Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Dev Diary #4: Putting the Quake in Enemy Territory

Dev Diary from
Edward 'Bongoboy' Stern
Senior Game Designer
Splash Damage Ltd

Splash Damage Senior Game Designer Edward 'Bongoboy' Stern talks about creating a backstory for the Quake universe.

By Edward Stern | Jan. 4, 2007

I'm Edward 'Bongoboy' Stern and I'm one of the developers toiling diligently on Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (ETQW). The Boss of Me, Paul 'Locki' Wedgwood, has already written about what the Quake universe backstory brings to the Enemy Territory gameplay. In this diary entry, I'd like fill in some detail about the, uh, Quakiness of Enemy Territory, how we got there, what that helps us do, and what that'll let you do, should you choose to buy the game (*fixed stare, subtle hand movements in peripheral vision, subliminal hissing "yesssssss").

Backstory War, What's It Good For?

As Locki pointed out previously, we knew that the Quake universe backstory (hereafter known as "QuakeStory") would give us lots of good stuff. The clash of the Strogg with Earth is an immediately arresting notion - straight away you just want to know what happened, where and how. Strogg on Earth! A Global Defence Force (GDF) desperately resisting them! You felt that? That's the immersion, right there. Sooon you shall be oursssss.

The QuakeStory isn't just a page of blurb to help fill out the game manual. It inspired cool immersive stuff like unique map plots and compelling objectives (more later) and best of all it gives us two very different teams, and thus the asymmetricked-out gameplay we craved: team-unique player classes, abilities, items, weapons, vehicles and deployables. In this diary I'd like to give a bit more detail about how we wrangled the QuakeStory, and what it'll do for you in the game. Let's start off with our glorious Plan A.

Instant Deep Context

Back when we gloried in Three Letter Acronyms (TLA's) we came up with the notion of IDC. IDC stands for Instant Deep Context, and was our rather awed reaction to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. The films, the 'Making Of' DVD extras and production design books revealed the frankly insane amount of thought that went into designing each and every character, location set, weapon, belt buckle and arrowhead. As soon as you saw anything in this fictional world, you could instantly grasp what it was, who'd made it, where it had come from and what it was for. The more you looked, the more you'd find, but the effect wasn't just cumulative, it was instant.

Bear in mind, this attention to detail was expended on movie props that only got shown a few times in each film. Any asset in our game, on the other hand, would be in players' view for hours and hours (hopefully). Players would have to interface with these assets and immediately, intuitively comprehend what they're for, which player race made them and if they could use them to do stuff. IDC was our goal. Every design brief we wrote, every concept we drew, every in-game asset we made would look intuitively and immediately right, while betraying lots of little details the more you looked at it.

Basically, we wanted our game to look that cool, and concepting the hell out of everything seemed like a good way to go. Well, that was the theory...

In practice, we haven't made everything that way. Some stuff we've hacked together, and it works better than the stuff we agonized over. We haven't completely abandoned the design-heavy approach, but we don't obsess about it as much. It was very handy early on when we were trying to nail down what the gameworld is about, but after a while we had a critical mass of mutually appropriate stuff in the game. We now know what Strogg stuff is like, and don't have to keep documenting precisely what's so Stroggy about it. It took a while to get there, though: I'm looking at a dusty old folder of design docs, which include such pearls as Tactics, Cover and Fortification, Strogg Raiding Tactics, Strogg Origins and Technology, Simulating Physiological and Psychological Effects of Combat, and a 5-page design brief covering the geology and overlaid human settlement and geography of a Siberian village, including digressions into the Soviet Sharaska Gulag system, all for a map we cut before we even had the MegaTexture technology in place. But we learned an awful lot before we cut it: truly, time spent on research is rarely wasted.

Reverse-engineering Quake II

In the Quake universe, our game Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is effectively Quake Zero, set during the initial attacks on Earth, decades before you get to strike back at Stroggos in Quakes II and IV. The main thing to bear in mind about the Quake universe is that it is what students of narratology refer to as "really ***king awesome" (I'll try to avoid such abstruse technical terminology hereafter). We really, really didn't want to screw it up.

We assumed that id Software would be understandably protective of Quake, but they gave us pretty much carte blanche to re-imagine the Strogg, their technology, items, weapons, vehicles and way of war, so we had to establish our own constraints, and direction. As soon as we heard we'd be updating Enemy Territory to the Quake universe, we went back and played Quake II. A lot. It's an awesome pedigree to live up to. We loved everything about the Strogg, but what direction would give us the right balance between compelling visuals, gameplay opportunities, ruleset restrictions and tech limits? How do we get from Quake II to ETQW?

