Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has a lot to live up to. It’s the spiritual sequel to Return To Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a free, stand-alone multiplayer game built off of RTCW. Despite the game’s age, it is still running strong placing in at number seven on GameSpy’s top games list. RTCW:ET features an innovative experience system, a very intuitive class system, and it left the underlying RTCW game play alone. While not a sequel in the purest sense, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (ET:QW) is the next best thing.

ET:QW is a prequel to Quake 2 and the most recent offering from the Quake franchise, Quake 4. Both Quake 2 and 4 transport the player into a life or death fight versus the Strogg, whom are bent on enslaving humanity and destroying life as we know it. ET:QW puts the player fifty years into the future, when the Strogg invade the Earth.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is being built on top of the Doom 3 engine and is being tweaked above and beyond what was done for Quake 4. id has introduced a new technology dubbed Mega Texturing that will allow the Doom 3 engine to render large spaces and will allow for different surfaces to have different traction and sound properties. The result is some amazing graphics but, as we all know, graphics do not make a game great.

An interesting fact is that the game does not include a single player component. In fact there are only a few tutorial missions to guide the way.

On the gameplay side of things Quake Wars will retain the class based setup of the Wolfenstein mod with the Strogg and Human sides sharing the same basic classes. However, each race has a unique take on each of the class archetypes. These archetypes are carried over from the RTCW:ET game, and are the following: Field Ops, Engineers, Medic, Soldier, and Covert Ops. Another feature making a return is objective-based maps. The standard functions these classes provide have remained similar but their abilities are now referred to as deployables.

Maps will be in the “blow up this wall, take these documents, and bring them back to your base” mold of the previous ET version. However, instead of capturing a spawn point or blowing up a wall a team might have to build a base or a certain device making the game slightly more immersive and tailored to larger servers.

While the nuts and bolts of the game will remain familiar, if not a carbon copy of the original, ET:QW will introduce player controlled vehicles, a la the Battlefield series, into the Quake universe. Vehicles played a role in several RTCW:ET maps, but these tanks and trains were moving objectives and not under player control. There are plans for a light vehicle, a Tank, and a helicopter vehicle for both the Strogg and the Human sides. Along with the addition of vehicles the game play has been tweaked to accommodate larger numbers of players. The ideal number of players has been listed as 24-32, making ET:QW more like Battlefield than RTCW. For more info, check out their webpage at www.enemyterritory.com