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When most people think of first-person shooters, id Software
immediately springs to mind. The small Texas-based company has been
involved in almost all of the first-person shooters that are considered
classics. Quake spawned a rabid fan base on the Internet that still
watches id's every move. So when id revealed that the next game in the
series, Quake III Arena, would be specifically designed as a
multiplayer game, fans weren't quite sure what to think. But id's
purpose became increasingly clear when it released a succession of
Quake III Arena technology demos for public scrutiny. The resulting
game is not only worthy of its lineage, but it may very well be the
best Quake yet.

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 on the higher difficulty
settings, they put up an excellent 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. The single-player
mode is a lot like the kind in an arcade-fighting game, such as Mortal
Kombat. You'll move through several different competitive tiers, each
with different arenas and bots. At the end of each tier is a one-on-one
showdown; these fights take place in smaller, tournament-style arenas.
The bots are downright chatty - when you get a group of them together,
they'll hold small conversations with each other, which are displayed
in text onscreen. In team games, you can order bots around, or even let
a bot take control of your team and tell you what to do.

The single-player mode is fun up to a point, but the multiplayer mode
is where the real action is. Quake III Arena moves very quickly, and it
has a real pick-up-and-play design to it. The game feels slightly
simplified as compared to other recent shooters, but for the most part
its simplicity is a good thing. The game has been stripped down to its
first-person shooter essence, and any extraneous weapons or power-ups
that might have gotten in the way of great deathmatch gameplay have
been omitted. However, a few things stick out as having been overly
simplified. For instance, as in most shooters, there is an auto-switch
weapons option that lets you automatically switch to the new weapon
when you pick it up. It's a convenient feature because it lets you
rearm yourself with a stronger weapon almost immediately instead of
having to press a key or spin the mouse wheel to select it. But when
you're in the middle of a close-quarters shotgun fight, you really
don't want to accidentally switch to the rocket launcher or railgun if
you happen to walk over one. In that case, you can disable the
auto-switch feature. Similarly, if you're running away from someone
who's firing BFG blasts at you, the time it takes to manually select
your new rocket launcher could be the difference between life and
death. A weapon-priority scale that lets you decide specifically which
weapons you'd like to switch to automatically, as in Unreal Tournament
or QuakeWorld, would have easily solved the problem.

The level design and texture design throughout Quake III Arena are
quite good, even if the levels feel a little generic. None of the
levels ever feel like real-world places; they are one futuristic castle
setting after another, occasionally broken up by a level composed of a
bunch of floating platforms in the middle of a black void. That said,
the textures, especially the animated ones, are really amazing, and the
game engine allows for curved surfaces, which deliver a more plausible
feel to the architecture. The levels have obviously been designed with
gameplay in mind - most of them are great fun to play in. However, the
game seems to focus on levels that are great for only six to ten
players. With more than ten players, most of the maps seem really
crowded. Aside from standard deathmatch, you can also play team
deathmatch, a one-on-one tournament mode that acts like a scaled-down
version of the popular rocket-arena mod that appeared in Quake and
Quake II, and capture the flag. Unfortunately, capture the flag seems
almost like an afterthought. There are only four CTF levels included in
the game, and all of them seem suited to smaller teams.

Like the great-looking textures, the game's 3D models and special
effects are very impressive. The character models and skins look
terrific, and the animation really brings a lot of personality to the
different characters. The various models are highly varied, and range
from giant hopping-eye creatures to skeletons. Models based on the
characters from Doom, Quake, and Quake II are also available. Curved
surfaces help improve the quality of the level design, but other
effects like fog and great colored lighting add even more atmosphere to
some of the game's levels. The weapon models also look good for the
most part, and they're easily identifiable in your enemies' hands.
Unfortunately, the sound in Quake III Arena is inconsistent. All of the
weapon fire is outstanding. The sound of rockets whizzing by your head
as you dodge from side to side is especially impressive. The different
character voices (each model has its own set of sounds) are pretty
good, though you may become annoyed with Orbb the eyeball's screeching
noises - all the more reason to kill him quickly. But the real problem
with the audio is the announcer, who says things like "five minutes
remaining" or "impressive" when applicable. Id obviously tried to
duplicate the sound and style of the announcer's menacing voice from
the Mortal Kombat games. But instead of hiring an appropriate voice
actor, id simply took a typical voice (specifically that of level
designer Christian Antkow) and pitched it down a few octaves to make it
sound sinister. Instead, it just comes off as amateurish. Given the
frequency with which the announcer speaks during the game, you'd think
that the voice would have received a bit more attention.

Regardless of how it sounds, after playing Quake III Arena, it's easy
to see that moving toward a multiplayer-centered game was an excellent
idea. With cable modems and DSL connections slowly gaining mainstream
acceptance, the bandwidth is there for a lot of people to finally enjoy
a good deathmatch game at a high speed. Fortunately, provided you find
a good server, the game also manages to be playable over a 56K modem
connection.

All things considered, it isn't a stretch to call Quake III Arena an
outstanding game. But whether it's superior to its rival Unreal
Tournament is less certain. If you're interested in sophisticated
team-play modes like those featured in Unreal Tournament, then Quake
III Arena comes up short. However, Quake III Arena provides the
ultimate deathmatch experience. If deathmatch is the particular style
of play you're interested in, then Arena is your game.