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Quake III Arena

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Quake III Arena
Quake III US box cover
Developer(s)id Software
Publisher(s)Activision
Series
EngineQuake III engine
Platform(s)PC (Windows / Linux), Mac, Dreamcast
ReleaseDecember 21999
Genre(s)First-person shooter
Mode(s)Single player, multiplayer

Quake III Arena (Q3A) is a multiplayer first-person shooter game made by id Software and released on December 2, 1999. It was the main rival to Epic Games's Unreal Tournament. While Quake III was lauded for its superior and colourful graphics which would make its engine widely adopted for other titles, Unreal Tournament had superior bot A.I and more creative weapons and multiplayer modes. Both games had plenty of mods created.

As a first-person shooter, players move throughout the "arena", to kill, or "frag" enemy players and score points based on the game mode. If your player's life reaches zero, then you will be "fragged". Soon after, you will reappear, or "respawn" and lose the items that you had gathered previously. The game ends when a player or team reaches a specified score or when the time-limit has been reached.

Background music was composed by Sonic Mayhem and Front Line Assembly.

An expansion pack called Quake III: Team Arena was released in April 2000 by id Software. It focused on team gameplay and featured new weapons, items, player models, and game modes. However, Team Arena was criticized because its additions were long overdue and they had been already been implemented by fan modifications.

Quake III Revolution was released for the PS2 in 2001. Quake III Arena was also released for the Sega Dreamcast in 2001 and featured 4 player online play versus Sega Dreamcast and PC gamers. PC players could download the Dreamcast map pack to join in but after the demise of the Dreamcast console, the map pack remained at PC version 1.17. The current PC version 1.32 effectively makes the Dreamcast maps obsolete.

On August 12, 2005 Carmack announced, the sourcecode to Q3A will be released as free software, under the terms of the GNU GPL "hopefully some time next week".

Gameplay

Modes

Q3A comes with several classic gameplay modes. They are:

Since its release, many more modes have been created (see mods).

Single player

File:Quake3Screenshot.jpg
Quake III screenshot

Unlike its predecessors, Q3A does not have a plot-based single-player campaign. Instead, it simulates the multiplayer experience by using computer controlled players, called "bots". In the manual, 'How to Play' is reduced to the single instruction: "Frag Everything That Isn't You."

While the story of the game is thin at best (the greatest warriors of all time fight for the amusement of the Arena Masters in the Arena Eternal), continuity to priors in the Quake series and even Doom is maintained with the inclusion of player models related to those earlier games, a mixture of gothic and technological map architecture, and specific equipment; for example, the Quad Damage power-up and the powerful BFG.

Multiplayer

Quake III Arena was specifically designed for multiplayer. This means that the game allows players, whose computers are connected by a network or to the internet, to play against each other in real time. It uses a client-server architecture, that requires all players' clients to connect to a single server. Q3A's focus on multiplayer gameplay spawned a vivid community similar to Quakeworld, that is active to this day.

Weapons

In Quake III, the weapons are designed such that there is a good weapon for every situation. So, if one has all the weapons available in the game, one is prepared for any situation possible.

Gauntlet
The gauntlet is a melee weapon used for close combat only. More or less it is a last option weapon when all ammo for other weapons is depleted.
Machine gun
The machine gun is the only weapon besides the gauntlet that the player starts out with.
Shotgun
The shotgun is primarily used for close range combat since its spray is rather large. The gun can shoot 11 pellets that do 10 damage each. Much like the machine gun, it is extremely useful for inflicting small amounts of damage to opponents with low health.
Rocket launcher
The rocket launcher is one of the most widely used weapons in the game because it is easy to use and can inflict a lot of damage with little aim, as the rocket impacts have a wide blast radius. But this becomes a double-edged sword at closer ranges; at point blank range, the weapon becomes nearly impossible to use without killing the player.
Grenade launcher
The grenade gun fires grenades that detonate either on direct hit of an opponent or a set time after being fired. Grenades are affected by gravity, unlike rockets and blasts from the plasma gun and the BFG10K, which always travel at constant speed.
Lightning gun
The lightning gun is much like the machine gun, except that it fires as a beam, deals more damage and is limited in its range. In close combat, it can kill a healthy opponent in seconds with no risk to the user.
Railgun
The railgun is primarily used for long range combat. It is very precise, inflicts high damage but has a low fire rate and requires good aiming.
Plasma gun
The plasma gun is an effective weapon for close to medium range combat.
BFG10K
The BFG stands for "Big Fucking Gun," although it is only ever referred to by its initials in the game's documentation. The BFG is so powerful, that it tends to tip the balance of the game and thus is very rare.

