With Enemy Territory: Quake Wars a few months old, the mass marketing campaigns and hype generated by the media and game developers have come to an end. It’s time to take a critical look at Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is certainly a name that the majority of gamers recognise. Even before BETA stages of the game, we heard claims that this would be the best FPS game not only this season, but for years to come. Expectant communities from the competitive worlds of Battlefield and Enemy Territory pinned their hopes on Quake Wars to deliver the gaming experience they desired.
The promise of large clans and organisations being involved in private BETA stages specifically to develop the game for competitive play as well as the potential of 60,000 Public BETA slots, the future looked very exciting indeed.
However, it now seems that Enemy Territory has been no-where near as successful as anticipated. This lack of players can be seen in the following statistics:
We can see that whilst Quake Wars experiences player levels of around 2000 players, even the original Enemy Territory player levels exceed those of Quake Wars and clear rivals to the Quake Wars franchise, Battlefield 2 and Call of Duty 4, enjoy between 9-13 times more players online at any one time.
The competitive scene hasn’t had much success either, particularly in the EU. November saw Multiplay.co.uk’s i32 LAN event take place with a guaranteed £3,000 Prize Fund and when it was announced it looked like the beginning of something great for Quake Wars, however with multiple dropouts we saw just two skilled teams (Team-Dignitas and GROF) fight it out for 1st and 2nd place, leaving the opportunity for anyone who could get enough players to compete for the £250 prize of 3rd place – hardly a successful competition to boost the popularity of Quake Wars.
Overall, the i32 online qualifiers for the Quake Wars “Contamination Cup” only managed to attract 9 signups, 3 of which dropped out and only 2 of which actually attended the LAN. The question is, why were there so few signups?
One possible reason may be due to the game not being suited to competition upon its release. Despite large gaming organisations taking part in both public and private BETA’s, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars wasn’t released in a fit state for competitive play. This ultimately lead to a large number of clans and organisations trying to decide what rules should be enforced to allow the game to play at its best in competitive games. This meant that many new clans had to repeatedly change tactics in order to play in the different rule sets until continuity between the large competition sites was finally achieved, however the damage had already been done and large groups of players had decided to play the game purely on public servers, where the game and its maps played well, rather than concentrating on clan play.
Even large prize purses for online competitions have failed to bring back people to the competitive scene and the game developers have had their work cut out over the last month or so working on Patch 1.3 which aims to try and make the competitive play of Quake Wars more enjoyable. I asked
Munchies, General Manager of UK Multi-Gaming Clan TLR, what he thought about Quake Wars and why some large MGCs are not picking up ETQW squads, given the seemingly large prize purses available:
With Activison and SpashDamage contributing the majority of prize funds for the online and offline competitions currently running time is running out for the game and its players to attract large sponsors and gaming organisations to the game in order to allow the game to continue to survive, as lets face it, developers wont be so generous forever. Is the end really near for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, or is it simply the “lul before the storm” of the 1.3 Patch?
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is certainly a name that the majority of gamers recognise. Even before BETA stages of the game, we heard claims that this would be the best FPS game not only this season, but for years to come. Expectant communities from the competitive worlds of Battlefield and Enemy Territory pinned their hopes on Quake Wars to deliver the gaming experience they desired.
The promise of large clans and organisations being involved in private BETA stages specifically to develop the game for competitive play as well as the potential of 60,000 Public BETA slots, the future looked very exciting indeed.
However, it now seems that Enemy Territory has been no-where near as successful as anticipated. This lack of players can be seen in the following statistics:
We can see that whilst Quake Wars experiences player levels of around 2000 players, even the original Enemy Territory player levels exceed those of Quake Wars and clear rivals to the Quake Wars franchise, Battlefield 2 and Call of Duty 4, enjoy between 9-13 times more players online at any one time.
The competitive scene hasn’t had much success either, particularly in the EU. November saw Multiplay.co.uk’s i32 LAN event take place with a guaranteed £3,000 Prize Fund and when it was announced it looked like the beginning of something great for Quake Wars, however with multiple dropouts we saw just two skilled teams (Team-Dignitas and GROF) fight it out for 1st and 2nd place, leaving the opportunity for anyone who could get enough players to compete for the £250 prize of 3rd place – hardly a successful competition to boost the popularity of Quake Wars.
Overall, the i32 online qualifiers for the Quake Wars “Contamination Cup” only managed to attract 9 signups, 3 of which dropped out and only 2 of which actually attended the LAN. The question is, why were there so few signups?
