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A new interview with Splash Damage's Paul Wedgewood is now available on the Eurogamer website. The Q&A features more information about the upcoming Enemy Territory: Quake Wars including a discussion of frame rates, and a glimpse of some of the new maps offered in the game.

Eurogamer : Could you give an overview of the new maps you're presenting?

Paul Wedgewood : Sure. In Quake 2 the retaliation against Stroggos is led because the humans have learnt how to use slipgate technology and the first map, Area 22, is really the telling of that battle. It's an arid-themed map. It has the Strogg attacking, initially to take the power out of a big EMP that the GDF have erected. When they take it down, the Strogg are able to deploy a mining laser from orbit. This blows the doors off a bunker and gets them into the final objective room which, just like every other map, is entirely unique. You've got the big slipgate with all of the lab equipment around it. You'd never confuse it with any other. Each map really works as a mnemonic.

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.

Eurogamer: Splash Damage Q&A

Aspyr Media (add to watch list)

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (don't use) (add to watch list)

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