We started to reverse-engineer Quake II, abstracting design rules from it to build our earlier Quake universe, and then ran the clock backwards. For instance, take Quake II's Icarus - the shooty-foot flying Strogg guard. So, the Strogg have antigravity, OK, let's make that a basic technology. So, if you have good antigrav, there's no need to make things particularly lightweight or efficient, so that lets the Strogg do perverse things like drop colossal, ungainly deployables and base structures from orbit. But hang on, was the Icarus always a combined Strogg and lift unit? Doesn't it seem like a Stroggy solution for all those Stroggtroopers who you can't find arms for? So what did they bolt on the armless, far-from-harmless Strogg? Hello, original Old School Icarus, ETQW's single-Strogg anti-gravity backpack/vehicle!

Designing the GDF

Actually, the first question replaying Quake II raised was "why are the GDF still using shotguns?" The QuakeStory answer was that Bad Things Happen in the future that prevented us inventing or fielding anything higher tech. The challenge with the GDF was to keep them conventional enough that they'd still be using that vintage of firepower, without making them just seem dull and outdated by the sexy Strogg. The look we wanted was Contemporary Futuristic: the sort of thing you'd see as a prototype mock-up at an arms exhibition today but with the dings and dents of twenty years' hard use. This was fine as a general direction, but we needed precise concepts of what our global army of 2065 would look like.

We kept looking for concept artists who could give our 3D modelers sketches that were both inspiring and detailed. The bar had been set prohibitively high by the awesome TJ Frame's work on the Command & Conquer series. We kept on seeing artist portfolios and comparing them negatively to TJ's work. It took a while before it occurred to us that we should just hire TJ instead of a looky-likey. We started throwing our IDC-suffused design briefs at him and he kept coming up with the goods. TJ has an amazing ability to take design blurbs and reference photos of existing military hardware, extract the killer details that make Form reflect Function and come up with something new and cool that fits the game world. Looking at the GDF player models, N2 Pistol, N80 Assault Rifle, Trojan APC, Titan Tank and Bumblebee Assault 'Copter now, we've stopped worrying about the balance between futurism and realism in the GDF's armoury; they just all look ETQW-y and GDF-ish.

Designing the Strogg

Lest this all sound like a Plan Coming Effortlessly Together, it wasn't. To be honest, we got stuck with the Strogg. We knew we wanted them to play differently from the GDF, we had some idea of what they did and how they did it, but for a long time we didn't know what they looked like. We had concept art going off in various directions, none of which really excited us, but no one direction seemed more evidently wrong than another. It's frustrating when you know what you don't want, but can't say what it is you DO want.

As an example, here's how NOT to make a Strogg weapon. You can just start drawing gun shapes (which we did) without really getting anywhere (which we didn't). You can even start drawing up rules of what won't work, as follows:

• Mustn't look as good or better upside down
• Mustn't look like a spaceship or a train
• Mustn't look more like another weapon's description than its own.
• Mustn't look great in profile and like ass in first person

All of which is helpful, but what do you want and what will work? Once you've identified the principles that the Strogg adapt people to use as things, that they've conquered several alien races, that they use biological organs for sensors but mechanical pistons to power moving parts, and you've established visual motifs of jagged, fanged, segmented metal, you've got a pretty strong design direction that immediately suggests ways it could be designed, concepted, modeled, textured and animated. Suddenly our in-house Ubiquitous Art Monkey Peter 'peppi' Boehme started handing us these grotesque, tortured, violated, violent images and everything else crystallized around them. It's amazing how quickly you can build a design aesthetic around a few images as long as they're the right ones. We soon started building a Strogg visual language -- motifs we could use on everything from the player models themselves to individual parts of items, weapons, deployables, structures and costume details. Of course, most it was Peter's skills-with-a-z, but those IDC-ish written designs at least gave him positive directions to explore.


These IDC design dogmas really helped reverse-engineer Quake II's Strogg. The first machine guns were artillery pieces before they could be made man-portable. What weapons had been miniaturized by the time they showed up in Quake II? ETQW's Strogg need a rapid fire support weapon, moderately effective against vehicles, good against infantry. What did the grandfather of the Hyperblaster look like? Hmm. The BFG is a wonderful Quake weapon, but was it always so portable? It's effectively hand-held artillery; what did it look like back when it was artillery? Greetings, Dark Matter Cannon deployable! The Railgun is an awesome piece of kit in Quakes II, III and IV: what would an Old School Railgun look like? Bigger, clunkier, less tidy;in fact, generally, more Stroyous. And speaking of which...

