"Tech Demo"

Welcome to Quake III Arena!

Centuries ago, a race of aliens called the Vadrigar, the so-called Arena Masters, constructed the Arena Eternal, apparently for the reason behind so many of history's greatest achievements: that they were bored. In these arenas they would watch the greatest warriors in the universe battle each other in mortal combat, but even death will provide no rest for the weary, as slain warriors are instantly revived and thrown mercilessly back into the fray. Should a warrior fight his way to the top, then and only then shall they fight the mysterious and hilariously-monikered Xaero, Lord of the Final Arena, who longs for the warrior with enough power to defeat him. The whole premise of the game is summed up tersely in the manual:

Frag everything that isn't you.

Yes, that loud thunk you just heard was id Software's storylines hitting rock bottom. Indeed, id Software needn't have bothered themselves; they made it abundantly clear before the game was released that they were dispensing with the mission-based gameplay of previous Quake incarnations and focusing on what everyone really wanted: deathmatch. A tragedy, then, that id Software's stubborn refusal to add even the tiniest iota of innovation to the core gameplay results in a product that feels more like technology demo for the latest incarnation of the Quake engine than a true game.

But let's not kid ourselves; the engine we do have is truly a sight to behold. John Carmack proves once again his immense programming talent from the moment we take our first step into the arena. Texturing is gorgeous and detailed, lighting is varied but not overused, and weapon effects pack a visceral punch, from the colorful railgun trails hanging in the air to the burn marks left by a swath of plasma gun fire. And of course, no Quake game would be complete without the "gibbing." Kill a player with a sufficiently powerful weapon and watch as his body disintegrates in a shower of bloody chunks that leave the walls and floors spattered with the red, red vino.

An interesting feature of the QIIIA engine are the "curved surfaces" that, while not truly curved (which would be impossible in 3D), are nonetheless impressive. Arching ceilings, towering pillars, even a giant, gaping mouth at the end of the first level are wonderfully rendered, and allow for much more flexibility in terms of architecture and geometry than the rather stiff and lifeless environments of the first two Quake games. Provided you have the graphics hardware necessary to run it smoothly, QIIIA is, if nothing else, beautiful to look at.

Yet like that gorgeous blond at the bar who, for all intents and purposes, ain't pretty but just looks that way, Quake III is a shockingly mediocre product once you take a gander beneath its shiny veneer. First of all, the sound in the game is stunningly awful. The music consists entirely of a grinding heavy metal/techno soundtrack that simply grates, and the weapons sound more like toys than actual implements of death and destruction. It seems that around the time that the first Quake was released, id Software completely lost all ability to create a decent aural experience. Particularly laughable are the sounds of pain and death from you fellow players; they are so ridiculous that they caused me to laugh out loud on more than one occasion. I should also point out another "feature" of Quake III: A Microsoft Windows-esque "beep" plays whenever you land a successful hit. Not only does this take you out of the game (and cannot be switched off short of deleting the sound file), it hardly seems necessary, as many of the weapons in QIIIA are capable of reducing your opponent to a pile of steaming entrails in one hit.

Yet the real flaw lies at the heart of the game itself. With the development of QIIIA, id Software could have pursued many avenues of innovation within the overcrowded FPS genre, but instead we have a game that is barely a step above its predecessors in terms of gameplay. Consider, for example, the wide variety of characters available for you to select; the cigar-chewing Sarge, the grunt from Quake 2, the obligatory scantily-clad women, or my personal favorite, the marine from Doom. Yet there is no quantifiable difference between any of these choices; each character plays exactly the same as the other. The hulking, mechanized humanoid Tank Jr. is just as agile and nimble as the hoverboard riding Anarki. An opportunity arose for id Software to do something truly unique with these characters, but instead all your choice of character really affects are the sounds that played when you get hit and die.

Level design, sadly, is just as tired and stale, and it's pity that the wondrous Quake III engine is stuck serving a bunch of maps that are nothing more than upgrades of the "sci-fi/gothic" look that pervaded the the Doom and Quake series from the beginning. The architecture may be gorgeous, but the maps themselves consist of nothing but hallways at 90 degree angles to one another and the occasional large open space. There are no sprawling outdoor arenas a la Unreal Tournament, and none of the dramatic backgrounds to give you a sense of scale. The only thing that truly differentiates each level from one another is whether or not it features a "gothic" or "sci-fi" motif. Perhaps it's being presumptuous of me, but I can't help but wonder if all the developers at id Software suffer from a bizarre form of color blindness that causes them to see the world in nothing but shades of brown and grey, because these are the predominant colors in every map, bar none. Worse still are the Capture the Flag maps, which are few in number, feature little or no creativity, and offer no opportunities for strategy. Which brings us to our next point; QIIIA doesn't really want you doing any hoity-toity, non-deathmatch related stuff like Capture the Flag. What? You mean NOT killing every single thing in sight? BLASPHEMY! The whole game boils down to essentially:

Run. Shoot. Die. Repeat.

