Exclusive Interview With Paul Wedgwood

[Sir. Side]

A new Interview with Paul Wedgwood has been posted over at quake-wars.eu - Home.

Great that you took the time for this interview knowing you are a very busy man. The fans are screaming for info about Quake Wars so I hope you can shed light on some questions I got from the community.

No problem Jan! Thanks for asking lots of questions I haven't seen before.



Q1 - Knowing the closed Beta is almost there you should have figured out the balancing by now. How did you balance the different classes and weapons in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (ETQW)? What were the used parameters?

In Wolfenstein ET the teams were basically re-skinned versions of each other, so we could use damage-over-time formulas (rounds fired per minute x damage per round = potential damage per minute) to rapidly determine if differing weapons were approximate equals. This approach just doesn't work with ETQW's team asymmetry; even if you just consider the simple hand-held weapons, there are still unequivocal differences between the GDF reloading weapons and the way the Strogg weapons simply overheat.

Balancing ETQW's new tools, items, vehicles and deployables is even more complex. The Strogg Flyer Drone is similar to, but doesn't equate to, the GDF Third-Eye Camera. The Strogg Technician's Create Spawn Host ability has no GDF equivalent. Even vehicle propulsion is different between the teams.

There's no way to just calculate the balancing arithmetically. Our method involves constant debate amongst the team, analysis of the feedback from the closed-Beta, focus groups, and Activision's QA team, making iterative adjustments, and then more play-testing - thousands and thousands of hours of it.

Thanks to our forum member Eden for posting this on our forums.
You can read the entire interview here.