Quake III Arena
id tears out the campaign and bets everything on the deathmatch.
Quake III Arena’s test release is basically two maps, one player skin, no monsters, no solo campaign, and no AI. In other words, it sounds like almost nothing.
So why did I sit there for hours downloading a 22 MB file like some kind of starving Quake goblin? Because it is id Software, it is Quake, and pretending we were not all desperate to see what they were cooking up would just be lying.
The good news is that I was not disappointed.
The gothic map immediately feels like Quake again, with skulls, inverted crosses, and that familiar “you are probably going to die here” atmosphere. The big difference is the new engine work. Curved surfaces are everywhere, from arched doorways to rounded halls and circular windows. After years of sharp edges and blocky geometry, seeing Quake bend a little feels almost wrong, but in the best way.
Other arenas are expected to push different styles, including industrial spaces with lava and pipes, plus a more Giger-inspired level packed with organic, pulsing weirdness. That alone sounds promising, because deathmatch maps live or die by how memorable they are. Nobody wants to get fragged in a boring hallway.
A 3D accelerator card is not optional here. I tested Q3 Test on a Pentium 200 MMX with an original Voodoo card, which required some manual DLL nonsense before it behaved itself. I also tried it on a faster 400 MHz system with a Voodoo 2, and while the difference was not night and day in the test, I know which machine I would rather be using when the final game lands. id has said that if you can run Quake II, you should be able to run Quake III Arena, although some features may need to be turned down.
The new lighting is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Flowing lava, flames rising from lift shafts, colored fog, mirrored hallways, and lens flare all make the world feel less flat and more alive. There is even a maze with mirrored ceilings, which sounds like a wonderful place to lose your mind while someone rockets you into paste.
Is there a plot? This is Quake deathmatch. The plot is simple. Kill before you are killed. That said, id seems to be aiming beyond the usual hardcore online crowd. Getting dropped into a server full of veterans and being instantly humiliated is not exactly a warm welcome. The final game is expected to include offline bot play and a ranking ladder. You start near the bottom and work your way up against AI opponents with different styles. If id pulls this off, it could make Quake III Arena far less intimidating for new players while still giving veterans something to chew on when they are offline.
The main focus is speed. Quake II had its fans, but it never felt as fast or vicious as the original Quake. Quake III Arena seems determined to fix that. Weapon switching is faster, movement feels sharper, and jump pads replace ladders. The weapons list is classic id comfort food: gauntlet, machine gun, shotgun, grenade launcher, rocket launcher, railgun, plasma gun, lightning gun, BFG, and possibly a flamethrower. The railgun is expected to do less damage than it did in Quake II, which should make some people happy and cause others to complain loudly on message boards until the end of time.
None of this matters if the netcode stinks. Thankfully, id knows that. Quake III Arena is being built around multiplayer first, and the goal is to make connecting simple and fast. A built-in server browser should help players get online without hunting through third-party tools or fighting with setup screens. John Carmack described the goal as three clicks and you are online, which is exactly the kind of thinking this genre needs.
id Software is taking a risk by building Quake III Arena around multiplayer, but it does not feel like a foolish one. Quake and Quake II are already among the most played games online, modem ownership is becoming normal, and more players are starting to understand that fighting real people is often more addictive than fighting predictable monsters.
Quake III Arena looks fast, sharp, technically impressive, and built for the kind of online chaos that eats entire evenings.
I cannot wait.
Whether pulling the solo campaign entirely was the right call, and whether the bot ladder system is good enough to keep players engaged when they cannot get online. The netcode is the whole game here.