ET: Quake Wars Enters Beta, But Slips Out Of 2006

In the first Enemy Territory: Quake Wars dev-diary that debuted on GameSpy a couple of days ago, Paul 'Locki' Wedgwood (Lead Game Designer at Splash Damage) not only reveals a thing or two about multiplayer balancing, but he also claims that - despite the game's development now entering the beta phase - Quake Wars will not be released in 2006. Before this, the previous speculated launch frame was September 2006, so it seems they just added a healthy quarter (and then some) to ensure that the game will meet our fussy expectations.

"Following E3, Splash Damage and id spent weeks reviewing the status of Enemy Territory. 2006 has been a great year for us, with incredible response from the press and the community. It's also been a challenging year, as the team here has given extraordinary effort towards completing the game this year. Unfortunately, sometimes effort isn't all you need -- sometimes you just need more time. To ensure the quality we want, we've decided to push the release out of 2006 to allow for extended testing, feedback and game balancing."

The kind of balancing they're referring to is "Asymmetrical Gameplay Balance". Unlike its predecessor (Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory), ET: Quake Wars will pit against each other two teams that are fundamentally different, making it a lot harder for the devs to predict every possible strategy the players might come up with.

"However, ETQW features asymmetrical gameplay with fundamentally different teams, each featuring unique character classes that make use of different items, tools, abilities, weapons, vehicles and deployables, battling in maps with different military objectives for the invading alien Strogg and human Global Defense Force, in turn resulting in player rewards for team play that unlock yet more abilities and items. This asymmetry is unique in ETQW's multiplayer combat and really adds depth to the team play, but also adds substantial complexity in tuning and balancing the gameplay."

You can read through GameSpy's dev-diary to find out how Splash Damage is trying to balance the game's multiplayer, and why such an apparently traditional process is taking so.god.damn.long. We'll see in 2007 if it was worth it.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)