Quake III: Arena

aka: Q3, Q3A, Quake 3, Quake Arena, Quake III: Arena (Elite Edition)
Moby ID: 649
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The third game in the Quake series is a departure from the previous games, focusing exclusively on multiplayer arena fighting with no story-driven singleplayer part - directly competing with Epic Games that did the same with the contemporary Unreal Tournament.

The offline part takes the player through a number of one-on-one and team-based challenges against AI-controlled opponents, slowly ranking upwards in difficulty, as the character of the player's choosing. Compared to the previous titles, the colours and general design of the game are much brighter and it shakes off the dominant shades of brown and grey the previous titles in the series were known for. The player's arsenal consists of new and familiar, but redesigned weapons, including a gauntlet (melee attacks) and a machine gun as the spawn weapons, a shotgun, plasma gun, lightning gun, rocket launcher, railgun, and BFG. Each weapon has specific advantages, ranging from the amount of damage to reloading times and the ability to hit-scan opponents.

The different arenas are also filled with health bubbles, complete sets of armour and armour shards, the well-known Quad Damage power-up, ammunition, and specials such as Mega Health, Haste, Invisibility, a powerful Battlesuit, and more. As with the other Quake games, it is known for its freedom in movement. Advanced players use techniques such as rocket jumping, strafing, and circle jumping to quickly get around areas. The game offers more speed than Quake II, but it is not as fast as the original Quake. Not everything was kept - the double-jumping from the previous titles was removed for instance, but replaced with new tricks.

The single-player part only serves as a diversion for the online multiplayer options, with modes such as duel, team deathmatch (TDM), capture the flag (CTF), and more. As with Quake II, the vanilla version of the game was eventually heavily tweaked by the players' community with all-new tournament features (including voting, referees, banning, netcode updates), as it was used in professional Pro Gaming tournaments for almost ten years.

The only difference between Quake III: Arena and the limited Elite Edition is the tin box packaging.

Spellings

  • 雷神之锤III:竞技场 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Linux version)

54 People (53 developers, 1 thanks) · View all

Programming
Art
Game Designer
Level Design
CEO
Director of Business Development
Biz Assist and id Mom
Special Thanks to
Bot AI
Menu Interface
  • Raster Productions
CTF
Linux Conversion
Map Editor
GL Setup
Additional Programming
Additional Level Design
Quake III Arena music
  • Sonic Mayhem www.sonicmayhem.com
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 88% (based on 70 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 260 ratings with 12 reviews)

Awesome deathmatch redeems this meatless meal

The Good
In 1999, id Software did something that, depending on who you ask, was genius or stupidity: release an FPS game that almost completely eschewed single player gameplay and focused on multiplayer. Released side-by-side with Epic's Unreal Tournament, it became a cult FPS and is regarded by many as id's magnum opus. Which is surprising when you consider that Quake 3 is less of a game than any of its predecessors.

Quake 3 condenses the FPS genre into the simplest form possible. Realism, story, and design have all been given the shaft and what is left is nothing more than the raw basics of the genre. You pick up weapons, pick up ammo, and try to kill your enemies more times than they kill you. Doom is rocket science next to this. Predictably the game was the subject of a lot of backbiting and criticism, and many claimed it typified the style over substance trend gaming had gotten into. But I'm willing to forgive Quake 3 simply because it was the most fun deathmatch game of its time when released, and even today more than holds its own.

The core of the game, deathmatch mode, is a blast. The transparent pick-up-and-play design to it that makes it very easy to get into, and whether you're a novice or a pro there's something for everyone. Everything in the game is just right. Your characters move at just the right speed, the weapons are all perfectly balanced (for the first time in history, we get a default weapon that is not a total piece of crap), the powerups complement the gameplay perfectly, and in another first for id Software the maps that come with the game actually do not suck. I'm sure all veteran deathmatchers have horror stories about the terrible Quake maps, but Q3A's maps are almost flawless, speaking of endless playtesting and tweaking on the parts of the level designers. No longer does the first person to find the rocket launcher win, and no longer can you rack +20 frags by camping. "The Longest Yard" in particular must be one of the most fun and well-rounded FPS deathmatch maps ever.

