Episode Four: Arena Eternal
Are You Not Entertained?
Welcome to Episode Four of “Quake’s Bizarre, Beautiful History!” Read the previous episodes here:
Despite id software’s best efforts to move away from it, Quake was still their leading shooter franchise in the late ‘90s. As far as the single-player was concerned, though, it hadn’t settled on an identity. The first game’s gothic vistas and creepy atmosphere clashed with the industrial sci-fi settings of its sequel, and I wouldn’t blame id software for having trouble figuring out where to take things after that. Two things were consistent, though; a focus on fast and fluid movement and gunplay, and a lively community of players fragging each other online. With the steady growth of organizations like the Cyberathlete Professional League and events like Quakecon, id decided that multiplayer would define Quake going forward.
Technically, this was a bit of a risk. Even the most multiplayer-centric games, such as fighting games, had to have something to appeal to solo players back then. id themselves had made single-player campaigns a standard of the first-person shooter genre with Doom, and Quake’s own campaigns had both been very well-received. If titles like fighting games could get away with “single-player” that boiled down to standard matches against computer-controlled opponents, though, id figured Quake could make it work too. The focus on multiplayer put them right into their zone; gameplay had always come first at id, and there was so much less to worry about when you didn’t have to pair it with some kind of adventure. With a fine-tuned arsenal, a wide variety of maps, and more player customization features than ever, Quake III: Arena would usher in the age of multiplayer-only shooters all the way from the release of its first beta on April 24th, 1999.
Pure Carnage
Like many of the best games, Quake III: Arena is simple to understand and difficult to master. You spawn into a match with a machine gun in your hands and one mission: as the instruction manual puts it, “frag everything that isn’t you.” Anybody with shooter familiarity can hop right in and start fragging in chaotic deathmatches. Do something cool and the game will praise you! “Excellent” for two frags one after the other. “Impressive” for hitting two consecutive railgun shots, which is funny since it doesn’t matter how much time passes between them. There’s even “humiliation” for snagging a frag with the Gauntlet, a fallback melee weapon with terrible range that usually only works against the unaware or extremely unskilled. Simple as it is on the surface, though, there’s a lot of depth in every aspect of the game.
Nowhere is this intricate interplay of simple tools better represented than the arsenal. With no more “super” versions of weapons or clunky guns with poor handling, Quake III: Arena’s weapons represent the Quake essentials. It’s defined by a so-called “unholy trinity” of iconic weapons: the essential rocket launcher, the precise railgun, and the beam of death itself, the Thunderbo - oh, sorry, we just call it the lightning gun now. Still, I’m glad to see it back and occupying its rightful place among the upper echelon of Quake guns. The rocket launcher’s explosions bounce foes around and deter their approaches, the railgun dishes out high damage with pinpoint accuracy from any range, and the lightning gun shreds enemies in close and mid range as long as you can track them well. The purpose of these guns is immediately clear and satisfying on their own, but they’re even better together. Bouncing enemies up with a well-placed rocket stops them from squirming around, making it easier to line up the finishing railgun slug. Enemies weakened by rockets or slugs won’t take as long to melt with the lightning gun, making the tracking less demanding and saving on its rapidly-consumed ammo. Other weapons like the shotgun and plasma gun still feel good to use and fill certain niches, but generally speaking, you’ll want at least one piece of the trinity before you set your sights on anyone.
Seeking out these weapons and everything else you need is what makes the maps of Quake III: Arena so important. Whether you need to stock back up on health and armor, upgrade your arsenal, or take control with a game-changing power-up, you’re on the move. On the best maps, everything important is spaced out around the whole map. There’s an addicting rhythm to switching between sniffing out resources on the outskirts or niche corridors and hunting down other players once you’ve geared up. Maps are generally compact enough to keep things exciting, and the amount of verticality they have consistently makes positioning interesting. All this put together gives Quake III an unmistakably pure feeling. Everyone spawns in with the same health on the same maps with all the same stuff. Being the best at moving around, controlling major pickups, and just plain shooting will keep you ahead of the pack. There’s lots to master, and your practice pays off in very tangible ways.
