Quake III: Arena

Overview

Unlike previous games in the series, Quake III: Arena is a multiplayer focused game and has a barebones single player campaign. The objective of Quake III: Arena is to frag enemy players and score points by completing objectives based on the game mode's current 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 in his possesion. 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 also a number of gameplay modes 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 - 1v1 Deathmatch with spectators. A tournament structure, allowing for multiple people to compete.
• 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

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 easily avoid it. Also, surprise melee kills are almost impossible due to the weapon's loud noise when in use. However, when a player kills somebody with the Gauntlet, the killing player is awarded a Humiliation point, which comes with its own separate icon. Multiple Humiliation icons stack up depending on the amount of kills, encouraging continued melee kills.

Machinegun

Machinegun

The Machinegun is the weapon every freshly spawned 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 very 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

Shotgun

As the name implies, the Shotgun in Quake III performs like one would expect a shotgun to: it fires a cone of 10 lead pellets. Each pellet does 10 damage, totaling up to a possible 110 points of damage, making the Shotgun very effective at close range. It's got a laser sight - deal with it.

Grenade Launcher

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

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 reach places inaccessible through regular jumping. Certain professional players have developed a skill towards avoiding rocket fire commonly described by the community as being rocket scientists.

Lighting Gun

Lightning Gun

The lightning gun is almost like a flamethrower, yet instead of discharging a plume of fire, it shoots out a beam of lightning. The lightning beam is also instantaneous and does not deteriorate from where the crosshair is aimed, making it more powerful in the hands of a player with good aim.

Railgun

Railgun

Like it's Quake II predecessor, the Railgun fires a depleted uranium slug at extreme velocities, dealing massive damage. The railgun is Quake III version of a sniper rifle; highly accurate, and extremely lethal. The railgun is the most common weapon used in the various instagib mods for Quake III, because of the trail it leaves, making it very effective for tournament commentary and viewership.

Plasmagun

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 amount of damage along with a small radius of splash damage. Because of this it has allowed some skilled players to "plasma climb", firing the Plasma gun underneath them against a wall to "climb" up walls.

BFG 10K

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 countless 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

Ports and Other Versions

Quake III: Revolution

Quake III: Revolution

This is the incarnation of Quake 3 for the PlayStation 2 game console. Revolution plays really close to its PC brethren except for controls and just a few tweaks. One of the greater and most innovative things about this version is the campaign and being able to build up your characters in a RPG-esque manner.

Quake Live

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 runs from a browser window.

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.

1. Install Quake III Arena from the original CD.
2. Download and install Quake III Arena Patch 1.32, the latest official patch.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. While Q3A has a built in server browser, MAXBrowse is a far superior application.
6. Start playing!

All these steps could be accomplished by just downloading this starter pack at inQuake.de.

Dopefish Easter Egg

Dopefish in Quake III

On the map Q3DM11 go to where the shotgun spawns, which is right next to a teleporter. Directly opposite to the teleporter is a wall, walking in to or shooting it will cause a panel to open up which reveals a Quake3ified version of the Dopefish, an enemy from the Commander Keen series of platformer side scrollers.