Our Team had the pleasure to do a exclusive Interview with Kevin Cloud, id Software co-owner & ETQW Exec. Producer

All these questions where collected from our users in our GamePropehts.com community forums. We thought that it is important that real players can ask their own questions to the guys which are working on this great game.

We wanna say thanks to Kevin Cloud that he took the time to answer our questions.



PlanetQuakeWars.net: A lot of people compare et:qw with w:et! What do you think about this comparison? Can we compare these two games with each other relating the gameplay and functions, or is it completely different?

Kevin Cloud: That’s a great question. People see big terrain, tanks, and missile systems and don’t know what to think. But trust me, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a true successor to Wolf Enemy Territory.

The objective game play creates a focused combat area. Yes, you can deploy your artillery and radar away from the center of combat but their purpose is to support action inside that combat area, and the closer you are to that objective, the more intense the action is.

On top of that, we made sure to balance on-foot and vehicle combat with lots of interior combat and objective areas, as well as ensure that vehicles are most effective against other vehicles or strategic assets rather than most effective in chasing down foot soldiers.

We’ve extended the class system by adding more strategic elements to the various roles without changing their overall tasks. For example, engineers still set up defenses, but instead of just laying mines (their only base defense in Wolf: ET), they can also deploy anti-vehicle, personnel, or missile turrets. Field ops can still call in air strikes like in Wolf: ET, but in ETQW can now also deploy and control targeting for strategic strike missiles and artillery. In Wolf: ET, Covert ops could sight and reveal concealed mines using their binoculars, but in ETQW covert ops players can also collect other intelligence by deploying radar.

We’ve also dramatically improved communication through a solo assignment system that allows players to learn about targets collected through various forms of intelligence, then select and attack those targets in a coordinated mission.

PlanetQuakeWars.net: Does ET:QW support different hit zones? Is there a difference between hitting an enemy on the leg or on the body itself? If yes, how many hitzones are defined, and where are they? Can we find some already known sounds from the old Quake and ET universe when we hit or kill an enemy?

Kevin Cloud: We have 9 joints on the player skeleton which are used to determine the area on the body which is hit, 2 of these are the leg, 4 are the torso, 1 is the neck, and 2 are for the head. Some of this is liable to change through play-tests and subsequent balancing, but each of these zones has a different damage scale - the current values are 50% legs, 100% torso, 150% neck and 200% head. Right now you can find plenty of old sounds because we haven’t gotten round to replacing them yet, but we will. There’s plenty of inspiration drawn from previous QUAKE games, but we’re not using any old assets straight from previous games.



PlanetQuakeWars.net: Are the ammo-packs from the field ops the only way to get ammunition? Or can you collect weapons/ammunition from your dead colleagues?


Kevin Cloud: Your main source of ammunition is the other classes – GDF Field Ops and Strogg technicians. We considered and tested different options but the decision we made was to focus the support elements into the hands of your teammates rather than disperse it into the battlefield. In our current play-tests, the Medic is also able to call for a supply crate drop in the field that dispenses ammunition and health, but we’re still evaluating the balance implications of this.

PlanetQuakeWars.net: Most people are a little bit afraid due to the implementation of vehicles in QW! How are you handling the balancing? Are there unlimited vehicles available on each map, or is it limited relating to the number of players or map size?


Kevin Cloud: There is a lot that goes into answering this, and I covered some of it in the first answer, but let me start with the simple question and say that the number and type of vehicles on each map are pre-defined by the mission. Players can call in smaller vehicles like an ATV but you can’t call in a tank for example. Larger vehicles are automatically deployed to your base, and if someone is using a vehicle it won’t re-deploy until it has been destroyed or the user has abandoned it.

As for balancing the game play, first, ETQW isn’t about who kills who the most or about who can control the entire map. If it was, then simply because vehicles are faster and more powerful, they would be very difficult to balance.

Instead, ETQW is about taking over a single key location in the map—basically controlling that point for a brief period in time. Once it is taken, it can’t be switched again, and the frontline pushes to the next objective. In every case, accomplishing these objectives (like building a bridge or planting explosives) requires you to be on foot.

