Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Moving onto Ark, on the coast Norway - a kind of fjord coastal inlet, in arctic conditions - the interesting thing is that the objectives are the same as on Area 22. You have an EMP to attack, a mining laser in orbit, doors getting blown off and an underground objective at the end. But they play entirely differently.

What's going on is...in the Quake universe, the GDF are a paramilitary organisation rather than a kind of organised military unit, and that's the reason they're still using projectile weapons and their vehicles are in poor condition. And it's good, because it gives us a nice asymmetry. If they were more futuristic - laser guns and stuff - it wouldn't be as fun to play against the Strogg. Anyway, because they are a paramilitary organisation, they've developed most of their presence as a rapid reaction force, because the Earth has been through a series of natural disasters and there isn't a ton of commercial research going on any more that's generally concerned with advancing Earth - it's mostly just about holding back the flood. The Ark is one of the few locations where a bunch of billionaire philanthropists have constructed a series of biodomes and they're doing something that's benevolent - storing strains of DNA for species of plants and animals that are becoming extinct.

For the multiplayer gamer, it's perfectly reasonable to argue that on his third time he's playing the map he doesn't give a crap about any of this stuff, but as designers it means that we can come up with a cool location for the map, a cool series of objectives, and when you make that transition from the outdoor part of Ark, going into the biodomes, having loads of vegetation, then going into the facility, the game changes. There's a really significant transition between the way the game feels while you're trying to blow up the EMP to when you're then fighting across the bridge and you have this big choke-point and all of the aerial combat comes into play, to when you then move into the biodome and you have the underground experience which is a lot more like Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory - kind of run-and-gun, assault rifles, leaning round corners and all that kind of stuff.

The third, Island, is one that's being developed over at Nerve Software, and takes place on Reversion Island in the South Pacific. It's the location of the last surviving facility that holds data on the first appearance of a Strogg slipgate. It gives us this James Bond-esque mission for the GDF. The Strogg have taken possession of the island and this data is behind a vault door in an underground complex. An engineer has to construct a generator first to bring power up on the island, to power up the satellite which is in the transmission towers up on the top of the mountain.

You then have to blow down a vault door and get the data disk, which is in a briefcase - there's even an escape route down through a staircase to a speedboat in an underground tunnel, which you can then use to escape round the island, or you can try and go straight up the hill with the Strogg forces bearing down on you. When you transmit it to the waiting GDF scientists, that's what led to them finalising their research into slipgate technology. And we have slipgates as a theme in a few of our maps, but the ways that we use them is quite original from map to map, and we have a couple of quite cool surprises for players when they buy the game...

If it was 12 maps that were in desert or a jungle and they just had flags that you captured on them, then it becomes a kind of indistinct and repetitive experience. Touching back briefly on the mnemonic idea - you know, um...I first read about mnemonics...I think it was Hannibal Lecter had a highly developed mnemonic memory palace, but the basic premise is that it's much easier to remember things if you store them in physical locations in your head. One of the things that I use is I have these 52 locations in my house, and I can stick things in those locations and I can tour through the house and I can remember all 52 things in there.

But for a player, the idea is that if a map is completely unique and distinct, when the map loads you are instantly reminded that this is that map where you place the landmines on that little strip of road and you watch hogs come haring past and they get blown over the top of your head. The mnemonic reminds you of the thing that you had fun doing, but the sequence of events ends up being a story you can tell other people, whereas it's less interesting to say 'I spawned, I ran forward, I stood there, the flag was captured'.