Items

Weapons

Weapons start off as items. They spawn at regular intervals at specified places on the map. When you pick them up, you will gain the weapon and a set amount of ammo. When you die, you drop your currently selected weapon.

Ammo

Ammo boxes are located throughout the map. They are usually in easy-to- find places, but oftentimes ammo crates will be hidden. Ammo crates give you a standard amount of ammo that simply gets added to your current supply. When you first enter an arena, you start of with some amount of ammo, and everytime you die, you start of with that same amount Machinegun - 100 Shotgun - 10 Plasma gun - 50 railgun - 10 BFG10K - 20 rocketlauncher - 10 Grenade launcher - 10

Health

When your health gets low, you can pick up health items. There are 4 kinds of health items. Yellow recovers 25 health, orange recovers 50 health, green recovers 5 health, but can go over 100, and blue recovers 100, and can go over 100. The maximum health you can get to is 200, however when you go over 100, your health starts ticking lower until 100 points, one point per second.

Armor

Armor decreases the amount of damage you take when you get hit. Armor comes in three flavors: Armor Shard, which gives you 5 armor points, Yellow Armor with 50 points and Red Armor with 100 points. Armor can go over 100 points, but as with health, it starts ticking back to 100.

Powerups

Quad damage

Quad damage triples the amount of damage done by the weapon you have. ( In the original Quake, it quadrupled the damage, but that was changed in Quake 3.) Quad damage is very effective when using rapid-fire guns and guns with splash damage (such as the rocket launcher, plasma gun, BFG and machine gun), though it is not as useful for slow-firing guns like the rail gun.

Haste

Haste doubles your firing/movement speed. When used with strafe jumping, you can move at an obscene rate.

Regeneration

Regeneration regenerates your life for a period of time. It regenerates at a rate of 5 hit points every two seconds, and can go up to 200 health.

Flight

Flight is an extremely rare power-up that shows up in a mere handful of maps. While it is effective, it allows you to fly around. You just hit forward and look around to fly. When it is found, it is usually for a purpose such as getting to a place in the map you can't without it. Flight is only available in Multiplayer.

Techniques

As Quake 3 is a skill based game, there are many, many techniques to master. Some of those techniques are listed here.

Aiming

Aiming in Quake is simple - point and shoot. There are no dynamic sprays and movement does not affect your spray. With instant hit weapons such as the gauntlet, machine gun, shotgun, lightning gun and rail gun, simply aim directly at your opponent and fire. Weapons like the rocket launcher, grenade launcher, plasma gun, and BFG require a bit more practice to master, as they require you to lead your target or shoot on the nearby ground to inflict splash damage.

Movement

For the most part, movement is simple. You can run, walk, crouch or jump. Running is always on by default, though running everywhere isn't smart. Walking is useful as you make no noise when you walk, allowing you to sneak up on an opponent. While crouching also deadens the noise you make when moving, it makes you move more slowly. The advantage of crouching is that it puts you lower to the ground and therefore makes you a smaller target, which can be useful if your enemy is using the railgun.

Strafe jumping

Strafe jumping is the most important technique to master. Strafe jumping accelerates the user to an incredible degree if used correctly. While moving forward, strafe in either direction, hold forward, jump and move your crosshair in the same direction. The best thing to do when learning to strafe jump is to move your cursor very gently left and right, alternating strafe keys between jumps. That is, hold forward strafe right, move the cursor right, jump, strafe left, move the cursor left, jump, etc. You shouldn't be moving your crosshair more than a few inches. The best way to get a feel for how to do this is watch demos of professionals - they strafe jump constantly.

Rocket jumping

Simply put, rocket jumping is jumping with a rocket.