One possible reason may be due to the game not being suited to competition upon its release. Despite large gaming organisations taking part in both public and private BETA’s, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars wasn’t released in a fit state for competitive play. This ultimately lead to a large number of clans and organisations trying to decide what rules should be enforced to allow the game to play at its best in competitive games. This meant that many new clans had to repeatedly change tactics in order to play in the different rule sets until continuity between the large competition sites was finally achieved, however the damage had already been done and large groups of players had decided to play the game purely on public servers, where the game and its maps played well, rather than concentrating on clan play.
Even large prize purses for online competitions have failed to bring back people to the competitive scene and the game developers have had their work cut out over the last month or so working on Patch 1.3 which aims to try and make the competitive play of Quake Wars more enjoyable. I asked
Munchies, General Manager of UK Multi-Gaming Clan TLR, what he thought about Quake Wars and why some large MGCs are not picking up ETQW squads, given the seemingly large prize purses available:With Activison and SpashDamage contributing the majority of prize funds for the online and offline competitions currently running time is running out for the game and its players to attract large sponsors and gaming organisations to the game in order to allow the game to continue to survive, as lets face it, developers wont be so generous forever. Is the end really near for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, or is it simply the “lul before the storm” of the 1.3 Patch?
EDIT:
And, honestly im happy that et players dont like et:qw, the less et players we have in etqw, the less is the possibility that it will turn into a cheating tard community.
but i will much rather play ET myself taking into consideration that EC has next to no cheaters and has lans like cdc
et only has cdc.
i might be totally off
agreed on that part :)
More precise stats:
5 Battlefield 2 19454
7 RTCW: Enemy Territory 13186
8 Call of Duty 4 11146
10 Battlefield 2142 7531
11 Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars 4272
http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/ <- gamespys tool is also flawed for many games.
General rule: for steam games use valves own stats, for other games use stats that scans all servers for the game. (gamespy only scans standard ports in some games for example)
Both bf2 and bf2142 got many public players and have had so since release, but dont have any large clan community.
The i32 LAN was used as an example for competitive play, if your not happy with that example then i could have used the Dignitas QCup as an example - not enough interest in an online competition for ETQW.
etpro 10%
well lets say I was wrong wouldnt you have told EYEBALLERS the truth, proven me wrong and not have gotten sacked?
Loved your and unisols fakenicks Gangstarn and qw3rty, without any gaming past. haha try to be a little smarter next time.
*ETQW has few players its dead, the stats are plain and simple wrong. Try to do better research next time.
*TLR dont want an ETQW team, well why did they ask us when we joined H2k?
*Players public dont give more clan players or a better scene, I have played bf2 for two years with over 20.000 players public at all times and the game sold more than one million copies. For the competitive side it dosnt mean anything, bf2 competition wise was a joke. The fate of etqw wont be decided until we see how good ETQW-TV, the competition changes from SD and the competition mod will be. There are many clans starting up, many good clans active and thats what matters.
*I32 was a failure. Well I32 was very early, it is very expensive to go and the prize purse wasnt any good. You cant judge etqw on a lan with so many flaws for the majority of ETQW clans, wait for CDC4. If it fails I will agree with you, but i32 wasnt something you can judge the future of the game upon. And btw a small ETQW lan in Germany got something like 8-9 teams, ask stfo for details.
This column is rated b for bullshit.
• I dont know, im not involved in the inner workings of TLR, H2K or your team - its simply a statement from the General Manager of TLR.
• I think it is fair to say that people playing public are more likely to move into the competitive scene compared to people that dont. The majority players start off playing public and then move into competitions. I agree, ETQW-TV, the 1.3 Patch and competition mods should benefit the game - im simply suggesting the damage has already been done and thus making it harder for ETQW to succeed as a competitive game in the future.
• I agree it was an expensive event, but I would have thought a £3000 prize fund would have attracted more teams - particularly teams who do have LAN support from their MGC. Once again I agree you cant base the future of ETQW on one event, I was implying that if this continued in other events (due to the matters i have discussed in the article) then the future didnt look bright for ETQW.
I've wanted ETQW to succeed as much as anyone, im just voicing my concerns over the games future.
The column is rated B for Brilliant!
your comment is rated 'f' for fail
But after patch 1.2 the game pretty much died straight away. :<
Crysis was never hyped as multiplayer game as it was primary developed for single player. Amazing graphic was promised. And it was delivered. So yes, statement about it being clanwar game is wrong.
Unlike ET:QW which was build as multiplayer game (with competition in mind?) from beginning of development. And what was delivered? Fuck, even lack of "pause" function make me laugh.
