Alien Invasion

GS: What can you tell us about the game's weapons? Can we expect to see the classic Quake II railgun make a comeback? What others can you confirm at this point?

You can expect to see a good mix of old and new in Quake 4.

TW: [Quake 4's weapon selection] is built on a foundation of Quake-style weapons. You have your railgun, your minigun, your rocket launcher, your hyperblaster, and things like that, and we also have a new special weapon. But I think the coolest aspect of the weapons is that throughout the game, you'll actually pick up weapon mods for almost all of them. The mods add some cool variety in terms of how the weapons work. So, players familiar with the Quake series will definitely feel at home with Quake 4's weapon selection, and the weapon mods will help spice things up. Here's an example: the rocket launcher mod will actually let you control the rocket after you've fired it. However, we can't go into too much detail at this time about weapon mods in general and how they work.

EB: Quake is Quake, so we didn't want to throw out all the stuff that people are used to. But at the same time, we wanted to take what was cool about them and see if we could give a little shift to them. But you'll definitely start out with the sort of weapons you're used to, and you'll find modifications throughout the levels.

TW: A lot of the weapons have mods that add a new kind of variation to what they do. You get them in different ways; you may find a fellow Marine who will give you one, or you may find another deep in the heart of the strogg war machine.

GS: We understand that a great deal of Quake 4's development is being focused on creating a single-player experience. Why was this decision made, especially in light of Doom 3's single-player focus?

TW: At id, when we looked at developing a new Quake game, we looked at the previous games, and we wanted to make one that had a compelling single-player game that also had excellent multiplayer as well. For single-player, we used the Quake II universe, because we feel that it had the most to offer in terms of having a great setting and a good, solid story of aliens invading the earth followed by the humans striking back. Quake II was also one of our most popular Quake games, so we started there with the foundations for the single-player game. But we also knew that [since this game would be part of] the Quake franchise, we had to make some great multiplayer as well. So, we looked at Quake III, which we thought had the best multiplayer feel to it. What you'll really have in Quake 4 is the best of all the Quake series all in one game--a great single-player game, along with great multiplayer. Raven has gone in and really tried to examine the way multiplayer feels, making tweaks to make sure that multiplayer isn't going to be Doom 3 multiplayer all over again, but really a Quake III-style multiplayer.

EB: We essentially have two teams working on the game. While the majority of the team is working on the single-player, we have dedicated programmers and designers that have been cranking on multiplayer. "Quake" is multiplayer, and we don't want to drop the ball on that. QuakeCon goes on every year, and there are some diehard, dedicated fans who come only to play Quake--it's one of the things that really makes the whole license great.

JH: A lot of what we've been talking about publicly has been about the single-player. We haven't really talked too much about the multiplayer, but like Eric said, there are a lot of hardcore people here [at Raven] who literally play Quake III every day over lunch. We're really looking at making the best multiplayer we can for Quake 4.

GS: What can you tell us about Quake 4's multiplayer at this point? Any specific modes we can discuss now?

TW: There are some multiplayer modes that are still in discussion with Raven, but you'll have capture the flag and variants, you'll have team deathmatch, you'll have tourney, and you'll have brand-new levels, some of which will be based on classic levels [from previous Quake games] that players really enjoyed. The number of clients is up [from Doom 3], currently around 12 to 16, but until we really finalize everything, we can't talk too much about multiplayer otherwise. But we will have a lot more information at this year's QuakeCon.

GS: Finally, is there anything else you'd like to add about Quake 4?

EB: From a design standpoint, it has been a thrill to work with the new technology and everything that comes with it in terms of what it will let us do--stuff we were never really able to do before. Quake 4 has been really cool to work on.

TW: Throughout the years, Raven has always been a licensee of ours and [the Raven team] has made some awesome games with our technology. But this is the first time that we've worked so closely together. It's important to note that all the original ideas in Quake 4 are a collaboration, so it wasn't just [id Software] calling up Raven one day and saying, "Hey, go make Quake 4." There's so much that the Raven guys, with their previous experience, bring to the table, and we [at id Software] can leverage our experience with the engine to help Raven out. I believe this is going to be our best Quake yet.

GS: Thanks, gentlemen.