Granted, there is a certain visceral thrill in running around frantically, grabbing whatever guns and ammo you come across and blowing up anyone who gets in your way. For about ten minutes. Sooner or later a vague sense of ennui sets in as you realize this the exact same game as Quake II, Quake, and Doom, albeit powered by a more advanced graphics engine. Combined with the sameness of each map, and the basic Deathmatch soon becomes pedestrian and tedious. No intellect or strategy is required; merely twitch skills, and given the frantic nature of most deathmatches, coming out on top is more often a matter of luck than skill. Perhaps the biggest insult is the so-called "Team Deathmatch," where the only thing different is that this time you don't shoot at half the players. The other two remaining options, namely Capture the Flag and Tournament, are likewise stale and thoroughly unoriginal. Compare this to QIIIA's direct competitor Unreal Tournament, with such gameplay modes as Assault where two teams fight to defend or attack an objective, and Quake III Arena starts appearing seriously dated. It's outclassed by nearly every other FPS on the market, even the particularly loathsome Counterstrike.

Making matters worse is that offensively bland selection of weapons. You've got the Machinegun, Shotgun, Grenade Launcher, Plasma Gun, Rocket Launcher, Rail Gun, and BFG-10K (basically a rapid fire Rocket Launcher). These weapons were cliched when the first Quake rolled around; using them again is tantamount to a university student resubmitting the same failing term paper six times. There's no strategy to the weapons beyond the obvious "The Shotgun should be used at close range!" "Shoot at their feet with the Rocket Launcher to inflict splash damage!" "Use the Railgun for long range combat!" I find it amazing that, despite the length of the development behind this game, that id Software could not create a single new weapon, as if an employee suggesting anything like a "secondary fire" would result in the corporate equivalent of excommunication.

Hey, I wonder if Capcom programmers worked on this Artificial Intelligence?

Given that QIIIA was designed to be an online multiplayer experience, the single player is nothing more than a simulation of the online environment. To that end, one can fill the arenas with AI opponents, or "bots," of varying skill levels. The problem is that the bots suffer from what I like to call the "Street Fighter" syndrome, where they play like both morons and cheaters at the same time. There were countless incidents where a bot would run right past me, oblivious, or take a full five seconds to react to me filling the back of his head with searing hot plasma. These same bots, however, are quite capable of whipping around in an instant and filling your skull with railgun slugs at 500 yards, because you dared to show your face for 1/10th of a second. Unless your online opponent consist entirely of poorly skilled players using wallhacks and aimbots, I doubt the single player will provide much preparation for online play.

But the poor quality of the AI bots is largely irrelevant. After all, no one plays Quake III Arena for the single player; you play to show all the people out in cyber space your l33t ski11z. Technically, Quake III accomplishes this flawlessly; the networking code is superb and I encountered little lag on public servers, even with 32 players. A cable connection is still recommended, but Quake III goes a little way to even out the disparity between those with faster connections and the poor souls still stuck with a 56K dial-up. This is certainly a step up from Quake II, where the server-side weapon firing response meant that there was, depending on your degree of lag, a delay between hitting the fire button and actually getting a muzzle flash.

Online play, however, is hampered by what has to be one of the worst server browsers I've ever had the displeasure of using. The browser window is small, slowly only a handful of servers at a time, and the time it takes to refresh the list is agonizing, exacerbated by the inability to refresh a single server at a time. There is no way to organize servers into groups, search for buddies, or even get a list of who's playing on what server. Instead, if one wishes to have these features, then they must download a third party browser like GameSpy or QTracker. I find it absurd that for a game with such emphasis on multiplayer should have such a uniformly awful method of finding opponents online.

Looking at Quake III Arena as a whole and seeing what paltry gameplay options are offered, I have to ask id Software: did you intend Quake III Arena to be a relatively stand-alone product, or did you intend the mod community to fill in what was missing? In spite of the various mods available for QIIIA, I instead turned to Unreal Tournament. It offers everything that Quake III does not; an innovative variety of weapons, new modes of play, and a level of depth beyond "frag everything that isn't you." Faced with such competition, id Software is going to have seriously rethink the direction of the Quake franchise; as it is, it's simply going nowhere.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 02/25/05