by Owen Williams
With the recent announcement from id software that the next game in their popular Quake series was going to be primarily multiplayer, with a relatively simple Mortal Kombat style single player mode, the Quake Community has split itself between those who favor the change, and those who feel that id is abandoning an important aspect of the FPS genre. Because of this drastic change in direction, it is necessary for id to develop a game that will please those who welcome a multiplayer-focused game, as well as convince nay-sayers that the elimination of the single player mode as we know it will not cripple the game.
There are three main groups that Quake Arena needs to target in order to capture a wide-range audience. The game must satisfy the first-time player, or a person who is not familiar with the FPS genre but would like to get into it. These players are also unlikely to take advantage of the internet capabilities of Quake Arena, and might not ever play other humans. If they enjoy the game enough, they might join the second tier of players, the internet players. These are gamers who play almost strictly online, finding human opponents much more interesting to play. The last category is the elite, or professional players. These are players who hope to earn money with their skill and dexterity.
The Plug 'n' Play gamer is usually someone who is not familiar with FPS games, and will most likely not play internet games. Because Quake Arena requires an accelerator card, this group will naturally be smaller than normal, but now that many 2D/3D cards come standard with new systems, this may not be a problem. Quake Arena must be attractive to what these players look for: ease of use, ease of learning controls, eye candy factor, and replay-ability.
The interface must be easy to use and understand, with all of the most basic options accessible by menus. While the command line interface is powerful, it is intimidating to the beginning player.
The controls must be relatively easy to learn. Documents should make it clear that a player should use a mouse to become good at playing the game, but there can't be an overwhelming number of keys and commands to learn. This unfortunately clashes with professional gamers, discussed below.
Because Quake Arena is going to be hardware-only, it will naturally be very pro-eye-candy. There is the problem, though, that the levels will be too small to properly show off the Trinity engine's capabilities. Because the player is most likely going to play against a low number of bots, the levels will have to be small to prevent searching for enemies. Small levels, however, are not much to look at. They can have interesting architecture for individual rooms, but the feeling of a vast facility or terrain will be lost.
Remember that plug 'n play gamers are unlikely to venture out into the world of internet gaming. Thus, they must be satisfied with playing against the computer time and again. This requires that the 'bots be extremely unpredictable, to prevent players from finding a specific weakness and exploiting it in order to beat a level. There must also be a feeling that each time the gamer plays, s/he is not forced to play the same levels with the same 'bots over and over again. There must be some choice or exploration involved.
This class of gamer is usually bored by computer opponents, and wants to prove his or her skill against others. Thus, this gamer has different requirements for the game: ease of finding servers and connecting to them, more complex control, personalization, a ranking system, and speed.
An internal system for connecting to servers is essential. The current system of using GameSpy to find servers and then running Quake to connect is slow, prone to crashing, and inefficient. It would be very easy to build GameSpy-like features directly into the game, so that players do not have to constantly exit and restart the game.
If Quake Arena wants to succeed in the Mortal Kombat / Virtua Fighter style of gameplay (Fighters thrown into an Arena), the control of the character must become more sophisticated. The current system only provides for the most basic of movements, including direction and angle, with jumping and ducking thrown in. The arcade fighting games have extremely complex controls, requiring practice time to master combinations of moves and strategies. Quake Arena will need to add more available motions, possibly including an Unreal-style jump away, or some other motion. The key is to allow players to develop a unique style of play, and avoid the discover of the "only real way" to play the game. These extra movements should not be required to play the game, though, because Plug 'n' Play gamers will quickly become overwhelmed by the amount of information needed to learn. Mech Warrior 2 was a game that suffered such a disability.
Along with customization, a gamer should be able to customize the game to fit him/herself. Whether there be multiple character "classes" to choose from, skins, models, keyboard layouts, move combinations, etc, a player should be able to fit the game to their own personality.
Along with this personalization, there should be an easy and convenient way to save these "personalities." A player should be able to carry around a disk with a config file that can be loaded into any computer, and instantly be able to play as if it were their own machine. While this is possible now, it is time-consuming and tedious to create a custom config file that has all of your favorite bindings, macros, and skin info.
One feature of QuakeWorld that was surely missed when it was removed was the ranking system. If the idea behind the game is for players to compete, there should be an official record of someone's progress. This should be selectable by the player (not through the command line only, of course), and the player's current rank with relation to others should be easy to access and view from within the game.
Internet gamers are not so focused on eye-candy, rather they want higher frame rates. The gamer should be able to tell the game what target frame rate to shoot for, and the game will add and remove certain detail options (how far away something should be before the engine starts cutting out vertexes, amount of particles (more than just on/off), and nifty but superfluous effects).
This is the area where Quake Arena truly has the potential to revolutionize gaming, and perhaps legitimize gaming as a professional sport. But for the game to succeed, it needs several things: even more movements and possibilities for skill and strategy, a built in tournament mode, a built in spectator mode, and anti-cheat options.
Professional gamers will want to play with very complicated strategies, and movements should be very open-ended. The players can come up with the strategies, and some, like rocket-jumping, should come completely out of the blue. Thus, movements should be designed with no strategies in mind. Again, these should all be extra options that aren't required in normal play.
The game should also be designed for split-second precision. As Thresh recently pointed out, Quake I shows a player where they currently are at all times. In Quake II, players are interpolated over .1 seconds in order to smooth out movement. One tenth of a second becomes very important in professional games, and thus any precision-related issues should be addressed.
Quake Arena should include a tournament mode, like the Clan Ring mod, but with a good non-command-line interface, password protection, and strict control. If tournaments are to be accepted, they should be controlled and fair.
One of the biggest problems with tournament viewing in today's games is the inability to follow more than one character at a time. Even with character's eye view, chase-cam, intermission-cam, and floating cam, no method of viewing a game gives a good view of the action. What is needed is a completely new system of watching the game that makes it easy to watch what both (or all) sides are doing, and to analyze a player's strategy.
Along with built-in spectating, demo recordings should be much easier to watch, with the ability to change viewpoints, rewind, fast forward, slow down, etc.
If Quake Arena expects to be a professional game, it needs to have stringent anti-cheat capabilities. This includes checksums for maps, models, sounds, and even textures, as well as warning an administrator of any "odd" player movements or actions.
Besides the preceding issues relating to specific gamers, there are several other issues with Quake II that should be eliminated in Quake Arena.
Physics information should not be tied in to the executable. Thus, when Zoid changes the way the player handles in a certain patch, we don't have to download a major patch to restore the physics settings.
Command line variables are extremely inconsistent. For instance, to change sound settings, one might type "s_init 1" to initialize sound, but then one types "snd_restart" to perform initialization. Having to guess between s_ and snd_ is too tedious. Also, commands are poorly documented. one should be able to type "help xxxx" and get information on that command.
Quake Arena will no doubt be a popular game when it is done, but certain steps must be taken to ensure that the game will be a lasting success. It will most likely be easily modifiable, but the most basic features outlined above should be integrated seamlessly into the game itself. If id software can successfully capture all three audiences with Quake Arena, the gaming community will be revolutionized once again.