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Interview Paul 'Locki' Wedgwood
Posted by: GlobalWar (Admin) - Tuesday 2 October 2007, 23:48	Main

First of all I want to congratulate you and your team with this great achievement. The demo looks and plays awesome and we really can't wait to see all 12 maps.

Thanks for the compliments! The team is really pleased with all the positive feedback - especially with the game being released on September 28th in Europe - we're so close now!!
We're finding that if players are prepared to invest an hour to find their feet in the game, they're then returning to our forums with all kinds of high praise. For new players I would really recommend getting some time practicing offline against Bots - you'll see them making tactical use of many of the games weapons, items, tools, deployables, and vehicles in a way that you probably won't witness quite yet with so many new players on the public servers. A good tip is to set their skill level to custom, so that you can set their tactical skill to really high, and their aim skill to low.

Q1 - Quake Wars has everything to become the game of choice for competition play, however some nice-to-haves didn’t make it in time to be implemented for the gold release. Functions that will support the most important competition options like Spectator Lock and Time Outs are very welcome to support the work of any Referee. Are there any plans to supply these options in a patch so we can do without all kinds of additional mods like ETPro?

Definitely! We're already building a wish-list of stopwatch and tournament play improvements for one of the initial updates. Our focus on release will be to keep an eye out for any balancing issues or bugs that might crop up, but we'll simultaneously start work on some of these additional features. We loved ET Pro and their dedication to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, so we'll do everything we can to get the SDK to them as soon as possible too.

Q2 - Quake Wars has a great balance for public 24 player games. It’s awesome to have an all out battle with 24 people on the server. For Stopwatch games we most likely need some work on the balance as we want the attacking team to have the upper hand so they will be able to set a time which then can be beaten by the other team. Will Splash Damage supply different map scripts to allow for different game modes like Stop Watch?

One of our two Lead Level Designers, Matt Wilson, is overseeing the needs for map balancing for competitive play and stopwatch. It's hard to say exactly what form this will take until he completes the design and review, but we've discussed both map scripts and server CVARs to allow tournaments greater control of balancing for competitive play. Wils is getting a lot of feedback from the community on requested features too.

Q3 - In North America we have QuakeCon that attracts loads of pro clans. Europe has a large number of (semi) professional teams so it would be great if we can have a similar event in Europe also. Any plans of that?

It's been our plan at Splash Damage to launch a European LAN Party for some time, but our focus on completing Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars has precluded that. Earlier this year we appointed Steve Gaffney as our Business Development Manager, one of his key projects is to get the LAN party up and running. Shortly after the game's release, Steve will start talking to sponsors about this.

Q4 - You have mentioned Quake Wars will be supported quite some time after release. What does this mean? Are you going to release additional maps?

The plans aren't final yet, but we're definitely committed (and so are id Software). Our primary focus will be to finalize the Software Developers Kit, including the game's source code, level design tools, media, and documentation, while also focusing on any game balance or bugs that pop up, and our initial wish-list for features (such as VoIP). Once all that is out of the way, we'll start looking at any additional plans.

Q5 - I love to play back demos and I know there are some nifty features possible if you know how to bind the correct cvars. This requires a bit more knowledge then the average user has. Any plans for a cool Quake Wars Demo Player? With simple playback functions?

You're right in that the back-end is actually pretty advanced - allowing you to fast-forward, crop demos, record your own mouse movement while spectating, export cameras them and play them back in Maya, smooth them out, create new cameras, and so on - you can even record all player's perspectives from the server's side, allowing you to view every aspect of a match that's been played. Unfortunately we didn't have time to improve the interface beyond our own needs for the initial release, but a user interface for controlling these cool features is on our wish-list.

Q6 - Any news about QWTV support?

Development on ETQW:TV was paused a couple of months ago by the developer that had been working on it, but we're still really keen to get support into the game. It's another one of the things on our list for review once we're done with the SDK.

Thanks for your time again.

Thank you!

Comments

Posted by: Netherlands

bzZ_ (Admin) - Wednesday 3 October 2007, 00:27

I knew it! Those guys aren't stupid; theyre already working on stuff which makes all the different rules-sets unnecessary or at least reduces them to main basics. Can't wait to see the things they're planning to release in that update

Posted by: Denmark

Runken - Wednesday 3 October 2007, 01:14