Like a clinically obese Tongan with an SMG.

That’s my analogy of the Doom 3 engine. The sooner it’s gone the better in my eyes. Let’s face it, you cannot argue that it feels like a fortnight-old drowned corpse compared to the lovably flawed Quake III engine or the hyperspeed Unreal 2003/4 engine. It’s difficult to describe how the engine feels, especially so to those who aren’t well aquainted with games, but I shall try anyway. Quake III’s engine was at its very best in Quake III. The game was intensely fast and designed in such a way as to fully take advantage of this - Quake III was a no-frills plug ‘n’ pray multiplayer fragfest - even the singleplayer aspect of the game was a faux-multiplayer. Then along came Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. These games took the Quake III engine and used it for themselves with a few modifications. Of course, some of the Q3 bugs weren’t ironed out, such as the infamous ‘negative acceleration’ caused by a multitude of factors, but the game were for the most part, polished. Play either of the two now and they are lightweight for both modern and aging PCs and manage to prove that the Q3 engine is suitable for both OMGQUAKEFRAGZ and sophisticated teamplay, objective-based play.

Enter the morbidly obese, hulking behemoth named Doom 3. Allow me to paint a picture for you here to better appreciate the differences between the two engines. Quake III is like a Swedish supermodel with mild haletosis and a lazy eye; she still looks pretty damn good and everything works as it should under the hood. Doom 3 on the other hand is Monkey Island II’s Governor Phatt; a bed-ridden creature who relies on constant sustenance fed to them through tubes, barely able to breath under the tremendous weight of an eighteen wheel lorry crushing down on them, which in fact is its stomach. It’s an immobilised funeral in bed, where the heart could cease to function at any second and nobody would know until the body began to decompose (or it went off its appetite) and let’s not forget the fact that it probably hasn’t seen it’s penis since it first lay down in that bed. Can you see what I’m getting at here? Ok, I’m exaggerating a little here, but after all that is my technique as a writer-cum-anything-else-I-want. The point I’m trying to make is that when you play a Quake III engined game, it is responsive, pacey and how a First Person Shooter should feel. When you play a Doom 3 engined game you immediately notice the lack of responsiveness, the dampened pace and lethargy. This isn’t just in Doom 3 either, I gave up trying with Quake IV thanks to the engine it ran off.

Another downright infuriating flaw of the Doom 3 engine is the cvar lock. So many of the engine’s cvars are capped or locked at a certain value that it makes it nigh on impossible for tweakers to have their way with the game. Q3, RTCW and ET were tweaker’s paradises, remember the days of Q3 where one of the hottest gamers had a mouse sensitivity of 30 whilst others went down as low as 0.1? On top of that, the only FPS cap in Quake III’s engine was the fastest it could manage without crashing (333fps). That means you could set your monitor’s refresh rate to 100Hz, com_maxfps 100 and cl_maxpackets 100 in your config and have a damn smooth game. Doom 3’s engine is limited to a measly 60fps and it disappoints me to say that for, supposedly, the most advanced graphics engine in the world, I can play Quake IV at a constant 60fps without a flicker to 59fps at damn high settings to. It’s about time that these limitations were lifted.

These are the reasons I refuse to get excited about Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. It looks like an MTV Mash-Up between ET, Battlefield 2142 and Quake II. Brilliant, I can’t wait to fight off the Strogg as a Covert Ops on mp_Kuwait, or fly my A10 Tankbuster over the Strogg spawn on sw_Hellmand - do me a favour. The only silver lining to the grey stormcloud that has been named ET:QW is that it will be the last id Software affiliated game to run the Doom 3 engine. That’s right, Carmack and Hollenshead said that ET:QW will be the last Doom 3 engined game they make before focusing completely on a new “in-house” technology featuring DirectX 10. So it looks like 2008 will see the release of Return to Castle Wolfenstein 2 built for Vista using Direct X 10’s API. Now that DOES excite me slightly. Yes, I know that ET:QW will run off a “heavily modified” Doom 3 engine with ultra shader or whatever the hell it’s called, but face it - you can’t polish a turd guys. As far as I’m concerned, ET:QW will be little more than a place to keep contacts for me and burn time. RtCW2 is where I’ll be - and that is a promise.

Don’t get me wrong though, I’m fully aware that this new engine that RTCW2 will run off could be just as bulky and lethargic as Doom 3’s, but look at it this way, people learn from their mistakes. There are a lot of well-known and highly respected gamers whose decisions can make a difference, not to mention the millions of gamers worldwide who could well turn up their noses at the ET:QW offering. There have been many complaints about the Doom 3 engine, and for sure mine is not the first and nor will it be the last and a great many have been for the same reasons I have given, lethargy, unresponsiveness and a generally ‘bloated’ feel. Maybe we are just purists who are happy with a custom cfg file and CRT monitor, but let’s not forget that those very purists are the ones who make QuakeCon possible each year and it’s also those purists that ensure Enemy Territory is still alive a good three years after it’s release and that ensured RtCW stayed alive for as long as it did. I’m not expecting perfection from RtCW2, but something that is good enough to keep the current RtCW/ET communities together would be damn fine enough for me. Engines are one thing we can all rant about, but those we game with are just as important.