The game becomes drastically different depending on how many players there are. If it's just you and a friend the game is a tense affair filled with stalking and stealth. If you've got sixteen players the game becomes a crazy mosh pit where you're frantically shooting non-stop at everything. Just about everything is user-configurable allowing for weird situations where every bullet kills or where players can only move at a snail's pace.

While Quake III Arena's focus may be its multiplayer deathmatch component, it does have a single-player mode. When playing alone, you can go up against artificial intelligence-controlled bots. The bots do their best to act like human players, and while I won't say they have the greatest AI ever they still put up a good fight. Each bot has different characteristics that govern the way it fights. The portly biker chick Lucy tends to duck a lot. Xaero, a Zen master and the final boss of the single-player mode, is also master of the railgun. There's also a tournament mode where you duel with increasingly tougher bots.

id Software's calling card has always been their boundary-pushing graphical engines, from the EGA graphics on Commander Keen to the realistic 3D environments of Quake I and II. With Quake III Arena they upped the ante yet again, delivering every cutting-edge effect in the book from volumetric lighting to curved surfaces, allowing the map designers freedom to create environments that go from hard edged industrial to squishy organic, all with geometric detail that is impressive even by today's standards.

And like all of the Quake games, it was built from the ground up to be user-modifiable. This spawned a lively modding scene that remains active to this day, tweaking the game's extremely flexible engine to produce everything from unofficial patches to completely new games. id Software actively supported this by releasing the source code and all their early design docs. That's one thing you can say about them, you never feel like a criminal when you're messing around with their games.

And I love the industrial metal soundtrack Sonic Mayhem did for the game. Seriously, I've got it on CD.

The Bad
Quake 3 is unapologetically a one-trick pony. It's about deathmatch, deathmatch, and deathmatch. Outstanding deathmatch perhaps, but once you're sick of deathmatch there's nothing else here.

This is not a criticism that can be applied universally across the genre. Unreal Tournament had a wide variety of multiplayer modes, including capture the flag, domination, and many others. There are people who spend as long learning to play Counter Strike as a grandmaster does learning chess. Even games like Duke Nukem 3D and Blood have combined great multiplayer modes with compelling single-player components.

Or look at it this way. Relatively few people play vanilla Quake 3 any more. It's all about mods like Rocket Arena and Urban Terror. In terms of replay value Quake 3 doesn't go the distance.

And on a less significant note Quake 3's in-built game browser doesn't really work properly and often will refuse connections. GameSpy Arcade is your best bet when looking for games on the internet. It's sad when GameSpy is the lesser of two evils.

The Bottom Line
I could roast Quake 3 all day long for being unoriginal, derivative, etc and to be honest there's fairness in those criticisms. But in the end, you've got to review the game on its own terms. Quake 3 was made so new players could jump right in. It was made so long-time Quake fans wouldn't be too unfamiliar. It was made for people with short attention spans. Maybe it's a repugnant design philosophy but complaining about Quake 3 because it's retarded is like complaining about ice cream because it melts. With Quake 3 you've got an arcade game in a 3D-accelerated engine, and we've all got to accept that and move on.

For what it's worth, you'll have trouble finding a higher-quality multiplayer FPS anywhere. In movie jargon, Quake 3 "works".

Windows · by Maw (832) · 2007

Frankly, disappointing

The Good
It was probably a bad idea to come to Quake III Arena so late. Indeed, by the time I had actually got around to inserting the CD into my drive and clicking the relevant buttons, I had already played through - and loved - some of its descendants. One of the most popular engines to have been licensed, it forms the basis for such luminaries as Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Jedi Knight II; impressive children indeed. But how does the parent compare? One of the most popular online FPS games of all time must, surely, be worth playing? Eager to find out what I'd been missing, I get about giving it a go.

