Francesco Poli wrote:


It's a joke, and I'm not amused
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars announced.

I was seriously taken aback when I read this.

Enemy Territory. The botched expansion for the vile Return to Castle Crappenstein (I won't insult one of the granddaddies of FPS by associating it with a craptacular disaster that I could define as "looking seriously like a PS2 port"), released for free as a multiplayer only game. To a decent success, although in the multiplayer arena that means "lots of loud squealing about it" and "nobody playing it".

“We have been so proud of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory’s™ rave reviews, ‘Game of the Year’ awards, and massive fan-base

That we completely forgot that without some fan success, we'd be out of a job now, since Activision pulled the plug on the main part of the game.

Quake Wars. OMGWTF its QUAK!!1 WTFWTFWTFOMGOMGOMGGMOOGM.

with ENEMY TERRITORY: QUAKE WARS, we’re taking players back to the war that started it all – the Strogg invasion of Earth – where the choice is to fight with the humans or the alien Strogg in a massive campaign for survival,”

I take it back: this is seriously amusing. As with Quake IV, it appears someone at id Software (or Activision) thinks somebody actually gave a flying fuck about Quake II's plot.

What, plot? Yes, Quake II had a plot. In the "so did the Aliens vs. Predator movie" sense: it's physically there, but it's A) something no one really gives a damn about and B) really not that good.
So it's really a fan service for the kind of fans that id Software has nowadays: those that remember fondly a hideous game that should neither have been made nor played by any sane person.

If it's not clear, I don't have those memory problems. I remember perfectly how Quake II played. I'm looking forward to a revival of that "game" like I'm looking forward to the next dictator.

The game will be built on a new technology from id called MegaTexture™ "that crunches millions of polygons and a gigabyte-scale texture into a single, seamless and un-tiled landscape with unique detail down to the square inch or the un-obscured distant horizon" (though the Splash Damage Website clarifies this is on top of the DOOM 3 engine).

New technology + id Software = poor to crap stuff.

Oh, please, just look at that ginormous (1Mb!!!) screenshot. Yeah, so the guy ain't half bad. But the landscape... oh dear lord, how do I put it? Like this:

DELTA FORCE XTREME LOOKS BETTER THAN THAT!

By the time ET2 is released, it'll likely look even worse.

And besides, it's just a multiplayer-only game. Big technology's a big friggin' deal when you can't understand that single player is where it's at.