Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, a tale of two (different) ports

by Christopher Grant { Apr 18th 2008 at 4:27PM }

Huh. Well, this is surprising. Instead of pushing for platform parity in their upcoming console ports of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars – like several other recent multi-platform releases have strived for – id Software has created two relatively unique versions. The practice of using two different developers to handle the ports – Nerve for the Xbox 360 port and Activision's Underground Development (formerly Z-Axis) on the PS3 port – accounts for some of the disparity, but certainly other dual-developed ports have been relatively similar, at least in feature-set if not quality (take Orange Box, for example).

In this case, as revealed to MTV Multiplayer, the Xbox 360 version of Quake Wars has a robust Achievement system that actually includes an entirely separate single-player campaign mode, as well as a training mode and all the Xbox Live integration you would expect from a team-based shooter. Meanwhile, Underground Development "was focusing in on other things like ... making the game look as good as it could on the PS3" and "creating systems that do what Xbox Live [already] does like matchmaking [and] server migration." Unfortunately, as relayed by PlayStation fansite PSU, the "near complete" PS3 port suffers from a hefty 4.1GB mandatory installation and "falls short of expectations, showcasing the same broke visuals we have become accustomed to in deprived PS3 ports, delivering an unpolished experience."

With the title's May 27 release rapidly approaching, it's unlikely the PS3 release will look radically different than it does now. And to think, we thought the era of gimped PS3 ports was at an end.

Tags: Activision, Enemy-Territory-Quake-Wars, iD-Software, Quake-Wars

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

theturtle363 @ Apr 18th 2008 4:30PM

Damn, i knew there was something i was forgetting when i went to gamestop today!

bigsofty @ Apr 18th 2008 6:20PM

Best online FPS of last year, bar none, stunning game!

born2expire @ Apr 18th 2008 7:02PM

really, i thought it was terrible. very dull.

Phranctoast @ Apr 18th 2008 4:31PM

Thank god for Haze then.

Vegeta (aka Ska Oreo) @ Apr 18th 2008 4:34PM

heh heh

Yeah sure.

lol.

Phranctoast @ Apr 18th 2008 4:59PM

My bad for being optimistic when the creators of Golden Eye, Perfect Dark and the Timesplitters series makes a new game.

Sir Fidlious Wong (Zeon Defense Force) @ Apr 18th 2008 5:04PM

Out of curiousity, was this game any good? I mean, it barely whispered into stores on the PC market and I heard nothing about it afterwards except "coming to consoles soon."

Hell, the collectors Editions of the PC version are currently at my local Best Buy for $20.

Zeus.:God @ Apr 18th 2008 5:06PM

Got this game on the PC- better than Haze for sure.

DangerMouse @ Apr 18th 2008 5:44PM

The PC demo was terrible. One of my biggest let downs, since this was in the top 3 games that i was looking forward to in 2007. Adopting the Enemy Territory style gameplay was a huge mistake. They slapped on new graphics over last (couple?) generation gameplay, amongst other things that were wrong with the game.

Vegeta (aka Ska Oreo) @ Apr 18th 2008 6:06PM

ugh, the whole "OMG THEY MADE GOLDENEYE" speech.

Anyways TS2 was the last good Timesplitters game. The rest of the stuff radical did was mediocre.

goboColossus @ Apr 18th 2008 6:35PM

TF2 was indeed the last great TimeSplitters game... But no way in hell was Second Sight mediocre.

Easily one of the most complete games developed last generation. Great story, likable characters (I'm talking Half-Life 2 level likable!), brilliant soundtrack, tight control... It was like Psi-Ops, if only that game ran 30 hours shorter and didn't draw the experience out with a sub-par, overused plot *twists* and personality that makes Army of Two look like the Dalai Lama.

I really need to go back and play that game now... If only it were BC with 360 :~

GreyFox @ Apr 18th 2008 4:35PM

It looks great but plays kinda shoddy on the PC (which I think the recent Steam price drop indicates) so I might (MIGHT!) be interested in the 360 port.

Sir Fidlious Wong (Zeon Defense Force) @ Apr 18th 2008 5:05PM

So if it ran shoddy on PC, it will run good on 360? I hope Quake 4 didn't give you this indication....

Zeus.:God @ Apr 18th 2008 5:10PM

Quake 4 ran pretty damn good on the 360. There were sections of lag, but mostly later on in the game after the drop ship segment and crashing in the Strogg base. Ironically, on the PC, it lags in the same places (E6750, 8800GT, 2GB OCZ Reaper HPC, XFX 680i)... I found it quite weird, but then again, its worth it. I've been a huge fan of Quake all of my gaming life. Hell, still play Doom 3 (waiting eagerly for Reca|| to He||, if it will ever come out).

