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Review: Quake 3 Team Arena

by David Ross on 4 February 2001, 00:00

Tags: Activision (NASDAQ:ATVI), FPS

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qaei

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Quake 3 Team Arena

Preamble rant

So its about 14 months or so since the original Q3 came out. The WOW! factor of Quake 3's graphics wore off about 10 months ago, and the game sat deinstalled from my system for ages. The original Quake 3 to me was a very shallow and disappointing Deathmatch-only experience. There were a few token CTF maps in the original, but they were badly designed and didn't have all the runes and grapples that CTFers yearned for.

Christmas 2000: Quake 3 Team Arena is out in the States. Usual situation of the only people playing it in Europe are the pirates, who have a more competent distribution network.

End of January 2001. The damned game finally hits the shops in Europe. What the hell takes these people so long to put games out here? RRP is something like £20, though I picked it up for £15.99 online.

So wotcha get for your cash?

As you doubtless know. this is an expansion pack so you need the original Quake 3 to use it. You get another one of those CD key things which need to be authenticated by ID before you can play online. With the pack you get

- 16 new CTF maps (I think thats right anyway - some of them you can only get at online as they're not available in single player, unless you play on yourown server)

- 4 new Tournament maps (i.e. Deathmatch maps - WTF they're doing in there I don't know) - Some new runes and models and stuff

Fire it up

Q3TA will update your install of Quake 3 to version 1.27, which may knock out compatibility with some mods you may have installed, although most mods are now 1.27 compatible. I tried it with CCTF and it seemed OK, and I'm told Q3F works fine with it too. The first thing you'll notice with Q3TA is the new interface, which is quite a bit slicker than the old Q3 one, and feels a bit less like using the DOS command prompt. There are lots of nice touches like little video clips playing behind the menus, although it does slow them down a bit. There is even a drop-down in-game menu system too, working a bit like Unreal Tournament.

The maps

A bit of a mixed bag really. The good thing from my point of view is that they're largely modern / futuristic style maps rather than the dull brown Quake 1 style gothic maps. A few are just rehashes of the original Q3 CTF ones, with a few extra jump-pads and passages chucked in for good measure. Mostly these new versions are improvements, but as they account for about 4 of the 16 new maps, already you're feeling short-changed.

The most impressive new maps are the outdoor (mpterra) ones, which feel very much like Tribes. The sky effects casting rippling shadows off the clouds works well, and if I could find a server with any players to try these on it would be nice. The biggest complaint about these maps is that it takes AGES to get across them. Doing a flag run takes absolutely forever, and I can forsee these maps having a zero point score at timeout time regularly.

The other maps in the pack are generally quite good. Certainly they generally look better than the maps is original Q3, with a corresponding increase in level of graphics horsepower needed to make them play well. I wuold certainly advise most people who play with in-game videos disabled as they cause things to chug when a few models appear at the same time.

As I said earlier there are also 4 new Tournament deathmatch style maps chucked in too- why I don't know. I sometimes think DM is all that ID software really understands.

Game types

The maps above, with the exception of the tournament maps, are all playable with each of the 4 game types. These are:

Capture the flag Standard CTF - grab the othe side's flag from their base and bring it back to your own flag.

One flag CTF A single flag appears in the middle of the map and you have to grab it and touch it down in the other side's base. this works well and has a high death-rate.

Overlord Each team has to try to blow up a statue thing in the other side's base, which is tricky as it can take a lot of damage and constantly regenerates. The gauntlet with the doubler powerup works really well here if you can get close enough. This works quite well as a team-game, although it can be a bit static - teams tend to split 50 percent defenders, 50 percent baseblasters, with little real dynamic use of the map.

Harvester Basically the same as the old headhunters mod. For each member of the other side that gets fragged, a skull appears in the middle of the map. These can be collected and taken to the enemy base for points. The skulls show up as a trail behind the person carrying them, so the more you carry, the more of a target you make yourself. I wasn't initially too impressed with this, but with my increasing frustration at a lack of online players, I've found this one works best with small teams of 3 or four per side.r

Powerups and new guns and stuff

Rather than classes ID seem to have gone with powerups (basically runes) to make playres have different roles. There are a limited number of these, soon busy servers only about one in 3 players will have a powerup at any time. The available powerups are Doubler (double-damage), ammo-regen (shoot-faster), guard (health has higher max and regens), and stealth (speeds you up and you shoot faster, but can't use armour). These don't wear out, but last until you get killed. The powerups are okay, but do give a bit too much of an advantage to those who have them, to a point where players tend to hover about round the base till the next powerup appears.

