Part 2 Of SPOnG’s Exclusive Interview with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars top-man, Paul Wedgwood.
First, a quick piece of back-story if you missed the first part of this three-parter (don’t worry, you can find a link to part one on the final page of this piece).
Quake III Arena,
ETQW is the second multiplayer-only game in the
Quake series, building on the gameplay of
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory but featuring loads more vehicles, bigger maps and lots more. It is also, unlike
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a full-priced commercial release as opposed to a free download.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is set to be released later this year on PC (“It will ship when its ready” I was informed) and following that, versions are also being developed for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. when I caught up with Splash Damage’s owner and creative director, Paul Wedgwood, recently for a chat about his latest baby. Read on, for Part 2 of our exclusive interview.
SPOnG: One other thing that struck me, is that the mission structure of the game seems to be fairly important to appeal to both the hardcore and also to the ‘noobs’ – how important to you is it for the game to appeal to those two extreme types of gamer?
Paul Wedgwood: Well, the games longevity depends on it having an audience wanting to play it. Obviously! And for that audience to have fun playing it, they need to be able to find servers full of people that they can play against. And they have to find people of a reasonable skill level, you know, so that they are playing against others that are challenging them in the game.
And that requires a constant influx of new players. In the case of
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory – which is regularly ranked up there in the top three most-played multiplayer combat games - it’s been out for three or four years now and we only ever released it with six maps. But one of the reasons why it has been so successful, is because the team play side of it works really, really well. But perhaps the reason why the ‘player pace’ hasn’t continued to grow - don’t get me wrong it has grown, there have been 13.2 million unique installations! - but perhaps the reason why it hasn’t grown at a more excessive rate is because it is a difficult game to get into when you first start playing it. It’s somewhat overwhelming. It lacked, really, in terms of interface and communications.
So one of the things we want to achieve by the time
ETQW ships is that players can jump in, pick a class and know exactly where to go and what to do when you get there and what your reward for success is going to be – and then when you suddenly hear that your team has completed an objective, then you know you had some part in that. Then when you get to the end of the game you get rewards – you know, for the part of the game that you were doing, so you are rewarded for anything that you were doing particularly well.