ET:QW was designed as a public game, the group developers were aiming at are etmain and etpub noobs. These noobs are 90% of ET players and most of them never even played cb/esl.
Now, there are many games that are being called "competitive games" and ET:QW was promoted as such a game, which is bad because it lacks lots of elements that are needed for competition gameplay.
its even more imbalanced then ET is, and considering that ET doesnt have balanced classes after what, 4 years?, its highly unlikely ET:QW will be balanced in a decade.
Only mistake ET:QW developers did is trying to promote that game as a competition game, they should promoted is as a public game and make some sdk that would make modding very easy so game would last as long as it can, perhaps even get a decent attempt at a competition mod or something.
Stats: As taken already said, the stats you used are not correct. I checked three different websites with those statistics and they were all not the same. I guess no page is able to give us correct numbers.And this again may have lead you to a wrong point of view.
• Half Life 77,135
• Half Life 2 37,398
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars 6,219
• Battlefield 2 5,986
• Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory 5,625
• Unreal Tournament 2004 4,322
These stats show us a bit different result, don't they? Even at the gamespy page there are different stats when you look at the mainpage and then look for the full stats. Furthermore Call of Duty 4 is still missing at gamspy. You can check all the websites yourself if you want. They won't tell you the correct result, I guess.
http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/
http://www.game-monitor.com/
http://www.serverspy.net/site/stats/
What do you exactly mean by that? Are teams like
ET:QW has still to grow and develop. But it's not that bad as you are describing it. CoD4 for example has the advantage of complete teams switching from CoD2 to the fourth part. In ET:QW new teams with players from many different games have to gather and show stability before big mgc's are willing to support them. That's also a reason why there weren't that much signups at the i32 lan. No team knows where it stands. There is not enaugh guarantee yet for big clans to give some teams their support they do not even know enaugh. There have to be some results before more clans step into the scene.
Also a game like COD4 is more mainstream so I would expect it to have more players and servers, how many TV ads did you see for Quake Wars? I counted 0, I've seen a numerous COD4 advertisements and it also has the advantage of 3 retail games before it so the COD franchise is way more in the minds of the public than that of Enemy Territory(Quake Wars).
Next time they want to make a proper competition game they should give me a call! Damn amateurs :p
One tip: Less is more.
And as far this column goes I have to say it's pretty terrible, your point might well be valid but actually back it up with something of note and reliability. The thing just reads like whine rather than any sort of factual insight.
well
its like brazilan top flight football v german 3rd division football.
guess which is which.
SAY IT, make me moan!
qw sux
ohhh yeah ...say it
qw sux
mmmmmmmm again plz
QW 28 euros www.play.com
cod4 61 euros (41 on steam)
have fun with cod4
ps: splodge u are so fucking idiot LOL. after 1 month u wanna make me believe this game is dying? Think about your game, et. make a colum about its death
clown u are my new hero :)
Oh, and the whole "LOL ET PLAYER JEALOUS" shit doesn't work since I've been playing Quake and CoD for the last 10 months.
PS: ETqw sucks, qw rocks
ETQW IS NOT QW, Retardbaby.
:)
I still value ET better than any of the newcomers
ET:QW merc avi!
I've been playing a game with a scene with 100-150 players playing on peakhours. Doesnt make me feel less about the game. It still is the best game ever; Quakeworld.
So what Im trying to say is that a game doesnt have to be mainstream to be good. The general public will always favour "realism" and mp5/ak47 above rocket launchers and lightning gun.
I understand that alot of people are disappointed that the whole world didnt roll over and play the game they wanted to play. But aslong as there's something to play for (CDC4, QCON, etc.) and aslong as there is good enough competition (hi digi) I will play this game.
And no COD4 noob can convince me otherwise.
Quakeworld is indeed an awesome game, and well without it we probably wouldn't be having this discussion now :P
But saying "people who dont like the games I like are noobs" isn't exactly a convincing argument.
Im just saying that I wont roll over and play whats "the flavour of the month" just because it seems like more people are playing it.
The only thing that would bring me back is a good competition mod and balanced maps.Quakewars is the biggest disappointment for a so called "competitive game".
The competitive community in North America is DEAD for Quakewars.
I wish the competitive community in North America for wolfet was still active , i would still be playing with u5. Wolfet was the best online experience i ever had , and it still is when i play it once in awhile.
PS: No Offense, just a side note ;>
so true
u should play with EU guys, ET is still kinda alive in here (although some ppl are trying to kill it)
the ping difference isn't' that bad anyway :P
Like we don't know there are problems :)
trying to make someone go back in "THE SHIT GAME"?
