Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Dev Diary #3: Developers Invade the Strogg Universe

Dev Diary from
Paul "Locki" Wedgwood
Managing Director & Lead Game Designer
Owner of Splash Damage Ltd

It's rare that much attention is given to the story in a multiplayer shooter. It's the kind of thing that's routinely ignored by developers and players alike -- we just want to get to the fragging, and developers know it. At best, maybe we get a few paragraphs of backstory to explain why everyone's fighting.

For the upcoming Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, however, the story will be more than a text file trying to make some sense of the action. The Earth vs. Strogg conflict will permeate every aspect of the game, from asymmetrical teams with varying abilities and vehicles, to maps that act as "historical recreations" of important events in the war. For this latest developer diary, Splash Damage owner and lead game designer Paul 'Locki' Wedgwood talks about how the story figures into the game's development.

Leipzig Games Convention 2006 and Crowd Control

As I write this diary entry it's around a month since my return from the 2006 Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, where we showed Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (ETQW) to a European audience for the first time. Unlike E3 in Los Angeles, the Leipzig convention is open to all visitors (not just industry professionals) and this resulted in 183,000 attendees this year, now making it the largest games convention in the world and a great platform to show off ETQW. In fact, it literally was a platform: ETQW's 24-player LAN party ran for five days on a balcony deck perched on top of Activision's stand!

The European gaming community comprises a huge and dedicated multiplayer fan base, and so a common question that these attendees asked me about the spiritual successor to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was, "Why set it in the Quake universe if it's not an arena-style game?"

I had something of an epiphany at that Activision stand, looking at the crowds of gamers queuing to play ETQW: I suddenly realized why story and universe finally have a place in multiplayer gaming.

ETQW is inspired and influenced by the story of the Strogg invasion of Earth in perhaps more ways than one might think, and so for this diary entry, here's my story about that story.

Prologue

Quake 2 was groundbreaking in many ways -- from the huge leaps forward in graphics to subtleties such as selecting from your inventory while being able to crouch, then returning fire on an enemy that knew how to dodge your attack. It's strange to think that all these years later, the press also wrote about Quake 2 being groundbreaking because it was a first-person shooter with a story. You fought your way linearly through the game, maintained contact with your command who'd brief you on your progress, completing a series of story-driven tactical missions.

Roll forward a few years and we all witnessed id Software and Nerve do this again, but with multiplayer. In Return to Castle Wolfenstein, players were again pursuing objectives -- not just capturing flags or pure deathmatching -- but they were doing it online, competitively and cooperatively.

In the past, story-based immersion in multiplayer games was considered (not without reason) the inbred third-cousin to gameplay, not least because the majority of hardcore gamers disabled every possible graphics feature in the pursuit of frame rate and smoothness of play. During my clan and tournament days in Quake 1 and Quake 3, I did exactly the same. At that point, narrative immersion just got in the way of my fragging.

In 2002 we started development of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory for id Software, and we built on this idea of story-driven multiplayer by reinforcing each level with plot-driven objectives. There was even a radio transmission you could play in the Limbo Menu of a newsreel story outlining why you were there. These plots inspired the gameplay ideas of robbing a bank or escorting a tank to destroy a fuel depot, but they were still largely cosmetic from the player's perspective. The tactical objectives -- seen purely as game mechanisms -- could still exist in the absence of the plot.

But what if the plot could have a more significant impact on multiplayer gameplay? Could the gameplay depend on it?

Good Morning Asymmetry

In the summer of 2003 we completed Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and immodestly basked in the Game of the Year awards that it won, but Kevin Cloud of id Software and I were left with a ton of ideas that we loved but hadn't had the time, resources, or in my case, the experience to get into the game.

Despite the plot-driven objectives, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory featured essentially the same teams with the same weapons, abilities and rewards, re-skinned or re-dressed to appear as the Allies' or the Axis'. However, moving Enemy Territory into the Quake universe would give us two great benefits we'd sought for some time.

Firstly, by setting the game in the Quake universe and charting the Strogg invasion of Earth (as a prequel to the Quake series of single-player games), we'd have another great multiplayer environment to build the game in (as with World War II for Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory). This new futuristic setting provided a great backdrop to paint the Strogg against, inspiring lots of interesting new objectives, especially relating to how Earth's Global Defense Force was eventually able to retaliate against Stroggos in Quake 2 with their discovery of Strogg 'Slipgate' technology. Richard Jolly (our Art Director) will talk in a future Developer Diary about artistic concept development with id Software for the look of the Strogg, the GDF and Earth's environment.

Secondly, and critically, what really changed was that we could finally reinforce the idea of asymmetry between two colliding teams, clashing in a universe where the player's use of tactics could not be abstracted outside of the plot because dialing down the graphics didn't make the universe or asymmetry go away. The plot would dictate fundamentally different items, tools, abilities, rewards, vehicles and deployables for the alien Strogg and human Global Defense Force -- not just the same kit with two different skins.


We loved this because the asymmetry offers players an even better experience based on their preferred playing style. A player chooses between the invading Strogg with advanced alien technology, or the human Global Defense Force with more conventional military kit. The alien Strogg team has access to Goliath Walkers, Bosonic Orb weapons and vehicles with Gravitonic Repulsors, while the human Global Defense Force team uses conventional trucks, tanks, rocket launchers and assault rifles, providing a much more military experience.

The player then chooses their specialist combat role within the team, but this "character class" selection is not just a different weapon load-out. Each character class in ETQW features unique items, tools, weapons, abilities and rewards.

On the GDF team, a player can choose a character class that is suited to fighting right in the thick of it such as the Soldier, while as Field Ops he can rain down artillery hell from his position on top of a hill, or get down into the battle and call in air strikes. As a Covert Operations Specialist, the player can infiltrate the enemy base, place third-eye cameras that relay intelligence to his team, and then snipe the enemy from afar, or play Medic and support his teammates in a hero's role, regularly risking personal sacrifice in the pursuit of keeping his teammates alive with health packs, revives and supply drops. This is deepened by the asymmetry that exists between the two teams' classes too; the Strogg feature similar combat roles to the GDF, but their classes are augmented with advanced alien technology -- their items include Remote Repair Drones, Violator Orbital Strikes and Teleportation Devices, while their nefarious abilities allow them to create Spawn Hosts and extract Stroyent from unconscious or dead GDF players. This wide range of choice almost guarantees that you'll find a combination of team and combat role that's absolutely perfect for your preferred playing style.

I'll ask Ed Stern, our Senior Game Designer, to write a diary on the development of this backstory with id Software.

Epilogue

As a game designer, I'm not terribly objective in arguments about the relative importance of art versus design versus technology, but as my more objective mentor Kevin Cloud once said, "You can drop a Ferrari engine in a school bus, but who would drive it?"

By August 2006 at the Leipzig Games convention, three years had passed since the decision to move Enemy Territory into the Quake universe. As I stood on that VIP balcony at the Activision stand staring at the queues forming below (people queued repeatedly for four hours just to play ETQW for twenty minutes), I felt really good about that "universal" decision.

Oh, and my epiphany? I suddenly realized what it takes to make a great multiplayer game -- you need to put a Ferrari engine in a Ferrari.