Quake III: Arena has four built-in gametypes, deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, and tournament, which is known better today as “duel.” Deathmatch and its team-based variety accommodate a lot of players, resulting in chaotic games where even the best players won’t be able to predict everything. These are the most popular modes among the general playerbase even in newer Quake games. Capture the flag is the fundamental team mode of Quake, with classic strategy based around offense and defense on symmetrical maps. Duels, though, are where Quake really stands out even today. It’s a one-versus-one test of the game’s many skills where you earn every frag; the winner stays on and defends their title against whichever spectator was next in line.
Most shooters are kind of dull for 1v1 play like this, as they tend to be designed specifically for much larger groups of players or team-based gameplay where a player’s choice of character or weapon can counter other choices hard. In Quake’s layered systems where players start on even footing and have so much room to express their mastery, though, duels are pure art. Experts move methodically from their spawn to the strongest tools they can reach, picking their openings against each other carefully. When one finally frags the other, it becomes a game of cat and mouse as the winner snowballs their momentum and the loser moves to gear back up for a comeback. It’s hard to put everything together in a duel, but nothing in the genre satisfies like a hard-earned frag in this format. Unsurprisingly, this would be the reigning esports format of Quake, though other formats like 2v2 deathmatch are also played.
Going Pro Mode
Quake III: Arena’s distilled multiplayer focus brought even more attention to its esports scene. Despite its no-frills, skill-based gameplay, though, id wasn’t necessarily building it just to be an esport. Deathmatch was the main focus, with the amount of players and powerups like the iconic Quad Damage shaking things up enough to make sure raw skill wasn’t the only factor for most matches. Pro players saw a lot of potential in the fundamentals of Quake III, though, and this is where id’s friendly habit of strong mod support comes into play. John Carmack didn’t want to make the basic rules too pro-focused, but supported the idea of an official “pro mode” to satisfy Quake’s biggest, baddest players. Lo and behold, a group of nine pro Quakers known by such illustrious tags as “Hoony,” “Swelt,” and “arQon” went ahead and made that pro mode a reality.
Challenge Pro Mode Arena - CPMA for short - reached its full Ver. 1.0 release on August 28th, 2000. Features included visual and balance adjustments, original maps, and new physics that allowed for even crazier movement. Quake III: Arena was actually a pretty hard game for most computers to run back in the day, so features such as allowing superfluous particle effects or even environmental lighting to be disabled made the performance more consistent. They even restored the railgun’s iconic corkscrew trail, which had been missing in the base game for some reason. Weapons were tuned with a focus on the unholy trinity, such as reducing the railgun’s damage to avoid Quake II-level dominance. Community maps were added into the mod with a focus on engaging competitive play; vanilla Quake III had a lot of gimmicky maps and ones without most of the unholy trinity by comparison. Most importantly, the new physics complement strafe jumping with original Quake-style airstrafing, allowing the best players to stay at top speeds around every twist and turn.
CPMA would quickly become the high-level competitive standard for Quake III: Arena, enhancing the overall feeling of the game while also including compatibility for vanilla Quake III physics. It would also introduce a number of popular gametypes that would return in official Quake releases later on. In freeze tag, players are frozen instead of killed when their health reaches zero, and teammates can thaw them out by standing near them; the first team to get fully frozen loses a round. Clan arena pits teams against each other like team deathmatch, but players stay dead until a round is won by eliminating an entire team. This mod and many others which would add new maps and gametypes kept Quake III’s multiplayer lively in a way that even constant official support couldn’t have matched. CPMA was essentially the step which codified Quake’s identity as a competitive game, and many die-hard Quakers still run tournaments for it today. However, pro players are never more than a small percentage of a game’s scene, and Quake would be no different.
But What About All the Normal People?