AND about your doubts like "Is the end Near for Quake Wars? " keep making ur mental wanks for yourself.
there is nothing wrong in change. I played second war fps for 7 years.
It's enuf imo
i32 cost like £500 just to enter and play for tickets (excluding food drink travel accomodation), people not wanting to go is understandable imo...
And yes, Cod4 is a gret game, better graphics, but worse than etqw.
Or do I have to remind you about the beginning times of ET? It still did a far far way when you watch the first months ...
and oh my god even if it dies we still take the quakecon that is coming for 100% sure in summer :>>>>>
Haha and don't even bring CoD4 into the discussion, it has to be the first game I have ever played where I played a high pcw without EVER playing a game in the CoD series before, and doing pretty well. It's just pathetically easy and the gap between the best and the mediocre is little. Easiest game on the planet atm, I'll stick to QW with ease.
Only way ETQW can get a bit better is with a mod, but it will keep it rep, your rep is beeing made on the start so will see but the chance is great that COD4 will k1ck etqw out of the loop.
ps
People that say ET was shit in beginning, atleast there was some fun @ pubs and further more ET was a game that was just dumped and wasn't intended to be finished @ all by splashdamage so they gave it away and that's why it was free.
ETQW was the next game of splashdamage and it would be a game for everyone public and competition, that were their words.
And for a game that was actually made for making money and getting it big in competition they kinda failed after working on it for 4 years. Like i said before the guys @ splashdamage are great in killing games.
#tag.et
Only thing that was enjoyable about ETQW was the HOG. All the other crap was just frustrating, slow and a disgrace to the ET series.
ps: How about next time they focus on the gameplay (MAYBE ASK TOPCLANS TO TEST YOUR GAMES INSTEAD OF DEVELOPERS WITH THE SKILL OF A RANDOM) rather than on your OMG MEGATEXTURE ENGINE ZOMG WOOT!
But the rest of game design sucks.
Basically a RTCW/ET with Q3 weapons would be cool. Instead of that they added realistic shitty features like big recoil, spread, iron sight on every weapons, buggy feeling in movements, big fucking maps and plenty of overpowered vehicles against infantry... + crappy engine and missing competitive features = FAILED.
Yes CoD4 did it! And they only had a bigger budget, bigger dev team, 4 years to dev on an already fully functioning engine, a huge install base of fans and experience across 3 previous commercial titles. It's truely an amazing feet on their part!
Both devs spent 4 years developing a game. One spent time on gameplay and one spent time on using a fucked up engine (doom3) and spent 4 years to deliver a mediocre game.
Tbh, cod4 and pk2 show that some devs actually are listening to the harcore multiplayer scene which doenst want cryengine gfx but hardcore gameplay. Fuck ultrarealistic physics, we want gameplay.
Computer games are going hollywood: lots of gfx, no content. Things are added because they look spectacular, not because they are needed or serve a purpose.
The just can't. You will say, they made ET, that's great!
Seems like all the credit about making ET goes to Splashdamage and everyone is forgetting which company did start it all. RTCW style multiplayer gameplay was developed by NERVE. RTCW was more or less perfect for competition.
ALL GLORY TO NERVE.
What Splashdamage did, was took RTCW core gameplay (created by someone else) and made it worse, decreased rate of fire, added one more class, few more weapons, new bigger maps (basically features for public players) and released free public game cause commercial product they were creating failed.
ET was pretty crappy at release. It took ETPro and years of testing to make a good competitive game.
What was new and interesting not-useless features in ET? I would say dynamic objectives, like tank in goldrush. Rifle for spectacular shots and mines. (some may disagree, but i like em :))
And here goes Quakewars. What else you all were expecting? Shit public game. Splashdamage style. With only tiny bits what made previous games good.
Are you still hoping for mod, saviour of em all? Doubt that.
..Splashdamage can't make games.
Hail to
who created it all.
...
I love this moment so much I want to have sex with it.
What SD added is crap (mortar, MG42, big boring maps like Fueldump, landmines, overpowered riflenade...)
one good idea : moving truck. GG.
all new gameplay ideas for Quake Wars (excepted one or two) are at the same level above... just crap
they should fire their lead game designer!
Island in quake wars was made by NERVE.
i hope so
I'm glad QW is doing poorly, because I detest that kind of public-style gameplay. I hope its lifespan is short.
I wonder how much hype this gamed had garnered had it now had the names "Quake" and "Enemy Territory" in it. Probably nothing.
There have been lots of FANTASTIC FPS games lately -- COD4, Crysis, TF2 -- and QW is nowhere near those names. In fact, it's one of the most tedious games I've ever played -- based on the beta, mind.
