Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Interview

Splash Damage's Paul Wedgewood takes us behind the lines of this team-based shooter.

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The better you play with your teammates the more you'll advance up the military ranking attached to your character. And since you won't necessarily progress based solely on selfish play, you're encouraged to work with the others on your team. "We want to discourage antisocial behaviour in the game because it makes it so much fun for everybody else that's playing," he explains.

But your intentions don't need to be altruistic to get the good stuff. "It would be a fallacy to not accept that people are selfishly motivated," he says. "So ultimately the rewards we give you for team playing are cool, they unlock cool gadgets and things you can play with that make the game more fun."

Will people play along? Much of the game's success relies on other players working together, but Wedgewood has faith that people who pick up the game will be inclined to play the "right" way.

"What we found [in PC mod Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory] is that people do get more of a buzz coordinating with other people than they do simply deathmatching or simply capturing the flag."

Something else players can expect is variation. The locations that serve as the battlegrounds for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars are set around the world and include maps in North America, north Africa, Japan, the Virgin Islands and more. Some have been designed for smaller matches, so that those who prefer 5-on-5 games have somewhere to go, and others support bigger skirmishes.

And the maps have more than just aesthetic differences. Consider Island, a map set in the Virgin Islands that tasks the GDF with infiltrating a Strogg stronghold. The base hold information about the alien invasion that is vital to the GDF cause. Players on the GDF side must then get into the base, knocking out their power generator and finding the data, which is then beamed back to central command.

"Each of them is distinct not just in the geography of the map that makes it feel very different from the last map you played but also that the final objective and the actual plot that drives the reason for the map existing is unique," explains Wedgewood.

One thing you shouldn't look for is cross-platform play. Even though the game is coming to PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 - "essentially the same experience" - Wedgewood says the team has no desire to allow players on different systems to play against each other.

"If we'd done that as a feature something else would have suffered and it didn't seem like there was any real benefit, that it was worth sacrificing anything else."

And from the look of things, players wouldn't be happy with any sacrifices at all.

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