Hot Summer Shooters: Enemy Territory – Quake Wars

[ August 20th, 2007 @ 6:00 am ] ... [ C. S. Magor ]

Hot Summer Shooters: Enemy Territory – Quake Wars

October is not exactly summer, in fact it is fall, but who could ignore a release from id Software? They did, after all, practically invent the genre with Wolfenstein 3D. Let us take a look at how it stacks up against the other major titles that have been announced.

In many ways, first person shooters have not changed a great deal over the years. A game will still live or die based on speed and graphics. They are some of the most demanding games on your system. It is refreshing, therefore, to see games that do not suck up too much graphics juice. For a PC shooter to really make a splash it has to accomplish the impossible; it has to look better than much of its competition and it has to use less RAM and require a smaller video card to do it. Games that push the hardware boundaries too much tend to open to a lukewarm reception and take a while to get going. People do not want to reach into their pockets for new video cards too often. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is rumored to be quite reasonable in the system requirements department. That is good news for everyone involved.
According to the Wiki, the requirements will be:

Intel Pentium 4 3.2 GHz or AMD Athlon XP 3200+ processor, 1 GB RAM, 128 MB NVIDIA Geforce 6600GT or ATI Radeon X800, 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card, 950 MB of free hard drive space, plus 700 MB for Windows swap file, Broadband connection and service required for full gameplay and downloads.

Before proceeding to what really counts there is one thing about Enemy Territory: Quake Wars that bears mentioning; the experience system. There are essentially two types of experience at play in the game, campaign experience and accrued experience. Campaign experience will land you weapons upgrades and other sorts of goodies, whereas the other will get you medals, military rank and stack you on a ladder against other players. That means that players all start with the same basic kit, but there is a real sense of progression considering that there are thirty-eight ranks in total.

As with all shooters, what brings in the gamers is the arsenal. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars lacks a little in this department. Weapons vary according to the team that you are playing. The human side, the GDF uses pretty standard kit, while the Alien team, the Strogg uses weapons that are just plain nasty. Unlike Halo 3, there are not all that many of them. Unfortunately, I was unable to get hold of any groovy screenshots for this one, so you will have to contend with some conceptual art that was found on Game Spy.

The GDF weapons list is as follows:
For light weapons, a pistol and machine pistol. For standard weapons there will be an N80 assault rifle, N80 Assault Rifle – Scoped, N80 Assault Rifle – with grenade launcher, N38 Sniper Rifle and N22 Shotgun. As for heavy weapons, there are only two, the N93 General Purpose Machine Gun, N72 Rocket Launcher.

The Strogg weapons are comparable to their GDF counterparts but look different and have different names:
Strogg light weapons are a Blaster and a Lightning Pistol. Standard weapons are a Lacerator, Accurized Lacerator, Lacerator with Plasma Launcher, Rail Gun and Nail Gun. Heavy weapons include the Hyperblaster and Obliterator.

While the weapons line-up is fairly unimpressive, it is balanced. The stats of the weapons on either side are comparable, which is sure to make for some balanced and fun game play. There are objective based missions that will incorporate team strategy as much as player strategy. Building and destroying things will be important to the outcome of a campaign. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars won the best shooter award at last year’s E3. It is due in stores on October 2nd and will be released on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. We are looking forward to seeing id Software’s new shooter in action in all of its glory.

The Weapons of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (GDF Line-up)