as you may or may not beware of the Enemy Territory Quake Wars (EN:QW) MP public beta was released over the weekend, this game has been on the scene for a while now, with many holding it in high regards from what they have seen in E3 video's and reviews and other such sources.
After the wait, after the grueling time i spent waiting for the keys to be released, stopping the film i was watching with my girlfriend to sign up for this key, i am seriously left sat here thinking is it worth it.

The game is basicly the classic battle between man and invadeing aliens. the strogg have come to earth you fight them off, that is essentialy it.

For anyone who played Wolfenstein Enemy Territory (now freeware) the gameplay style will immediatly be very very recognisable. the gameplay has not changed at all except for the introduction of vehicles which are just weird and slightly overpowered and over-armoured from my experiance. it took a good 5 rockets on direct hit on side armour to take down a strogg tank, plus i had some assistance from a friendly tank. Many of the origional elements of the game remain, such as when you die you have the option to go to limbo and respawn or wait for a medic to revive you, this was in the origional and although it encourages teamplay amongst your team its just basicly been copied right out of the origional.

as the game largely focuses on teamplay, your objectives encourage you to play as a team. with certain classes being able to complete certain objectives, such as the basic soldier carries an explosive charge that is used in the beta map to destroy some grates, the engineer cass can build objectives and place gun turrets. although this is a nice thing to have in a game, set objectives to complete and for it not to be a straigh forward Deathmatch it basicly turns into a deathmatch with one person running for the objective. With the engineers building objective structures it ruins the atmosphere of the game, as you suddenyl get this huge white outline of the structure appear(as you can see below)

for me, that outline appearing ruins any realism the game may hold. in the above picture i was palying as Strogg forces and what is shown is a GDF (human) objective, so its a bit of a nappy game, as you do not realy need to be paying much attention to whats going on or being said as is appear slap bang infront of your face.

the graphics of the game are very dated, i have it on full settings getting an average of 30fps... the graphics in Battlefield 2 look better and i get around 80fps everything maxed in Battlefield 2. i know this is a beta version so performance will be increased hopefully with the final release but graphics will not improve to bring it up to date which is a shame.
 
so basicly the graphics of ET:QW are around 2 years back dated with just some bump mapping on objects to try and make them look more real... but it doesnt realy do anything to the overal graphics.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is just the same old looking slightly better but the graphics still look dated, its a shame that it has not lived up to its expectation as i was genuinly looking forward to this, but you may as well play the origiona wolfenstein enemy territory as its the same but you will save yourself £30.
i would personaly not buy this, with crysis being released sometime this year, and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2(GRAW2) being realeased on the 29th of June they are going to be some of the best MP games this summer of the shelf. If you are a HL2 fan and are looking for something to keep you occupied this summer then Insugency Mod (INS) is going to be a great game and is on the verge of released within the next month or possibly 2 weeks

john

Those graphics look like Half life 2's...... Only with a tenth the framerate. 

Why does everyone just focuses on eyecandy nowadays. After 2 hours of playing noone really care´s
about the graphics anymore if the game is good !! So many game´s have been ruined because the focus was on
graphics (Oblivion, Deus Ex.. etc.). I´m still playing ET and it´s one of the best MP Shooter out there.
The graphics are five or six years old.. but who care´s .. the game rocks !! I played ET:QW this weekend myself.
It´s a fantastic game... Every one who liked ET will love ET:QW...but just like ET you need a real team (!!!!!) for this game.. not just a bunch of people who
meet on a server. And please don´t judge 3D engines just by the eyecandy !! Have you ever had your hands on
the Quake engines ? Have you ever compared the capability to other engines (regarding editing) ?
I guess not !! What ID Software does is rock solid, bug free and a dream to use for Gamedesigners. I´ve worked
with nearly a dozen of game/realtime engines in my life. And (expect the Gamebryo engine) the Id engine´s are
beyond everything else !! (You don´t even need to convert you´re models it reads the native files of every bigger
3D Software package directly into the engine)
But hey.. go on.. scream for more eyecandy.. and in five years we´ll have games as flat as the breast of
Kate Moss
If you don´t like the gameplay.. it´s one thing.. But judging a game just by the eyecandy.... is.. sorry.. simply stupid !!

What if the gameplay blows as well?

ET was Quake 3 in WW2, ET:QW is Q4 in a whack scenario. Even the famed (for its realism) Red Orchestra is just UT2004 in WW2 with a few built-in annoyances (yet nice tank combat).

K.

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That's what I don't understand. Look at images of it.

Little shadows.
Obviously repeating textures.
Horrible Anisotropic Filtering (Probably Geforce 7)

Yet 30fps. For? HDR , Fresnel Shading, Displacement/Paralax Mapping.

Yet look at this:


On my videocard that costs $80? On a two year old game based on the incredibly flexable and moddable Source engine? I do find that pethetic.

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Figure of speech. I can prove the rest though (If you want).

The point was is how newer videocards, such as the HD 2600XT, has 390 million transistors.  My X850 has 160 million. Go read benchmarks, and tell me... is that efficiant use of the chip?

The reason why I said that about ET:QW, was that... look at those pictures posted  by John. They were rendered at 30fps. I cannot play a multiplayer shooter under 40fps... and lowering the settings would probably make ETQW look like Morrowind. I do find that Pethetic.

I understand, ET:QW has huge gains on newer hardware. But I just find that really, really bad. Better be optimised for release.

I am not going to argue, as that's only MY opinion which I stated because I am sick to death of all these games which are exactly the same as there predecessors minus vehicles yet requiring super computers to run, which I find pethetic.

Zerotime wrote on Jul 4^th, 2007 at 8:39am:


A simple answer so these hardware companies can make money. Thats why I'm always a bit behind the technology curve. FS9 ROCKS!

The Half Life 2 engine is amazing, its amazing how well it works even on a moderate system.

yeh i see what you mean Bjorn, but the problem with the huge games is that they were always buggy, joint ops use to be bugged ot hell (havnt played it in ages, i might get a copy if most the bugs are gone) BF is still bugged to hell and gets worst with every patch somehow. and operation flashpoint is the best soldier sim available to date no contest! IMO

i like insurgency cos it looks pretty, the game play is awesome IMO and Doom3 sucked! it sucked bad P

JSpahn wrote on Jul 4^th, 2007 at 10:48am:


thats partialy due to the nock backs valve sufferd when developing. it was ment to be released in 2002 at first but got pushed back to 2003 i think it was  or 2004 (cant realy remember of the top of my head) but the source engine as its known is good, and a Geforce4 can run it pretty well or atleast my old 4400 ran Hl2 fine on med settings

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Never noticed any bugs in JO, never any major ones in BF42.

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"Awesome gameplay". Yeah, right.
The pace is okay, but the maps are way too packed for my taste.