Tucked in between a supermarket lies Splash Damage, the up and coming developer behind the brilliant id Battlefield-beater Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.
And tucked in between the kitchen and rigged-up testing room lies lead designer and founder Paul Wedgwood, whom we sat down with to find out more about the upcoming Stroggified shooter.
The obvious question is why has it taken so long to get Quake Wars out the door?
Wedgwood: The first thing to bare in mind is that it is a brand new title so it's not based on another game and it doesn't share assets from Quake 4. Although it does have some of the Doom 3 backend rendering stuff, the entire engine is completely new.
We had a year of research and development where we decided what was going to be the technical direction for the game. We knew that we wanted to build a pure multiplayer combat game from scratch. Ordinarily when you make a multiplayer combat game there are some compromises made because you take a single-player game, start cutting back on the physics, graphics and everything else to make it work across a network.
With Enemy Territory: Quake Wars the goal from the very beginning was to build everything so that it would work across a network. So knowing that everything was going to be networked meant that we can have so much more stuff going on; we can have crazy physics, lots of advanced projectiles, just a hell of a lot more happening.
If we built every map so that it was desert and the physics system wasn't too advanced and all you had to do was capture flags then probably it would be a two year game. But with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars every asset in the game has been built from scratch and that includes the terrain rendering, the megatextures, the networking and so on - so that's really a huge challenge.
When Splash Damage finished Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory we only had between six and ten staff - we were a very small company having been a mod team originally. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was our first commercial game project and so we weren't like a 40 man company that was ready to build a AAA title straight away, it took some time to get that together.
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