"John Carmack's .plan file has been updated.
Owner / Lead Programmer id Software
Here is a summary of the update made:
My last two .plan updates have described efforts that were not in our original
plan for quake 3, which was "quake 2 game and network technology with a new graphics engine".
We changed our minds.
The new product is going to be called "Quake Arena", and will consist
exclusively of deathmatch style gaming (including CTF and other derivatives).
The single player game will just be a progression through a ranking ladder
against bot AIs. We think that can still be made an enjoyable game, but
it is definately a gamble.
In the past, we have always been designing two games at once, the single
player game and the multi player game, and they often had conflicting goals.
For instance, the client-server communications channel discouraged massive
quantities of moving entities that would have been interesting in single
player, while the maps and weapons designed for single player were not ideal
for multiplayer. The largest conflict was just raw development time. Time
spent on monsters is time not spent on player movement. Time spent on unit
goals is time not spent on game rules.
There are many wonderful gaming experiences in single player FPS, but we are
choosing to leave them behind to give us a purity of focus that will let us
make significant advances in the multiplayer experience.
The emphasis will be on making every aspect as robust and high quality as
possible, rather than trying to add every conceivable option anyone could
want. We will not be trying to take the place of every mod ever produced, but
we hope to satisfy a large part of the network gaming audience with the out of
box experience.
There is a definite effect on graphics technology decisions. Much of the
positive feedback in a single player FPS is the presentation of rich visual
scenes, which are often at the expense of framerate. A multiplayer level
still needs to make a good first impression, but after you have seen it a
hundred times, the speed of the game is more important. This means that there
are many aggressive graphics technologies that I will not pursue because they
are not apropriate to the type of game we are creating.
The graphics engine will still be OpenGL only, with significant new features
not seen anywhere before, but it will also have fallback modes to render at
roughly Quake-2 quality and speed."
I must say that it's the multiplayer experience that does it for me. I've played Quake2 single player, but only to be able to say "Yeah I completed the game". I've never touched it since. In fact when I bought the game, the single player version was fun, but just something to do while I waited for a server to appear.
WOW Quake Arena WILD! Can't wait for it!!!! Yeah! Fuck Yeah ! Yeah, baby, YEAH!!!!!!