Quake III - Online Gaming

Quake III Arena

Quake III Arena or Q3A as it’s also known as was released on 2nd December 1999 and is the third in the Quake series.  The 3rd game is a multiplayer first-person shooting game and unlike the other Quake games, features only multiplayer versions.  When the game was released it was seen as the only real competitor to the Unreal Tournament game.  Comparisons are often made between the two games due to their previous title being focused on single player games and then converting to multiplayer games.  The multiplayer function of this game has become extremely popular amongst gamers and as such their own gaming community has been set up called Quakeworld.  Since its initial release, there have been 2 expansion packs entitled, Quake III: Team Arena in 2000 and Quake 3: Arena Gold which comprised of Q3A and Team Arena bundled together as one pack.

Play is based on the supreme warriors of all time fighting for the entertainment of a race called the Vadrigar in the Arena Eternal.  Play picks up from previous Quake titles and is sustained by the repetition of characters that feature biographical information on them in a manual.  The only real difference between the 3rd Quake and the others is that it is set in another dimension called the Arena Eternal and features multiplayer mode.  It is through this arena that players aim to get through by fragging enemy players.  This is achieved by trying to get the health points of the avatar down to zero in order for them to frag (die).  When a player has fragged, they are then able to respawn and continue playing with restored health points although they will have no weapons or power-ups to help them.

Q3A features 4 classic gameplay modes which are: Free for all (deathmatch), Team Deathmatch, Tournament and Capture the Flag.  The free for all deathmatch modes is the most used gameplay mode and the aim is to kill as many other players as possible within a time limit or frag limit or once certain game conditions have been reached.  Only once these conditions have been met, the match is over.  In the Team Deathmatch, players are placed into two or more teams.  The team with the highest frag count at the end of the match is the winner.  The tournament mode involves a large number of players competing against each other or as teams competing against each other.  Capture the flag is a traditional mode based on two teams trying to capture each other’s flag.

Q3A features a series of maps that consist of fighting against various characters in the game.  The maps start at a relatively easy pace as in Crash, Tier 0 and then start to increase in difficulty in Tier 1: Trainee, Tier 2: Skilled, Tier 3: Combat, Tier 4: Warrior, Tier 5: Veteran, Tier 6: Master and Tier 7: Final Tier, Elite being the hardest of all to complete.

There are various weapons that can be used in Q3A and the weapons in this game compared to previous titles appear to be much more balanced.  Therefore, players aren’t choosing one particular weapon over another as it has greater superiority.  Players start off with a gauntlet and machine gun and depending on where they are in their chosen map; weapons can be spawned at certain intervals during the game in specified areas.  Players may also choose from alternative weapons such as the machine gun, shotgun, grenade launcher, rocket launcher, lightning gun, rail gun, plasma gun and the ultimate weapon of the BFG10K

As Q3A has developed a large number of multiplayers, competitive play has increased and when competitive play is in force, there are two rulesets that should be adhered to.  These are Vanilla Quake 3 (VQ3) ruleset and the Challenge ProMode Arena (CPM) ruleset.