The new guns are frankly piss-poor. First up comes the chaingun which is ludicrously powerful and is going to be a camper special. It a machine gun that does about double the damage of the standard machine gun, and combined with a doubler powerup can slice through anything in a few hits. At least it has limited ammo, but as I said, its just going to be a camper's wet-dream. Next up comes the nailgun, which is a bit like the UT flak-cannon except its utterly useless. Finally comes the prox launcher. This allows lamers to go around laying mines all over the place which slow the game to a crawl. They only detonate when the other side go near them, but can be laid in groups near each other and make flag grabbing a real pain. They do at least detonate on their own after a while, and can be shot, but really, they're just a bore.

Finally there are a couple of special items. One is a suicide skull thing that blows up and kills everything within a certain range unless you can run away fast enough. This is okay, but again can make flag capturing even more laborious. Secondly there is the invulnerability sphere, which makes you invulnerable to everything except prox mines. Which might be okay except you can't move while its on. So its useless.

Gameplay

On the plus side you still get the basic Q3 engine, with its tasty graphics and spot-on physics. While I have questioned many of the ways teamplay have been implemented, there is no getting over the fact that this is a top-notch engine powering it with highly refined controls. Netcode is also still good for those of us with good connections - it plays fine on a sub 100 ping environment. once you start getting into 56ker land though, I find Q3's netcode decidedly poor compared to other engines.

What you DON'T get in the pack is any kind of grapple or translocator or anything to get round some of the big maps quickly. Oh well. While I did find grapples a bit too fast in Q2 and translocator hopping in UT unbearable, moving round the big maps in this game is painfully slow compared to the backpack-aided ease of Tribes.

Single player is really a waste of time in Q3TA. The bots are simply far too stupid to be any good at it. While they do just about understand the new gameplay types, they don't play as a team and can't even manage basics such as chasing a flag-carrier or making a half-baked attempt at sensible base-defending. They also tend to make flag-runs exactly the same way time after time. At least it gives you an opportunity to try out maps before going online and making a pillock of yourself.

I have now had the game for a couple of weeks and have STILL to find a decent range of servers in Europe for the game. Even worse, the few that there are don't seem to have many players on them .This is strange because there were more servers for the test than for the full thing. As it stands there are a couple of empty servers in Holland and Germany, and I usually end up playing on East coast US servers from the UK. This may of course be largely due to the demise of Barrysworld, who act as a kind of focal point for UK gaming. I can just hope that the more relaible UK server operators like Jolt and Demon take up the game or it will be a flop here.

So in conclusion

If players show some restraint on those b100dy prox mines, the game can be fast and furious fun, and is certainly the most up-tempo of the teamplay games around. If it can get a few decent servers, I think it will attract a lot of the old-school teamplay types from Q2 CTF. It doesn't really push at the forefront of teamplay, like TFC's classes or the base system of Tribes, but it has a faster pace about it as a result. What may let all this down though is the potential for exploits of the rather badly balanced new powerups items available. Time will tell - I have still to see a decent range of servers operating with poper teams to jusdge this - but I'm no 'pro' player and I already see lots of imbalances and abuses within it.

Putting my serious reviewer cap on, I should say something balanced about this add-on. But I'll tell you my gut instinct instead. I think Team Arena is a complete rip-off, and by buying it we are being shafted up the ass. The publisher should have included this stuff in the orginal game or as a free download. UT was better as a team game out of the box and has had numerous free addons, HL got TFC as a free add-on, the full games Tribes costs the same as this addon, SWAT3 got Elite edition as a free addon. The list goes on. There are also better FREE mods for Q3 than this, such as the brilliant CCTF and the promising Q3F. As a paying punter I feel I deserve better than this. All this stuff should have come with the original game. It isn't a bad mod, but at the end of the day it is just that, a good but not brilliant mod that we shouldn't have to pay for.