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Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Beautiful from afar

Quake Wars is based on the ageing id Tech 4 engine, built for Doom 3 in 2004, and later used in Quake IV and licensed by 3D Realms for Prey. Originally designed for the dark, shadowy corridors of Doom 3, id Tech 4 faces a completely different challenge with the wide open areas of Quake Wars. One of the innovations in Quake Wars is the use of megatextures, which contain the entire ground texture in one huge, effectively compressed image.

The biggest benefit of a megatexture is that the terrain isn't built up from tiles, which can make the terrain look artificial and repetitive - every piece of land on every map looks unique. The terrain looks remarkably good during vertical movement, but the ground is painfully lacking in detail when viewed up close. The megatexture approach still forces a compromise between the benefit of great level of detail scaling and very long viewing distance, and the disadvantage of lower resolution ground textures that don't impress up close.

Everything looks great as long as it's far enough...

... but as soon as you crouch behind something for cover, you'll have to stare at some pretty ugly textures

Where low texture quality is a definite weakness for Quake Wars, the game paints very beautiful images on the screen as long as you don't have your nose in the ground or stare at a wall from an arm's length. Quake Wars boasts a dynamic lighting model that allows transitions from dimly lit sewers and corridors to the bright daylight on the same map; the lighting isn't rendered in high dynamic range, but a bloom effect is used nicely to highlight very bright light sources.

One map in particular, Slipgate, shows off the dynamic lighting model in a unique way. The mission starts with the GDF assaulting a Strogg Slipgate in the equatorial sunlight of a Saharan village. The Slipgate, a kind of a harnessed worm hole used by the Strogg to travel long distances, leads to a Strogg outpost in the Antarctic, gloomy and dark in the polar continent's cold winter night. You might be stunned for a moment when you play the map for the first time, but despite the unnaturally sudden travel, the winter landscape - with ice storms and all - looks just as nice and realistic as the desert.

Old engine, great scalability

The publisher doesn't give recommended system specifications for Quake Wars, and the minimum requirements look suspiciously low. However, we found that a system matching the minimum spec ran the game quite well, as long as we toned down the graphics.

At low settings, the game uses a tad over 300 megabytes of memory, easily fitting the 512 MB requirement. Similarly, the game consumes around 50% of processor time on the required Pentium 2.8 GHz during normal gameplay, so the CPU isn't a bottleneck either. What suffers most at low settings are the graphics - especially ground textures, which look downright awful. Nevertheless, the specified minimum video cards can run the game at around 20-25 fps with some nice Shader Model 2.0 effects at a 1280x1024 resolution, and over 30 fps at 1024x768. This is an impressive feat of scaling down to meet the minimum requirements.

Low graphics settings: a Hammer missile is about to hit

The explosion is massive - notice the long draw distance even at low settings

We recommend using at least Medium graphics presets to get the most out of Quake Wars; luckily the game isn't very demanding, so even if you have a two-year old mid-range graphics card, you can run the game at a steady 30 frame rate at Medium settings at 1600x1200 resolution, or High at 1280x1024. The YouGamers minimum system for Quake Wars reflects this level of performance.

Medium graphics settings add grass and reflective water; foliage and ground texture quality are significantly better

The lighting effect from explosions is also improved at medium settings

Since Quake Wars is such a well-optimized game, we got to turn up anti-aliasing while playing at high resolutions (tested at 1920x1200) on our YouGamers recommended system. Ultra-quality shader effects make the game's firefights much more thrilling, and high quality lighting brings the characters to life. Even with post processing effects set to maximum, explosions still look flat compared to other recent titles; smoke looks good thanks to soft particles. Bullet and Lacerator holes look impressive with bump maps set to highest quality, but disappear all too quickly.

High settings add much more detail in models, ground and tree textures, as well as improve lighting

High settings have similar post-processing effects to medium, but notice the dramatic improvement in the nearby wall texture

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Story and backgroundPage 3: BalancingPage 4: GameplayPage 5: Graphics and TestingPage 6: Conclusion and Scores

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