Hell's Katz Squad

Quake Wars is the combination of two of the greatest competition franchises of all time. Enemy Terrority, while free, was a huge hit and still is. The competitive community flourished, and was a major success. It focused on teamwork and tactics in order to win matches, and the competition for it flourished. Why? Because the folks at Splash Damage are focused on making good competition.

Quake was a huge point in FPS in general. Quake 2 was hugely popular, and Quake 3 even more. Most of today's great gamers started out on one of the Quakes for competitive play, and Quake games have been traditionally the best games for direct competition - they usually lack the teamwork to make them fun with higher numbers in competition, however.

Now, you've got two of the most competition-friendly, greatest FPS's of all time combined into one package. You've got likely the best competition game of all time. But what if the developers don't know what they're doing? What if they're more concerned about making it friendly to the public and ignore the competition community all together? Well, though I'm quite positive there will be a lot of hand holding, and a lot of focus on making it friendly for the public and easy to get into, I have no doubt that it's competition-focused, just like both Quake and Enemy Terrorities tradationally have been. Why? The lead developer was in a clan for YEARS before creating Splash Damage, the development studio, WITH THE CLAN. The entire core development staff are former gamers who played competitively for years and years. This is what I'm placing my trust in.

Quake Wars will also succeed where Battlefield 2 succeeded. Battlefield 2 got gamers and clans to come from Rainbow Six, Enemy Terrority, America's Army, Tribes, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, earilier Battlefield games, and much more. There was a huge variety of clans in both CAL and TWL from dozens of different games. It was a huge attraction not due to great graphics, or ambient battlefields, but because it offered an attractive gameplay premise - a flag-based open battlefield with all the equipment of modern war. Quake Wars is offering up a similar plate, it's an objective-based open-ended battlefield set in the feature. I'm pretty sure we'll see a large community being drawn from a lot of different games, just like BF2 did, because of the premise.

Now, Battlefield 2 didn't die because the premise wasn't good, and it's still not dead. The reason it's dying, however, is the constant changes and lack of ANY additions by EA. The game hasn't gotten remarkly better since it's release, and since it's release it's taken small steps at best. Since it came out nearly a year ago, what has changed? What has been improved? What has been added? Though there has been numerous changes, bug fixes, and tweaks, there has been little in the way of improving or expanding the game. The reason it's dying is not only because of the lack of any additions, but because the changes that they make are constantly refocusing the game. They want BF2 to have legs, but they fail to provide interesting new content, or a stable gameplay that competitively-focused gamers can thrives off of.