost the only game worth playing. Quakeworld was a little too fast, UT too fat and feature-obese, and so on. Quake III was minimalist wonder, and what Id started was finished by the modders who worked on things like OSP, Threewave, and Rocket Arena 3. It's that last bit that has me the most concerned about Quake Live: Id made a fine game, but it was their community that completed it and honed it to the point of perfection. The browser-based system seems to make that community contribution rather more complex, as everything will have to be mediated by Id.
]]>This isn't really news, or really even worth me posting, but I share it nonetheless. On a whim I just booted up Quake III and jumped on a public server. I used to play every night, for hours, but I'd not looked at it in a long, long time. As it happened there was a 3v3 CTF match going, so I joined in. Within moments someone I'd played with regularly, over four years ago, joined the server too.
]]>Carmack has been interviewed about Quake Zero over on Gamesradar. For an old Quake III creature like me it was pretty satisfying to see the big man say this:
]]>Ole from Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe has written to tell us about their Quake III hack for a wraparound screen. The video is pretty impressive, and shows people deathmatching using the giant multi-projector contraption.
]]>In an idle couple of hours earlier today I found myself reading the peerless architecture and urban speculation blog, BldgBlog. It's the kind of writing project that makes me sick with envy, and I can't wait to see Manaugh turn his ideas into book form in 2008. Anyway, one of Manaugh's recent posts was headed up by an image of the Chartres cathedral map from Quake 3. It's a map that's as old as the (virtual) hills, and not even that interesting a build, given what many others did with Quake 3 mapping. Nevertheless it sparked a recollection of the hours I used to spend downloading and playing around in Quake III maps, when I should have been editing the online section of PC Gamer.
Digging out my old Quake III installation (which I found buried in a spare hard disc filled with old games that I don't want to part with just yet), I decided to have a root around in the virtual architectures of yesterday and see what I could unearth.
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