Quake III: Arena

aka: Q3, Q3A, Quake 3, Quake Arena, Quake III: Arena (Elite Edition)
Moby ID: 649
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Description official descriptions

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)

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

A great multiplayer game, but if you're not a multiplayer fan stay away.

The Good
This game has one of the best 3D engines to date. I disagree with people saying that it's the best as I find Unreal more appealing (haven't played Tournament yet), but the eye-candy is definitely amazing. The 3D engine is great in complexity and generally beautiful. The AI is one of the best I've encountered yet, unlike the veritable stupidity of the bots in Unreal. The bots in Quake III behave reasonably well and human-like (although are simply too difficult in high levels) and the only single player experience available in this game is quite satisfying. The level design is amazing, my personal favorite being The Longest Yard, and the levels are fairly large and allow a great deal of gameplay. The sound effects are excellent (the music isn't all that good though) and the A3D implementation is awesome.

Also noteworthy are the support for hardware transform and lighting (a la GeForce 256) and support for Symetrical Multiprocessing (SMP), which gives an incredible speed bost on dual-processor sysmtems.

The Bad
AI is way too difficult in the higher levels (read: hardcore, or even worse, nightmare) and simply does not miss with the railgun, which is rather annoying. The 3D engine is very slow on relatively modest hardware: last year's near-best computer (my P2-350 with Riva TNT and 128mb memory) is this year's sludge, and I can get more than 30 frames per second in 640x480, 32 bit colour (23ish if I turn A3D on). The music simply sucks (too heavy on the bass and too lenient on the quality).

I'm also personally against the concept of a multiplayer oriented game (including Unreal Tournament), especially because although working on the fastest reasonably acheivable internet connection in Israel (single-channel ISDN), I still get a 450-500ms ping rate, which makes gaming practically impossible, and I don't have LAN-parties on a regular basis.

The Bottom Line
A great game which emphasizes multiplayer gaming. If you're a single-player fan like me, stay away from it.

Windows · by Tomer Gabel (4539) · 2000

THE MOST MINDLESS GAME EVER CREATED!!!

The Good
Well, to begin, Q3A is not as good as Unreal Tournament. The only thing Q3A has over UT are way better models (one for every mood you're in at the time) and the running around/shooting feels a little better than UT. Weapons are the same as Q2 also, and there is not very much lag. But if you're in the mood the relieve any stress besides getting pi$$ed of by your teammates in UT, lock 'n load and pick up your copy of Quake 3 Arena!

The Bad
Plain deatmatching gets pretty boring after awhile; you know you should take a break when you start fragging yourself on purpose in this game. Also, sometimes it feels like a really big expansion pack for Quake 2, and some people like myelf will get a hadache from playing it two hours straight, because of the bright graphics and fast gameplay. Also, the maps could be better. But the worst part is that you get a couple Capture the Flag levels and that's it; two modes of play. Fortunately there is an expansion pack coming out for team play.

The Bottom Line
Shoot people in a first person perspective over the net.

Windows · by Dragoon (106) · 2000

[ 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.