ET + better cheatprotection: 8 (cant make a lying endless sign :<)
Now in this post there stands over 2000. NEVER! The 2000 are the online players imo!
*EDIT* Blame on me, i was false with my first text here... :<
*edit* your right :<
But CoD4 just shows to have more potential, even alrdy now you can feel that the competition will be nice.
great balance and stuff
but with the new rules ( no tanks and and plains .... ) it sucks
After playing ET and ETQW I'll never be able to go back to the old and tired DM, CTF, etc modes.
I'm hoping that ETQW will do well or things aren't looking good for future games MP FPS games with any depth to the gameplay.
It would be sad if RTCW2 mp end up as a simplistic DM game but currently it looks like the general populace prefers the same old game modes we've been playing for the last 10 years.
What needs to happen is the SDK needs to be released. Then mods/maps can be made and it will get better I'm sure.
Remember ET was shit before ETPRO. Give it time, I don't think 3 months or so after release is fair to be making these kind of scare mongering judgements.
Plus it's pretty unfair how you have shown your statistics:
ET is a free game. Free games always get loads of players, even the shit ones (runescape).
COD4 and BF2 are main stream titles. Comparing them to ETQW is unfair as, to be honest, it's a reletively unknown game to casual gamers. Ask any casual gamer if they've heard of ETQW or ET and a lot will say no. Ask them about COD4 and they'll cum in your face about it.
But as I say, when the SDK comes out and bugs get sorted it will be fine. ET was shite when it came out and with huge mods it's now awesome.
I disagree, SD made ETQW to compete with the mainstream titles.
SD tried to make it mainstream yet it didn't really work. Plus they didn't have the funding for any TV adverts where most casual gamers get their motivation to purchase a game in my opinion.
Also the fact that ETQW has no SP (which is wasn't meant to I know) but this also scares casual gamers off as there is still a huge amount of game players that still only play SP and will only dabble in MP.
ETQW was always going to be a more hardcore gamer game regardless of whether SD tried to make it mainstream or not...
Plus I'd also like to know what time those statistics for player counts were taken at... as that would dramatically change the statistics.
well
Top Game Servers By Players
1. Half Life
36049 servers, 73321 players
2. Half Life 2
29797 servers, 58041 players
3. Battlefield 2
4520 servers, 12172 players
4. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
3317 servers, 8494 players
5. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
1250 servers, 6499 players
6. Battlefield 2142
1728 servers, 5388 players
7. Unreal Tournament 2004
1814 servers, 5081 players
QuakeWars aint going anywhere i guess
Quake Wars: 2,488 Players
Battlefield 2: 21,673 Players
Call of Duty 4: 34,414 Players
That's the stats from today at 8pm GMT - about peak time for gaming.
Plus as I said BF2 and COD4 are mainstream games so can't really say QW is diing cos it can't compete with mainstream games.
+/-1 clan like grof doesnt change the community much :)
maybe some new mods will increase playernumbers... but how ever.... i played bf42 and bf2 for 4 years or smth and all i figured out was: public sucked with 99% players who just camp on fucking big maps with a sniperrifle and dont do anything but vote for a playerkick ;)
so i prefer smaller community to the big public com when the smaller community is competitive and the prisemoney is ok :)
yeha prisemoney... thats what ea did for battlefield and stopped the agony of this game. if activision will support qw with price money then qw willl live and own a clancommunity which is much more important for everybody in here then some pubplayers
And you're right, 1 team doesn't make a difference, other than its a LAN team which reduces offline competition (and look of numbers of teams at LAN, and 1 team does make a difference)
Long Live ET
I think davy really had a nice comment for me, but now it's gone!
ase : wolf:et server : 4005 !!!
Now that RTCW2 has been turned over to some relative no name developer we can also not get our hopes up because there will undoubtedly be more vehicles in that game as well. Nobody likes getting killed when they couldn't avoid it with either mortars, cyclops, or any other big things that you can't kill with a gun and can't avoid being killed. That crap doesn't belong in competition.
There was one speech by Hollenshead or Carmack at Qcon saying something to the effect that modders will be a thing of the past. But, here we are hoping that some modders can make ET:QW worth playing in competition. Time for Carmack to pull his head out of his ass with some Rage car racing game and get his company back in order by returning to the FPS games that made him his millions. Give me a game like the original RTCW with better graphics, anti-lag, and a steel trap that snaps the nuts off potential hackers when they try to load a hack. That's the game I want to buy. Needless to say I wish I hadn't pre-ordered ET:QW.