Quake III Arena is, as its name suggests, the third of the Quake series, but the first to explicitly promote multiplayer as its raison d'être. Previous games in the series have had a single-player campaign, which while never being the most well-fleshed out of stories, were still worth a play and were by the by enjoyable. Quake III dispenses with that; its offline component merely sets up a number of different predefined arenas populated by bots, to be played through in sequence. In addition, the usual 'instant action' mode is provided for, allowing the player to pick a map and play with bots to their heart's content.

Speaking of bots: the game comes with plenty to choose from, with a wide range of models and skins to pick from. Some are culled from iD's history: the Doom marine makes an appearance, as do representations of Quake and Quake II's player characters.

Equally well-represented are the game's weapons, with many taking direct cues from earlier titles. There's the typical Quake rocket launcher (point at enemy, admire new red wallpaper), the grenade launcher (complete with satisfying Quake sound effects), and the railgun for those with a fondness for sniping. Even Quake's lightning gun returns, reminding us all why playing with high voltages is dangerous, if compelling to watch from a safe distance.

There's a remarkably large range of maps shipped with the game, and although the visual style is hardly diverse - pentagrams, fire, and lava all present, as per iD Level Design Guideline #23 - each map has a distinctive feel, and many bring fresh challenges to the player. Q3DM10, for example, apes Unreal's "healpod" level, providing a chamber players can use to heal themselves (while providing a perfect location for their foes to find them). Few of the maps will leave the player finding unique, only-in-Quake-III touches, but by and large they're professionally designed and play well.

The Bad
By this point, you're probably wondering, "Golly, Matthews, you sound really enthusiastic about this game. Why did you give it such a low score?", to which I would reply that it serves you right for skipping to the end of the review.

The fact of the matter is this: I found Quake III simply not very much fun to play. On paper, it should be elementary: iD are one of the masters of the art, having brought us fantastic FPS games every few years and effectively creating deathmatch as we now know it. They are, presumably, good at their jobs. And as a technical achievement, the game is perfectly competent.

Yet I can't shake the notion, after ten minutes or so playing, that I'd really rather be doing something else. My chief argument in favour of this would be the words 'Unreal Tournament'. Everything Quake III does, UT one-ups, with the sole exception of sheer graphical prowess; Quake III still looks quite impressive, while UT (despite its many charms) hasn't aged quite as gracefully.

Offline play, which to me still holds many joys, is barely comparable. Where Quake III has a barely-concealed ladder with barely a paragraph of explanatory text to tell us why we're running about gibbing everyone, UT presents a much more enjoyable campaign, with multiple ladders for each variation of gameplay (deathmatch, capture the flag, and so on), with individual trophies for their completion and a hugely satisfying final boss. Quake III's single player is tedious; defeat one set of opponents, and you move straight onto the next, with no variation to be seen; not even CTF or team deathmatch. Disappointing.

The weapons in Quake III feel unsatisfying, too; the rocket launcher has punch, but many (such as the shotgun) have no feeling to them, and seem to be highly arbitrary when it comes to actually using them. To this day I cannot quite work out how the shotgun seems to be utterly lethal one minute from across the room, and yet the next fails to graze my opponent point blank. Compared to UT's arsenal, almost everything (save, alas, the Ripper) feels much more exciting.

Unreal Tournament boasts voice taunts from its bots, whereas Quake III can only provide written responses, as if the bots had typed them in, which may have been a shade more realistic given the general lack of voice chat in online games at the time, but does betray a desire on iD's part not to allow a bot backchat gap.

The Bottom Line
Really, the biggest criticism I can level at Quake III Arena is, again, that I simply do not find it particularly fun to play. While this opinion probably makes me about as popular as malaria in sub-Saharan Africa (That's enough - Taste And Decency Ed), it remains my continued and unrelenting feeling as I plow through another grimy, brimstone-tinged map, shooting the same bots over and over, wondering quite where iD went wrong.