What you do is jump immediately before firing a rocket at the ground. This can increase the height of your jump drastically. If done incorrectly, it will damage you and not help your jump at all. For starters, it is easier to jump and fire the rocket at the same time. The effect is almost the same. The closer the rocket is fired after the jump, the higher the jump. While the damage to yourself cannot be avoided, it can be reduced greatly by collecting armor prior to rocket jumping. This way, it's your armor that will take most of the damage instead of you. when doing a rocket jump on a jumppad, you can make huge jumps, bringing you to high and otherwise unreachable places.

Grenade jumping

Grenade jumping is one of the most difficult skills to master in Quake, since it requires the exact timing and placement of the grenades. "Simply" fire a grenade, be over it and jump when it goes off. This can be used in conjunction with rocket jumping, but only in conjunction with massive damage to yourself and with a low success rate.

Plasma climbing

Plasma climbing is using the knockback from the shot from the plasma gun to climb up walls. To do it, just get right next to a wall, aim low on the wall (about an inch or two from the floor), jump, and fire continuously. This technique can be extremely effective when used with grenade jumping. Drop a grenade, aim at the floor, and right before the grenade goes off, jump, and start firing your plasma gun.

Timing/Item control

Having control over the items of a map is equally important as aiming, movement and tactical skills are to winning a match. Since items reappear over specific periods of time it is possible to snatch items away from the opponent, just as they appear. By memorizing the time an item was last picked up you can keep important items like armor and megahealth away from the enemy and gain a significant hit point advantage.

Mods

Like its predecessors, Quake and Quake II, Quake III Arena can be heavily modified to support other gaming styles with mods. It can use (like Quake II) native shared libraries to store the game code but the preferred method is to program all modifications in pure ANSI-C and compile them with a special version of the free C compiler LCC into machine independent byte code, which will be interpreted by an in-game virtual machine. The virtual machine in Quake III Arena even uses "just-in-time" techniques like modern Java virtual machines.

The most popular mods for Quake are Rocket Arena 3 (RA3), Orange Smoothie Productions (OSP) and Challenge Pro Mode Arena (CPMA or Promode). RA3 is a tournament focused mod, allowing players to play on the same server in 4 virtual arenas. The players rockets inflict no damage to himself, allowing intensive usage of the rocket jumping technique. Unlike regular quake, when a player dies, he is dead until his entire team is eliminated. OSP is a mod meant for tournament play. It gives the player more interface options and modifications. You can effectively change everything in the interface so that it fits your whims. There are also added parts to the multiplayer that make it easier than standard quake for tournament play. Such improvements include only allowing players to start a match after each had declared their readiness, additional stats on the score window, voting, timeout calls, and much more. CPMA incudes vastly modified physics, with features adapted from Quake and Quake IIsuch as bunnyhopping, doublejumping and fast weapon switching.

The other popular mods are-

1.Corkscrew - The players start with a railgun and unlimited ammo. The main concept is to kill with one shot. It requires a lot of skill since the reload time is large and one has to be extremely accurate.

2.Gmod - The players start the game with a specified amount of ammo and armor. Extra ammo, health, armor are not available on the map. All the ammo and health get restored when the player frags another person or when he is killed and respawns.

3.Jailbreak - This is a team game [ 2 teams]. On getting fragged, the player is sent to the opposite team's jail. They can be freed only when someone from their team presses a button which is located in front of the jail. In some arenas, the players can also escape from the jail by climbing on top of one another and going into a duct. A team scores when all the players of the opposite team have been jailed.

4.Weapons Factory Arena - Capture the flag mod based upon Team Fortress, although with some player class and gameply modifications.

5.Urban Terror - Similar to Counter-strike, although a smaller selection of weapons.

A listing of Q3A mods can be found at Quake III Arena mods.

Professional

In competitive Quake III Arena, there are two distinct disciplines, often referred to as "rulesets". Vanilla Quake 3 (VQ3) is the default out-of-the-box ruleset for Quake 3. It is named 'vanilla' in contrast with the CPM ruleset of the CPMA mod. The same applies to Quake I, where the 2 rulesets are Vanilla QuakeWorld and JawnMode. As with CPMA, JawnMode adds more able movement and other competition oriented changes.

Bots

Bots are multiplayer opponents controlled by an Artificial Intelligence. Quake featured an (for the time advanced) AI, with difficulty levels ranging from "I can win" to "Nightmare". Although good for practice and difficult to defeat for a beginner, bots are no match even for a modest Quaker.

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