Developer: id Software
Publisher: Activision
Quake III Team Arena is just what Quake III needs. But for all the good stuff in this box -- and there is a fair amount of good stuff -- the fact remains that this expansion pack from id runs counter to the standards id software set for first person shooters. Id founder John Carmack's greatest legacy isn't his excellent coding so much as his philosophy about how that code should be used. He introduced the concept of open architecture that lets the fans get inside the game code to tinker, modify and create. Carmack's Doom was the Gutenberg Press of gaming.
So when an expansion pack for Quake III rolls around with a $30 price tag, you'd hope to find in the box the sort of game-bending work that goes beyond mere mods. Rogue Studios' expansion packs for Quake II, Dissolution of Eternity and Ground Zero, are good examples. They bent and remolded the engine at a basic level beyond the capabilities of most mod makers. But Team Arena has very little of this. Most of what you're paying $30 for is the sort of stuff you can already download for free: new levels, new weapons, new game modes, and a new interface. In a genre where open architecture isn't the standard, this would be great. But for a first person shooter like Quake III, it smacks of a company trying to wring money from the built-in fan base of a game that sold a few hundred thousand copies, many of them to people who don't know the first thing about how to download and install the Jailbreak, Weapons Factory, or Rocket Arena mods.
Setting aside the unwarranted and steep price tag, there is some really good stuff here. The most significant addition is the set of outdoor levels that breaks Quake III out of its corridor sensibility. Wide open areas with natural rolling terrain are nothing new to fans of TRIBES, Delta Force, and Unreal Tournament, but they're a welcome addition to Quake III. It's surprising how cloying the tight rooms and twisting hallways feel after you've played the new maps like Distant Screams and Overdose.
The new game modes are basically variations on capture the flag, but they do a great job of focusing Quake III's deathmatch action around strategic points. The One Flag CTF mode, in which two teams fight for control of a neutral flag and then have to bring it into the enemy's base, has a nice ebb and flow. Each team spreads out and covers the whole map, but once the flag is captured and you know the enemy is going to drive for your base, it becomes like an assault game; your team falls back and goes defensive, also keeping in mind the middle ground where the flag will respawn if the other team scores. Harvester, in which you have to kill enemy team members to generate skulls for points, is a great combo of deathmatch action and capture the flag strategy. Overload is a mode in which you have to get into an enemy's base and hold it for a while rather than just dashing through a capture point.