It's a perfectly capable game, and as a technical demonstration of iD's ability to craft an engine, astounding; but I remain at heart a player of games, and not tech-demos. 6/10; and honestly, I expected a lot better.

Macintosh · by Vulpine (247) · 2009

Still Neat

The Good
Many things have changed since I first reviewed Quake III, but most of my comments still stand. While the improvements in video card development are on show in Half-Life 2, Quake III actually holds up fairly well for a five year old title. It's still colourful and entertaining in its presentation, and while there aren't vehicles (Unreal Tournament 2004) or really expansive maps (Counter-Strike, etc.), everything still comes together nicely for a mindless romp.

I'm still impressed to this day with how much ID were able to get out of the title in terms of character design. Many of the titles that came out at the same time, including Unreal Tournament, relied on simple colour or clothing changes to differ the team players, for the most part. Quake III tried something different and it worked, with some really crazy characters (the eyeball for one).

The Bad
Quake III started a new age of gaming, taking players out of the usual single player environment and placing a greater emphasis on multiplayer and team play. It's influence on future titles, therefore, was a very big one. Multiplayer is a big selling point for many titles, and up until Quake II and Arena, it was rarely looked at outside of sports or racing games, except for the few that did try.

But of course, just having multiplayer and nothing else doesn't always work. Quake III does have a single player campaign, but essentially it's the multiplayer levels stretched out to one on ones with bots. It helps to give newer players a chance at working on their skills, but it doesn't cut it compared to those hoping for another true action title.

Like I said before, Quake III does hold up well compared to newer releases, long after its first release. So there aren't many new downsides I can update with, which is a good thing.

The Bottom Line
Q3 is the perfect type of game to play at a LAN. Quick to setup and get going, and a hell of a lot of fun. Without a decent single player mode to back it up, however, there isn't that much to take out of it in the end.

Looking back and playing it again, it hasn't lost any of its charm or entertainment factor. Pick up the mods or Team Arena expansion, and you've got a title that can bring endless amounts of fun, and now at a much cheaper price. So don't shy away from Quake III if you do happen to find it at a bargain bin, and you are yet to try it. You may be surprised at how much fun it really is. I still enjoy it to this day.

Windows · by Kartanym (12418) · 2004

[ View all 12 player reviews ]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The PC version of Quake III Arena appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Copy protection

As Half-Life, the game shipped with a very controversial multiplayer CD key check. (The key was printed on the case of the CD-ROM)

This system reduced piracy, but also introduced several other interesting issues. Several people who had bought the game were unable to play it online because their cd-key had already been "stolen" by people who used key generator programs to find valid multiplayer keys. There are also numerous reports of Quake III: Arena boxes being opened at the store by dishonest people wanting to get a valid CD key.

Credits

After finishing the game, watch the credits roll. After the Credits show "THE END", the character with the hoverskates will skate around the screen like she's just learning.

Cut content

Quake III: Arena had several graphical features cut (assumed for performance reasons, and the arcane OpenGL ICD driver implementations at the time). Quake II-style particles and realistic flares (that occlude behind models and alpha textures) were present in earlier revisions, but did not make it to the final release of the game.

There was also a flamethrower weapon planned, as well as a 3-tier player class system (light, medium, heavy) which were also cut from the design. References to this can still be seen in older Q3Test releases, and the files of the designer player models in a patches' pak2.pk3 (the 1998 dated .skin files).

Engine

Some of the features of the id Tech 3 engine:

  • Bump mapping instead of mip mapping: Mip mapping rescaled a texture for several different sizes. Bump mapping actually applies per pixel light calculation for each texture. The trade off is processor speed vs realistic lighting.
  • Curved surfaces: Quake III will interpolate the position of a point by doing real time calculation, based on the curvature of a surface.

