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The Annual E3 Awards: 2006 |
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It's a match made in heaven: the strategy and depth of the team-based Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, moved out of WWII Nazi Germany and into the futuristic Quake universe. That's the basic premise of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which pits Earth's forces against the Strogg, sixty years in future, with multiplayer scenarios that retell the "history" of the Quake universe and the Strogg's first invasion of Earth. At this year's E3, gamers were able to go hands-on with Quake Wars for the first time at Activision's booth, and even though only one map was being shown off, we can already imagine spending months with the final product.
The basics of Quake Wars are the same as the original Enemy Territory: two teams, made up of different classes (soldier, engineer, covert ops, etc), take turns attacking and defending their way through scripted scenarios. For Quake Wars, many of the levels are being designed as recreations of historical events in the Earth-Strogg conflict, such as the acquisition of Strogg technology.
But while Enemy Territory was a very infantry-focused game, Quake Wars will play out on a much larger scale, with bigger maps and numerous land and air vehicles that allow you to fight this war on multiple levels. In the one map we played at E3, the game had already achieved the delicate balance of keeping the combat constantly focused on one or two areas, while giving players plenty of options to try different tactics and avoiding the common problem of leaving players stuck in the middle of nowhere without a vehicle. If the rest of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars turns out as well as what we played at E3, it could be the biggest multiplayer game of 2006.
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