Ahh, sweet, sweet Stroyent: so this is what makes the Strogg tick! We loved the idea of Stroyent, the notion that the Strogg come all the way here only to use us as spare parts and go-goo. Stroyent gave us ways to make the Strogg different from the GDF, both cosmetically and in terms of gameplay experience and tactical abilities. Aesthetically, it seemed like Stroyent would burn dirty and stink and smoke and squirt through tubes and ooze from vents, and that weapons would use it in sudden gasping gulps. If Strogg weapons use Stroyent instead of ammo, would they need to change magazine to reload, or would they just overheat and need to cool down? That changed the way we thought about the Strogg armoury, and changed the feel and rhythm of Strogg weapons in-game, but it also helped generate asymmetric gameplay. We'd looked at various game economies, from resource gathering to capture-and-hold, and various classical RTS trade-offs between investment and consumption. There are some fascinating gameplay mechanisms, but they just didn't fit with the FPS experience we wanted to make. We had more luck extrapolating the implications of Strogg technologies like Stroyent.

If the Strogg Technician supports his teammates with a combined Health and Ammo resource (unlike the GDF Medic who only has MedPacks), how can the Oppressor help his teammates? Don't the Strogg use energy shields? Hmm. Well, yes, now you mention it, that would make the Oppressor play a little differently from the GDF Field Ops. But the Technician still revives fallen teammates, just like the GDF Medic. The Strogg have teleportation technology: what if the Technician could implant something in still-warm GDF bodies that would allow Strogg players to spawn direct from Limbo straight to the frontline? Of course, we'd need to balance that. What if in return for being able to create these SpawnHosts, the Strogg Technicians lose the ability to revive? And what if GDF Medics can destroy SpawnHosts with their Defibrillators? Suddenly our playtests changed: playing Technician was a lot different from playing Medic, less assisting angel and more predatory, and the Medic had a whole new are of responsibility. Of course all this didn't come all at once, it took a lot of trial and error (which always feels like error and error) but it feels like this asymmetry, inspired by the QuakeStory, gives us better gameplay.

Map Plots and Objectives

We knew the Doom 3 engine and MegaTexture tech would give ETQW awesome terrain and interiors. But what would the maps be about, and what would the objectives look like? Just as Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory had maps inspired by WWII commando raids, we wanted ETQW's maps to tell the story of the Strogg invasion. Each scenario should be a turning point in the Quake Wars. Clearly, to survive (let alone win), the GDF would have to both thwart the various Strogg plans, and capture and exploit their superior technology. Without giving too much away at this point, it's safe to say that the GDF are keen to turn the Strogg reliance on Slipgates into their Achilles' heel, and aren't delighted about Stroyent production.

To complicate things further, instead of Wolf:ET's maps where the Axis always defended and the Allies always attacked, we wanted a balance of maps where the Strogg are attacking. This was really tough. Why don't the Strogg destroy everything from orbit? What could they be after and where would the GDF keep it that they couldn't just nuke it? Again, the QuakeStory constraints pushed us to come up with more distinctive map ideas. We knew the Strogg had antigravity, which meant they can drop things in from orbit without needing them to be lightweight or streamlined. If the Strogg are in the habit of dropping things in from orbit, what could the GDF do to stop it, and what could the Strogg do to stop that? Where did the Strogg get the idea for their EMP defences in Quake II? The old GDF EMP Jamming Tower, which would need a Generator. And the Strogg need a destruction objective? Hmm...

As ETQW's screenshots demonstrate, the maps aren't light on detail, but you can't just make pretty things and scatter them about (the dreaded "strew"). We want the maps to be as unique and coherent as possible, which means specific art direction, and the IDC'd QuakeStory helped us generate those distinctive map plots, locations, environments, structures, terrain and timelines so we knew the histories of our map locations, and what had been built or destroyed when. The IDC goal was that anywhere in any map, you should be able to look around you and get a sense of what had happened there in the last thirty years, but we'll happily settle for "looks awesome and plays really well". Of course, the primary function is to support gameplay and be fun to run around and shoot people in, but the QuakeStory helps immersion, and I reckon that helps you play better.

Yeah, But What Is The QuakeStory?

Busted. You remembered that I said the GDF hadn't developed better tech to replace their shotguns because unspecified "Bad Things" happened to Planet Earth before the Strogg attacked. So what are the Bad Things? I'm not going to tell you. You don't need to know. We don't want to squeeze the life out of the Quake universe by filling in every single detail. Such detail can be literally exhaustive, leaving nothing to the player's imagination. The QuakeStory is there to make gameplay more immersive, and inspire us developers to make better game assets, maps and rulesets.

This diary has been a cool opportunity to Show Our Workings a little, but otherwise we prefer to let ETQW speak for itself. If you're interested in the ETQW QuakeStory's version of the future of our planet, there'll be the odd hint in the game, but if you just want to get into ETQW, shoot stuff and win objectives, go get some! You don't need to know the QuakeStory to play Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, although as I hope I've shown, we did need to know the QuakeStory to make it.