German index

On January 12, 2000, Quake III: Arena was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS (confirmed on March 31, 2000). For more information about what this means and to see a list of games sharing the same fate, take a look here: BPjS/BPjM indexed games.

Limited Edition

There was a Limited Edition run of a "tin" game box instead of cardboard. The only difference is the box itself, nothing else extra is included.

Multiplayer

  • A downloadable add-on map pack is available on many Quake III: Arena sites on the internet, which contains all the maps from the Dreamcast release of the game. This add-on pack allows players of the Windows/Linux version to play on servers with Dreamcast players. This makes Quake III: Arena one of the first games to support transparent Internet play between a game console and the PC!
  • In an interview on Gamasutra, designer Tim Willits called Quake III his biggest failure: "The game offered perfect multiplayer for hardcore players. In fact, they're still playing it. But the more casual gamers, and other people who actually have money, found playing next to impossible." This hints at a commercial motivation, and not the quality of the game itself.

References

  • Quake III: Arena presents some of the heroes from previous Id games as playable skins, including the Space Marine from DOOM, the marine from Quake, and a few of the different marines from Quake II. All of these models and skins have both male and female counterparts, and different color variations.
  • The game contains a reference to a popular online comic called User Friendly (www.userfriendly.org). When playing on q3dm19, pick up the fly power-up from the top of the level and fly all the way down until you’re below the final platform. Look up at the central floor and you’ll see an image of the Dust Puppy, as featured in the comic.
  • While this game was in development, it was referred to as Trinity. This was an obvious reference that it was using the third and possibly final Quake engine.
  • Some maps in Quake III: Arena include a wall decoration, that is actually The Icon of Sin, the final boss of id Software's Doom II: Hell on Earth.
  • On the map q3dm15, the severed head of John Carmack can be found lying in a pool of blood.

References to the game

The game appears in the fifth episode of the first season of the US HBO TV series Six Feet Under. The character Claire is shown playing it, doing rail shots with the quad damage activated.

Sales

50,000 copies of the game were sold within the first 3 days of its release.

Source code release

On August 19th, 2005, the full (GPL'd) source code to the game was released.

Tech demo

id Software released a technology demo of the game, called Q3Test, in early 1999. In the following five days, 2 million internet games were started worldwide. That works out to around 4 games every second.

Awards

  • GameSpy
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 03/2000 - Best Graphics in 1999
  • Power Play
    • Issue 02/2000 – Best Graphics in 1999

Information also contributed by Chris Martin, Cochonou, Jason Musgrave, JubalHarshaw, Lord FlatHead, leileilol, lethal guitar, Medicine Man, Paul Budd, Sciere, Scott Monster, Tibes80 and Xoleras

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Related Sites +

  • Bill Brown - Music Composer (cinematics)
    Listen to streaming and downloadable MP3 music tracks from this title at the composer's official site.
  • PlanetQuake
    PlanetQuake was one of the first sites featuring news and file about Quake 1, and it is now probably the biggest Quake series related site. If you can't find what you want there, you probably won't find it elsewhere.
  • Quake III Forever
    Play Quake III in your browser (Shockwave needed), courtesy of Necromanthus.
  • Quake III: Arena
    Official page on id Software's website
  • Telefragged
    A very huge site dedicated to the first person shooter games, particularly focused on the Quake series.
  • The Final Hours of Quake III Arena
    GameSpot writes about the end of Q3A development in their "Behind the Games" series.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 649
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by DarkTalon.

Macintosh added by Corn Popper. Windows Apps added by Kam1Kaz3NL77. Dreamcast added by Adam Baratz.

Additional contributors: Cochonou, Istari, Eric Barbara, Adam Baratz, Unicorn Lynx, AdminBB, Sciere, Alaka, leilei, Patrick Bregger, Titan10, FatherJack.

Game added January 2, 2000. Last modified March 14, 2024.