Well, That Explains It

Oh, now I see why Enemy Territory: Quake Wars seems so similar to Return to Castle Wolfenstein: It’s an upgraded version of a free RtCW mod called “Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory,” made by basically the same people, ported to the Doom 3 engine (aka. “id Tech 4”).

Also, I just noticed that ETQW was released on September 28. I had no idea I was buying a “new” game. I thought this thing was like six months old. I’m super hip and I didn’t even know it!

I haven’t tried playing online yet. (Give me a break, I’ve only had the game for a day.) Besides, the bot AI is good enough that it “feels” like playing on a public server, but without all the lag and minus the flaming dorkwads that teamkill you and whine about their team sucking. Shockingly, the bots even say “you’re welcome!” when you say “thanks.” (Don’t ask why I’m saying thanks to a bot… okay, it’s because they say thanks to me when I give them a med pack. :) Come to think of it, I did get teamkilled once by a bot, but it politely said “sorry.”

Lest you get too excited about never having to play with or against human riff raff again, the bot AI is also bad enough that you do constantly think to yourself, “God, my team sucks” just like you do on a typical public server: You just want to strangle them and scream in their faces to quit standing around and help you because you can’t do everything by yourself! Then you have to calm down and remind yourself that you need to focus just on your own tasks and derive personal satisfaction from playing your class as best you can, even if the team still gets pounded every single time no matter what you do. (It’s sort of like going to work in real life, now that I think about it.) So all in all it’s a pretty good simulation of the pub experience.

I noticed one of the bot names is “DaBug,” a name that I swear I remember seeing back when Crayola Clan played Quake. Maybe that’s just my imagination. Ah ha… some Googling reveals that DaBug created the map CTF5 (“Da Ancient Wargrounds”); that’s where I remember the name. Ah, CTF5. I remember it well. Mainly I remember it because Crayola wasn’t very good on that map, and we lost a match once when we had to play a tiebreaker on it, after giving up a capture on the previous map (CTF4!) in the last few seconds after having dominated the rest of the game. Ah, that sucked mightily.

But I digress. I haven’t decided what ETQW class I like best. So far I rotate mainly between engineer, medic, and rocket-launching soldier. (Oddly enough, it seems like the rocket launcher is better for offense, where the big chaingun-equivalent gun is better for defense.) I haven’t had much luck with the covert ops and field ops classes. I could maybe get into the covert ops but I can’t hit a damn thing with the sniper rifle, which seems like the biggest attraction for that class. I’ve always been more of a dueler than a sniper anyway. The field ops class seems kind of useless. My artillery always gets trashed and none of the bots on my team ever feels the need to repair it (see rant above), so I can never call in any artillery.

While I haven’t played online yet, I have looked at the server list. Why are there hundreds of servers listed but 99% of them are empty except for 1 or 2 people and a bunch of bots? I only saw one server with a full complement of real people on it. Whatever happened to the days when you could pick from dozens of servers any time of the day or night? I guess the online gaming community is pretty fractured. Why would a game developer even bother with online play when there’s only going to be a dozen people playing your game online?