Interviews// Enemy Territory: Quake Wars - Paul Wedgwood Part 3

SPOnG: So, post-release, at some point (hopefully) later this year, how do you plan to add to the game in future?

Paul Wedgwood: You mean like additional downloadable content and stuff?


SPOnG: Yeah, how will that work?

Paul Wedgwood: Well right now at Splash Damage, we’re focused exclusively on completing the PC game and supporting the efforts of the engineers on the 360 and PS3 versions. Actually, they are helping us back, the guys working on the 360 version are actually doing a couple of maps for us… so there’s a really good level of collaboration going on there.

After we finished the PC SKU… err, why do we use that word by the way, ‘SKU’, what does it even mean?


SPOnG: Stock Keeping Unit, I think.

Paul Wedgwood: Does it? Well I’m never saying that again! [laughs] Well, anyways, after we’ve finished the PC version, the company is going to polish the documentation that they’ve been maintaining for the last couple of years. Being ex mod-makers we’ve been documenting everything like crazy, but we just need to make sure it’s all up-to-date and correct. And we’ll be then releasing the SDK – so that’s the source code, the level design tools, the documentation and all of the artistic media to allow the community to get started on mods and making levels and maps and stuff. I would think that by then, id Software would have formalised their plans for ongoing support.

What I can tell you is that they are really committed to making sure that ETQW continues to get support as a multiplayer combat game. That ‘stuff’ comes out for it. But it hasn’t been formalised as of yet. There’s not ‘definitive’ list of what that ‘stuff’ is going to be.


SPOnG: It’s great that these types of game are now available on PS3 and 360, targeting fairly casual console gamers as well as the hardcore. But is there not a danger that there’s quite a lot of competition – with games like Shadowrun, Team Fortress 2 and Unreal Tournament 3 also coming out this year - is it not in danger of becoming quite a crowded market?

Paul Wedgwood: Well, Team Fortress 2 is a mod. I played Team Fortress for two or three years originally, non-stop. But while TF2 looks like a really fun game, it is just not designed as the kind of game you are going to go out and buy. You’ll get it free with Half Life 2 Episode 2.

Unreal Tournament is a completely different game, in play and feel and everything – it’s much more arena-like, you know, like a kind of sports event. I think there are fair comparisons between ETQW and games like Battlefield, and stuff.

When Wolfenstein Enemy Territory came out, we were ahead of most people in that we had things like command maps and character advancement. But then of course, character advancement has been in RPGs for years. So, it’s kind of pointless having that back and forth about ‘who did what first’ and stuff.

But I don’t really think that, firstly, to assume that because something is multiplayer that makes it part of ‘the multiplayer genre’…it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. If you look at World of Warcraft it has eight and a half million subscribers. Yet, Counterstrike, at its highest level, has a hundred thousand people playing online.

So, the potential for a really good game that’s accessible is far greater than a pure hardcore, multiplayer game as they’ve been done in the past. Because, while everyone was saying there are fifty thousand people playing Wolfenstein Enemy Territory and hundred thousand people playing Counterstrike… you know, there were probably thirty-two MILLION people playing Solitaire on Windows! It just depends on how easy it is to open the game and to play it, right?

So, in answer to your question, I don’t think the market is anywhere near as crowded as some people might think. If you look at the sales figures for past games such as Battlefield and so on, they’ve sold in excess of a million copies. But they didn’t have eight and a half million subscribers a month.

Warcraft has pretty much shown that there are a lot of people with decent PCs and videocards and internet connections that the publishers, press and journalists seemingly didn’t think were out there!