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Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Splash Damage, best known for the great Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, has been working on their tactical team shooter Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars for quite a while. A peek at the end result is now available as a public beta, currently limited exclusively to Fileplanet subscribers. Of course we had to take a look, and I'm happy to report that the game appears to be shaping up as an evolved competitor to the excellent Battlefield series. There are many similarities, but the concept has been refined with additional features and ideas liberally borrowed from other popular first person shooters.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars pits humans in the form of GDF soldiers against the Strogg invasion force during the initial Strogg invasion of Earth, setting the game prior to the storyline of Quake II. ETQW is exclusively a multiplayer game, with the current beta limited to maximum of 12 vs. 12 battles.

Both sides have five different classes and wide selection of vehicles filling roughly the same roles for each side:

Soldiers and Aggressors are your basic grunts with the widest selection of primary weapons and the ability to blow up obstacles with deployable charges.

Medics and Technicians can heal and revive teammates. Strogg Technicians healing also resupplies ammunition, and Stroggs can deploy Spawn Hosts on GDF corpses to offer a respawn point for friendlies. GDF medics are limited to just healing, but they have the ability to destroy the Strogg Spawn Hosts.

Engineers and Constructors are able to construct mission objectives, deploy defensive turrets, lay mines, disarm explosives and repair both vehicles and deployable support hardware. GDF Engineers can also supply ammunition to teammates.

Field Ops and Oppressors can deploy and fire support weapons such as missiles and artillery from behind the lines. They can also call airstrikes or orbital strikes to take out pesky enemy holdouts.

Covert Ops and Infiltrators can snipe, deploy radar stations and cameras that double as remote bombs, and use their hacking skill to complete mission objectives.

Covert Ops calling in a radar station.

Field Ops initiated a missile launch - major pain incoming for the Strogg.

While there are similarities, both sides have an unique feel to them mostly due to different weaponry. As the GDC and Strogg have their own classes, weapons and vehicles, balancing everything just right is critical, and it is obvious that the Public Beta is just the tool to work on that balancing.

My initial impression is that the balancing is actually pretty good for a rough beta, but some things of note include the Strogg jump packs, which are slightly on the overpowered side as it's very hard to kill flying targets. There is also the issue of the effectiveness of rocket launchers against non-vehicle targets, as the splash damage is currently a killer, especially indoors. All this is subject to changes and I'm sure these things get tweaked as the beta progresses.

Page 1: Introduction and UnitsPage 2: Gameplay and ExperiencePage 3: Graphics and Hardware

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