Like I said before, id wasn’t just thinking about esports when they made this game. For more casual players, Quake III: Arena still holds on to some features meant to evoke a sense of atmosphere, and there is a single-player mode. Instead of a proper campaign, of course, the single-player consists of a series of deathmatches against computer-controlled opponents of increasing difficulty. The story goes - all in the manual, of course - that an ancient race known as the Vadrigar so revel in battle that they created the Arena Eternal, pulling the greatest warriors from all across time to watch them fight endlessly. The prerendered intro even shows the character Sarge getting pulled right out of a battle into the Arena. Why do you respawn? Because it’s no fun for the Vadrigar if all their best fighters keep dying for good. Why is it laid out so much like a game, with glowing pickups on timers laid out in consistent spots? Because that’s fun for them to watch. It’s a sort of metanarrative that justifies inherently unrealistic video game mechanics as part of the world, which is cool even with how simple it is.
The many faces in the arena are ranked in different tiers, and the single-player consists of moving on up throughout the tiers by winning fights on all of the game’s deathmatch and tournament maps. This is a clever way to repurpose the wide variety of character models made available for any player to use themselves, and the loose narrative justification of the Arena results in some fun inclusions. Quake’s Ranger and Quake II’s Bitterman are both available - of course I prefer to use Ranger - and even Doomguy shows up in the penultimate tier of the arenas. Some of the characters are meant to be cool, others are just reskins of different characters, and some are just plain silly. Orbb is an eyeball with a mechanical set of legs, which is funny because he’s small enough to be more frustrating to hit than most. Bones is, fittingly enough, a literal skeleton - and he’s one of the highest-tier fighters in the arenas. A surprising amount of effort went into making these bots feel like characters in the single-player; they constantly type quips into the in-game chat, even referring to you by your in-game name. It’s kind of a notional effort at single-player, but some of id’s characteristic attitude remains and the gameplay of Quake III is fun enough to make this structure less tedious than it would otherwise be.
The convenient environment of the Arena Eternal also justifies maps which fit both Quake and Quake II’s aesthetics. For every industrial factory or military base, there’s a crumbling castle or hellish fortress to match. Both looks are done pretty well, and the game’s enough of a generalized hodge-podge of edgy ‘90s cool factor that I don’t feel out of place in either kind of world. There’s also a fair number of maps built right into voids in space, where falling off is as much of a threat as getting shot. Frustratingly, knocking players off the map with a well-placed shot counts as a suicide instead of a frag, docking one of their points instead of giving one to you. Later Quakes would fix that, thankfully. id, as always, pushed their tech to new heights to realize these maps, which is a big part of what made the game so hard to run for many players in the first place. Though it doesn’t directly impact the gameplay of multiplayer-focused titles, I still appreciate when games such as this make an effort to have a good sense of style and personality. Even the most competition-focused games benefit from feeling like they belong in some sort of world.
Aftershock
Quake III: Arena didn’t start the arena shooter genre, but it certainly defined it. It’s remembered today as the classic example of the early days of shooters in esports, sitting amongst other genre icons of esports like Super Smash Bros. Melee and StarCraft. In its time, it was the trendsetter, inspiring competitors of similar caliber like Unreal Tournament and Starseige: Tribes. It remains John Carmack’s favorite game he ever worked on. Much in line with the obsession with difficult games that defined the ‘90s, Quake had leaned into its reputation as a cutthroat experience where you either learned the hard way or gave up. This is what the relatively small scene of online gamers at the time enjoyed, and there will always be a place for games that put gimmicks aside and give players free range to express their skill. For all that Quake III’s laser-focused, hardcore scene brought to the table, though, emerging trends in the shooter market were threatening to pass it by. Shooters were spreading to new markets, experimenting with new strategies, and fleshing out their worlds, and players were really into it. Quake would soon be pushed out of its comfort zone of leading the genre into responding to it.
Can Quake adapt to a changing gaming landscape? Find out in “Episode Five: Follow the Leader,” coming soon! Also take a look at the how the industry was changing around Quake in “Expansion Pack Two: Realms Beyond,” coming soon!
MY GOAT FINALLY POSTED