Quake III: Arena

Quake III: Arena is a video game that consists of 6 releases

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Quake III Arena is a popular multi-player focused first-person shooter from iD Software released in 1999.

Overview

Unlike the games in the series that came before it, Quake III: Arena is a multiplayer-focused game and therefore has a barebones single player campaign. The objective of Quake III: Arena is to frag/kill enemy players and score points by completing objectives based on the game modes objective. If the player is fragged he instantly respawns with full health and gets straight back into the action but loses any weapons/powerups that were carried. A game ends once the frag or time limit is reached. In the single player portion of the game players battle through 7 tiers of maps, facing various numbers of bots. There are awards for things such as killing enemies with a gauntlet, getting multiple frags in a short amount of time and having a high accuracy. There is also varying degrees of difficulty, including:

I Can Win (easiest)
Bring It On
Hurt Me Plenty
Hardcore
Nightmare! (hardest)

There are a number of gameplay modes aswell, that can be played with bots and humans. They are:

Free for All (FFA) - Deathmatch, person with the highest amount of kills wins
Team Deathmatch (TDM) - Two teams compete for the most kills
Tournament - 1 v 1 deathmatch
Capture the Flag (CTF) - Two teams try to capture eachothers flags while defending their own

Weapons

The Quake III weapon list borrows from both the Doom and Quake franchises.

Gauntlet

The Gauntlet is essentially an electrified hand mounted saw blade. Used as a last resort melee weapon it does about 50 damage per hit, and can usually frag an enemy in 2 or 3 hits depending on health and armor values. Given the fast paced nature of Quake III, the Gauntlet is rarely ever used as people can easy avoid it. Also, surprise melee kills are almost impossible due to the weapon's loud noise when in use.

Machinegun

The Machinegun is the weapon every freshly spawed player starts with. Like any other Machinegun, you pull the trigger and bullets come out at high velocity. At about 7 damage per shot, and a reletively high firing rate, the Machinegun is a serviceable starter weapon, yet it is usually only used until one can pick up a better weapon.

Shotgun

As the name implies, the Shotgun in Quake III preforms like one would expect a shotgun to: fire a cone of lead pellets. While in the real word a shotgun fires hundreds of pellets, the Shotgun in Quake III only fires 10. However, each pellet does 10 damage each, totalling up to a possible 110 points of damage, making the Shotgun very effective at close range.

Grenade Launcher

The Grenade Launcher fires pineapple sized "pineapples", which bounce around for a few seconds until exploding. However, if a grenade comes in contact with a player it immediately explodes, bringing about the term "grenade swallowing". While the former is hard to accomplish, the grenade launcher is primarily used for littering an area full of people with grenades.

Rocket Launcher

The staple of Quake III: Arena is the rocket launcher. Firing explosive rocket projectiles, the real draw of the rocket launcher is it's splash damage. While it's easy to avoid a rocket, it's harder to avoid the explosion the rocket causes. Because of this, most Rocket Launcher wielding players will try to aim at the ground or nearby walls around a target. The rocket launcher is the most effective way in Quake III to leave your enemy in a shower of gibs. Not only used as a weapon, the explosive effect of the Rocket Launcher allows players to launch themselves up into the air. Combined with jumping (known as rocket jumping), this allows players to access places normally not available through regular jumping.

Lightning Gun

The lightining gun is almost like a flamethrower, yet instead of discharging a plume of fire, it shoots out a beam of lightning. Considering the amount of damage caused, and the rate at which the Lightning Gun chews through ammo, most players prefer to stick with the Rocket Launcher instead.

Railgun

Like it's Quake II predecessor, the Railgun fires a depleated uranium slug at extreme velocities, dealing massive damage. The railgun is Quake III version of a sniper rifle; highly accurate, and extremely lethal. With the railgun came the introduction of instagib modes, promoting the player's skill to aim effectively.

Plasmagun

First found in Doom, the plasma gun acts like the Machinegun, spewing out orbs of plasma at a high rate of fire, which do a moderate amout of damage along with a small radius of splash damage. Because of this it has allowed some skilled players to "plasma climb", firing the Plasmagun underneath them against a wall to "climb" up walls.

BFG 10k

While previous versions of the BFG fired slow moving balls of energy, the BFG operates as a souped up version of the Plasmagun. The BFG fires large bolts of plasma at a high rate of fire, causing even the most heavily armored characters to turn to gibs in only 2-3 well placed shots.

Mods

Like previous Quake games, Quake III: Arena has a strong mod community. There are hundreds of modifications, ranging from small tweaks to total conversions. Popular mods are:

DeFRaG - Allows players to engage in trick-jumping
Urban Terror - Creates a tactical-shooting experience
Rocket Arena - All players start with same weapons and upgrades, while removing all others from the map
OSP (Orange Smoothie Productions) - Mainly dedicated to tournament gameplay
CPMA (Challenge Pro Mode Arena) - Makes improvements for competitive play

Online guide

A small guide for the ones who want to play Q3A online, made primarily because of the lack of autopatching from the game itself and the number of custom maps that players usually play aren't there from the begining.

Install Quake III Arena from the original CD.
Download and install Quake III Arena Patch 1.32, the latest official patch.
Download and install CPMA, a modification that makes a significant amount of improvements for competitive play, fixes alot of bugs and has overall better netcode. Standard for most servers.
Download the following maps: OSP map pack, CPMA map pack, ztn3tourney1, hub3aeroq3, pro-nodm9. Extract the files in to the baseq3/ folder, there are several other maps but this is the most basic set.
While Q3A has a built in server browser, MAXBrowse is a far superior application.
Start playing!

Quake Live

Quake Live (formerly known as Quake Zero) was announced at Quakecon in 2007. Quake Live is an updated ad-supported free version of Quake III: Arena which will run from a browser window.

General Information Edit

Game Name	Quake III: Arena
Platform(s)	Mac Xbox 360 Dreamcast PC
Publisher(s)	Sega Activision Valve Corporation
Developer(s)	id Software
Genres	Add a new genre Action First-Person Shooter
Themes	Add a new theme Sci-Fi
Original US Release	Dec. 2, 1999 need a fuzzy date?
Original US Release	know the real date?
Aliases	Q3 Q3A