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What's got those hardcore gamers so worked up?
For one thing, Quake 3 is, well, beautiful. "A lot of
the other hardcore players don't like Quake 3 because
it's so mass-market and so 'arcadey,'" explains Dennis
"Thresh" Fong, arguably the greatest first-person shooter
player ever. "The icons are simpler. They have cartoony
boxes for ammo, and it's all color-coded in bright red
and bright purples, colors you'd never see in the other
Quake games." On the aesthetics charge, Id's Devine pleads
no contest. "We purposefully gave Quake 3 an over-the-top,
cartoony, comic-book look," he says. "Our big influences
included games like Street Fighter and Robotron."
The game's use of curved rendering surfaces, lighting
effects and highly detailed texture gives you the impression
that you've dropped into a very violent section of a Saturday-morning
cartoon. Two of the three arenas, or "maps," that Id has
released evoke the game's more heavy-metal predecessors:
The arenas are, essentially, dungeons -- albeit dungeons
with mall-bright lighting. But the third map is a space
station without walls, where one misstep launches you
slowly into the void, the extant players' action taunting
you until the screen goes black. Festooned with jump pads
that launch you like a human cannonball, the arena tends
to feature a lot of midair firing between opponents rocketing
past -- or directly toward -- each other. Basically, it's
"Toy Story" meets "The Matrix."
But there's more to the critiques than just the look
of the game. For two years, players have complained that
Quake II plays slower than the original Quake, which in
turn plays slower than Doom II. Many of the players in
Fong's Death Row gaming "clan" preferred the older, faster
game. Keep in mind, of course, that when Fong talks about
a game playing slower, he's mostly talking about millisecond
differences; it's somewhat like Michael Jordan complaining
that the humidity in a stadium is affecting his shooting.
For any newbie, or even the average online gamer, the
first few hours in the online arenas will seem like a
bad amphetamine trip. Your adrenaline surges are constantly
cut short as you watch your bloodied character fall prone,
head askew. Most matches last around five minutes, but
it's pretty easy to play 20 matches back to back without
flinching. Eventually, you find your bearings -- and really
start losing track of time.
Fong suggests that Id may have deliberately slowed down
the game to draw a broader audience: "Quake was so fast-paced,
it wasn't a true mass-market game. Some people just couldn't
handle the speed or were intimidated by it." In Quake
II, the action slowed a tad and turned away from close-quarters
fighting toward a more strategic game; aggression got
you killed, and fast. And while Quake 3 does play faster
than Quake II, it does not mark a return to the spine-twisting
blur that made Doom II akin to an adrenaline I.V. drip
administered through your mouse.
Fong, whose Firing Squad Web site tracks the gaming industry
voraciously, says he completely understands Id's position:
The developer can hardly be expected to ignore the fact
that increasingly fast connection speeds and processors
make the mass market a potential gold mine. In an early
review of the game, Fong wrote: "All we, as hardcore gamers,
need to do is remember one thing: [Id's] intended audience
is not us. They are listening. They want to make everything
fun and fair for us and give us the best competitive experience,
but they at the same time have another 2.99 million gamers
to cater to."
George Jones, editor in chief of Computer Gaming World,
calls Quake 3 a perfect entry point to the genre, pointing
out that complete newbies can train against the game's
artificial-intelligence bots to hone their skills rather
than just getting slaughtered online for weeks on end.
And Garth Chouteau, a spokesman for the Professional Gamers
League, which promotes video-game championships, points
out that Quake 3 will make a much better spectator sport
than its predecessors. "There's absolutely no question
that Id was thinking about Quake 3 from a spectator standpoint,"
he says. "I don't want to make it sound like Id was taking
orders from us, because they weren't. But by making all
the spaces better-lit and details like flashing the names
above each player ahead of you, they've created a game
that novices and nonplayers will be more able to understand."
These departures from the previous games' more "realistic"
environments draw immense criticism in some quarters,
of course. So does the fact that Quake 3 characters "spawn"
into the arena with 125 health points, 25 more than the
maximum available during normal gameplay (the extra points
serve as a buffer against instant annihilation during
the first few moments of play). This change, Devine explains,
is engineered to defeat an old tactic: snipers ambushing
barely resurrected players with a single shot from the
rail-gun. Under the wrong conditions, a player could die
several times in a minute without even firing off a shot
in defense. Quake 3's extra health points at least give
them a chance to sprint away -- damaged but not dead --
while the sniper's rail-gun languorously recharges. To
hardcore gamers, who endured such hazing years ago, that
seems like mollycoddling the newbies. Then again, it's
hard to generate much sympathy for players whose tactics
make them blood brothers to the deer hunters who use roof-mounted
spotlights to hypnotize their prey.
Naturally, Devine strenuously objects to any implication
that Quake 3's design has been much shaped by market forces.
"We built the game with the Id staff as the target audience,"
he says. "That includes everyone from John Carmack to
Donna Jackson the receptionist, and we value our view
over everyone else's." Whatever the motivations for its
design, Quake 3 is almost a guaranteed hit when it finally
comes out. (As usual, Id is honing to its tautological
"the release date is the day we release it" policy.)
As Fong points out, "Id might lose some of the more hardcore
audience, but they're gaining 10 to 100 times more new
gamers. And even people who thought Quake II was inferior
still continued to play the game. A lot of people will
switch just because it's the newest game from Id Software."
salon.com
| Sept. 8, 1999
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About
the writer
Despite frittering away many hours playing computer
games, Marc Spiegler has written for Wired, Metropolis,
Details and New York, among others. He lives in
Zurich, Switzerland.
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