Defining who the most powerful class or useful vehicle is really depends on the mission, but overall our goal is to make sure everything is important. This is what we describe as the rock-paper-scissors dynamic of the design. Here’s an example – The Strogg may set up anti-personnel and anti-vehicle turrets around an objective to mow down any GDF players coming within range. These turrets are not mobile, so if a GDF field-ops’ targets the location with a strategic strike missile, they get wiped out. Of course that strike missile is useless if a Strogg Constructor has also deployed an anti-missile shield near the turrets; yet that shield can be quickly hacked by a GDF Covert Ops sneaking into enemy territory to sabotage defenses. Now, he can definitely get to that missile shield faster using an ATV, but it’s small and destroyed fairly easily by… yep, the anti-vehicle turrets. This is a very circular example, but the point is that everything has a strength and weakness and in real-world games not every team makes the right strategic decisions about what they have deployed, or has the skill to use the assets properly – the key is to figure out and take advantage of the opposing team’s weaknesses.

Then as I said above, all of this changes for the objectives that go indoors. That’s where drones and spawn-hosts and mines become more important, and team coordination goes from taking out strategic assets to moving through a corridor with a good medic, soldier, and engineer.


PlanetQuakeWars.net: How about the damages from these vehicles, is it possible to total them by driving into a rock or some other vehicles?

Kevin Cloud: Vehicles take damage from the collisions that you’d expect them to, such as crashing into walls, driving into water (if they’re not amphibious), colliding with other vehicles and deployables.

PlanetQuakeWars.net: I hope it’s not possible to knock over the infantry with some tanks! Or can you fly kamikaze style into an objective to destroy it? How do you handle this? We know this is a problem for several other games!

Kevin Cloud: Objectives in ETQW require you to be on foot and generally require some type of specialist class ability like hacking, explosive charges, etc., so you will not see vehicles directly taking out objectives. Vehicles are most effective against other vehicles and strategic assets like defense turrets, than they are against other players—although you can’t stop a tank shell with a flak jacket. So, I wouldn’t charge one on foot.

Vehicles are more armored, carry stronger weapons and are faster, but they are also less agile, more difficult to cover, and have blind spots. Most importantly though, the game is not about the most kills or controlling the entire map by getting around faster; it is about working together as a team to accomplish a focused mission. Vehicles are useful to winning but on foot combat is necessary.


PlanetQuakeWars.net: We saw that some maps are bigger than the maps in W:ET! Are there more players necessary to have real fun on it, or is it okay to play 5on5…?

Kevin Cloud: The goal is to balance the game to be the most fun for 12 on 12—but it really depends on the map and the skill of the team. I would reserve fun five on five games to well coordinated teams and clans where each player knows their job. For public games I think eight on eight is doable and fun for most maps.

PlanetQuakeWars.net: There are some rumors about the maximal number of players in the game! Some peoples are talking about up to 400 players on one server! This sounds a bit unrealistic to some of us! What will be the maximum number of players on a normal internet game? Is there a difference to LAN games relating to the number of players?

Kevin Cloud: The game is balanced and designed for 24 players. Sometime after release people will probably make 64 player maps and run bigger games, but a 400 player game is not in the foreseeable future – primarily due to the server bandwidth requirements in tracking all those players with the precision required in a fast-action shooter.


PlanetQuakeWars.net: Now we get a lot of questions from our XP junkies! ;-) as we can see on some E3 vids, there is a scoreboard like on W:ET! Is this statistic still XP related, or is it a mix of several skills which are responsible to get on top of this list? Is there a global list to compare some players online to each other?

Kevin Cloud: Yes. There is both the campaign system like we had in Wolf: ET (3 maps combined to create a campaign where skill progression and rank are persistent from one map to the next) and a persistent stats/achievement system. We do however want to avoid encouraging people to treat stats rewards as a personal mini-mission because often that goal is unrelated to winning the game. We are still working out the leader board decisions. Personally I don’t like them, but I know people who love them.

PlanetQuakeWars.net: Another open point is the missing server query protocol, which is going to report player stats to IRC scorebots and probably to our partnersite splatterladder.com, which has an excellent buddy tracker tool for W:ET.

Kevin Cloud: You will be able to do this in ETQW. However, because of the way our stats servers work, we'll be adding an alternative feature to the server and master to Provide for this functionality.

PlanetQuakeWars.net: Last but not least, when can we play the first time online? It dosen’t matter if its just a demo or the final version! ;-)

Kevin Cloud: This year for sure.

Hey. Thanks for taking an interest in the game. These were some great questions. It is nice to get questions from someone who clearly knows the game.

Thanks.