Anyway, Quake Wars runs fine for me. At first I was getting framerate issues (HUGE issues), but it was because of a bad driver install. Easily fixed it by updating/reinstalling them.

GreyFox @ Apr 18th 2008 9:14PM

I should clarify: the game engine is great and runs really good on my PC but I just found the game play to be shoddy. I love Quake but bunny hopping soldiers play like complete crap when the rest of the game is trying so damn hard to be realistic. The reason I'd probably look at for consoles is because they might straighten things out a bit and that gameplay might feel a bit better on there. Honestly I'm going to be busy with GTAIV and TF2 so I doubt I'll give it much more then a demo download.

bigd7387 @ Apr 18th 2008 4:42PM

Why am I holding on to the PS3? I'm waiting for the Jasper board for the 360 to get released and then I'm going back to the Green and White side. Broken games, No games, Delayed games and a Gimped overall product. Wow Sony suckered me out of $500, Why MS didn't you do a better job a quality control before releasing the 360, I mean I owned 4 before moving on, but I'll be back this Fall and put this PS3 Crap behind me.

Phranctoast @ Apr 18th 2008 5:07PM

Did you plan on buying this game?

Zeus.:God @ Apr 18th 2008 5:14PM

Phranc, I would suggest you pick up as well. Its fun as hell, even though it has a dated engine. It lives up completely to the greatness of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

Kizzle @ Apr 18th 2008 4:43PM

Installations.

Really.

Funny how those moronic DMC4 guys were mocking the people complaining about the installations - when anyone with a brain saw the slippery slope for what it was. Now we have 4 GB here, 5 GB there...those hard drives are suddenly looking a bit more cramped as this becomes the norm, huh?

And people said the XBOX was a PC in disguise?

Jeff @ Apr 18th 2008 4:45PM

Porting out of Direct X must suck.

Bslashingu @ Apr 18th 2008 5:00PM

Actually, the game can run in OpenGL, as it has a Linux installer and demo available.

j4s0n @ Apr 18th 2008 5:02PM

Um.. not for the xbox, it musn't.

mko @ Apr 18th 2008 5:42PM

Actually the Doom 3 engine uses OpenGL only. The XBOX 360 people probably had to write/reuse code to translate the OpenGL calls to DirectX.

LZBravo @ Apr 18th 2008 4:46PM

All that power and no one can program properly for it. Pretty sad. You would think that with the Blu Ray drive it wouldn't have to run from a HD install. Sony needs to train/educate their 3rd party developers if they want to survive.

jsn @ Apr 18th 2008 5:00PM

what they needed to do was create a console that was in line with how every developer, games or otherwise, was writing their code. Instead they come out with something that is completely ass backwards and requires you to dump 200 extra man hours into optimizing your code in order to get the same level of performance.

Sir Fidlious Wong (Zeon Defense Force) @ Apr 18th 2008 5:08PM

Well, jsn... worked for PSX and PS2, turns out third time isn't the charm.

Or we could take a look at this as yet another example of someone hiring someone else to port their game. I'm curious, has this EVER worked?

doubleyewdee @ Apr 18th 2008 5:35PM

If it were only 200 hours that wouldn't be a big deal. That's a mere 5 man-weeks! It's probably more on the order of thousands of man-hours to reshuffle architecture and quite possibly rewrite the very core of the game to make "correct" use of the SPUs.

Oh, and then you get the pleasure of rewriting or refactoring most of your test automation to run against the new platform. Yikes.

John @ Apr 18th 2008 4:49PM

Wow, bask in the power of the cell.

Bow down.

Just glad I'm in before godisamyth tries to tell us how this is an advantage.

Emophia @ Apr 18th 2008 4:49PM

I'd written this game off ages ago after playing the PC version.

Benny @ Apr 18th 2008 4:51PM

I kind of cringed reading the article. I can feel the troll horde making it's grizzly march forward already...

deaftly @ Apr 18th 2008 5:07PM

With my 40 gig filling up pretty fast I'm going to have to pass on all games that require insane installs like this. I don't even want to think of how much space MGS4 is going to require.

Phranctoast @ Apr 18th 2008 5:12PM

Picked up a 250GB drive for $120 from new egg.

If you don't like to delete game data, it may be a good time to look into more space.

Do you save music and videos to it, or do you use an external device for that?

Cyro @ Apr 18th 2008 5:15PM

The full 40GB.

Anticrawl @ Apr 18th 2008 5:42PM

That 120 dollars for a 250 gig drive better have been 2.5 inch, otherwise you got screwed. $500gb 3.5 external drives go for $100-120 retail.

Phranctoast @ Apr 19th 2008 6:19AM

yeah, Anticrawl, it was for an internal 2.5" Western Digital.

And if you ever replace the ps3 HDD, be careful not to strip the screws. Its really easy to do. Then you're left picking at it with a needle nose.

arrrgh @ Apr 18th 2008 5:56PM

ps3 gets gyped again. wooo

Steve @ Apr 19th 2008 3:11AM

More like PS3 reaps what it sowed again.

Mooseman721 @ Apr 18th 2008 6:18PM

Shit game anyway, this will disappear quickly.

Kujel @ Apr 18th 2008 6:17PM

Why am I not surprised another low quality BS3 game is coming, not to mention those BS3Fanboys get stuck wasting HDD space.

Syn @ Apr 18th 2008 6:54PM

I agree... 4/250 is eatting all the HDD space.

Kujel @ Apr 18th 2008 8:55PM

Maybe not one game but say you have ten games, that's 40 gigs right there and most BS3's don't ship with a HDD any bigger then 80 gigs, so you'll have to upgrade just to play. Fucking rip off if you ask me.

xFenixKnightx @ Apr 18th 2008 6:47PM

Via IGN Hands on...

"Then there's the graphical portion, while we'll save final judgment for when the game ships (though the version we played was near final) there's no question that there's a discrepancy between the two versions. The Xbox 360 version has a nice coat of anti-aliasing on it with some nice HDR lighting effects. The PS3, at least the version that we played, DID NOT. Both had smooth framerates (less a few drops when massive explosions went off in close proximity) and the same clipping problems with character models sinking into the ground."

This is why I always say buying the 360 version is your best bet. And of course those other reasons too that everybody already knows =) UT3 should be no different either. -The mods =/

horngreen @ Apr 18th 2008 6:50PM

JUST WAIT UNTIL 2009 BITCHES! Ok so the fanboy defense now is that it's a crappy game. Fair enough as I didn't even know it had come out on the PC and God knows the last Quake game on the 360 was a turd. That said does it not concern you that people can't/won't even port a decent version of an "old" PC game to the PS3? Oh and I think the reason the PS3 needs to install is because the Blu Ray is cheap and slow so it can't keep up with gameplay needs. Remember all those VAST worlds Blu Ray would hold? How massive the games on PS3 would be and how the 360 and it's gimped DVD wouldn't hold a candle to them? Hows that working out for you? Would you still drink the urine of a Sony exec? What does it take to get you people to understand that YES tou too have been duped by Sony. Shit we all figured it out last gen.

Syn @ Apr 18th 2008 7:05PM

I do recall the days of Oblivion.

360vsPS3, The PS3 had better draw distance, faster load times, and looked nicer. Oh well, right?

I mean, If I wanted to play Arcade Games, Id get a 360, If I wanted to play Quality Games, Id get a PS3, If I wanted to be bored one week later of waggling, Id get Wii.

But due to the fact I could use the PS3 for more then Gaming, and I didn't want to take a higher chance of defect. Accessing movies,music,pictures via computer, or using the PSP to access my PS3 or Computer using remote play, is a great plus. Not having to worry about lenghty downtimes, all the while you pay for. As for games... Quality over Quanity.

Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.

Kujel @ Apr 18th 2008 8:59PM

Couldn't have said it better myself horngreen. Syn are you sweating just a little bit!

Spiza @ Apr 18th 2008 8:16PM

ETQW is trash, its already selling for $10 at target for the PC.

Nerve is awesome. They made the best multiplayer game ever for RTCW. Maybe they'll improve on Splash Damages work, especially since SD is terrible. Lets see, they made a couple of bad custom maps for RTCW, then made a crappy ET game that had to be released for free that had terrible graphics and chugged a lot of resources, so then iD let them make ETQW. Wake up iD. They should have had Nerve working on RTCW2 instead.

END RANT.

Grimble Crumble @ Apr 18th 2008 10:41PM

Do not, under any circumstances, ever put down W:ET. It is only second to TF2 (and possibly TF:C) in online multiplayer games. ET:QW, which is a decent game, just came out at a bed time, and they made a few mistakes. Crappy game it is not. Bad compared to the other games out there? Yes.