The team at planetquakewars had an interview with Kevin Cloud, id Software co-owner & ETQW Exec. Producer.

PlanetQuakeWars.net: Are the ammo-packs from the field ops the only way to get ammunition? Or can you collect Weapons/ammunition from your dead colleagues?

Kevin Cloud: Your main source of ammunition is the other classes – GDF Field Ops and Strogg technicians. We considered and tested different options but the decision we made was to focus the support elements into the hands of your teammates rather than disperse it into the battlefield. In our current play-tests, the Medic is also able to call for a supply crate drop in the field that dispenses ammunition and health, but we’re still evaluating the balance implications of this.

PlanetQuakeWars.net: There are some rumors about the maximal number of players in the game! Some peoples are talking about up to 400 players on one server! This sounds a bit unrealistic to some of us! What will be the maximum number of players on a normal internet game? Is there a difference to LAN games relating to the number of players?

Kevin Cloud: The game is balanced and designed for 24 players. Sometime after release people will probably make 64 player maps and run bigger games, but a 400 player game is not in the foreseeable future – primarily due to the server bandwidth requirements in tracking all those players with the precision required in a fast-action shooter.

The guys at cgonline.com held an interview with Paul Wegdewood, which contains some surprising answers:

Question: How many players can join a battle?
There’s no restriction on the maximum that a server administrator can set, beyond the physical hardware specification of the server itself. As with Wolf ET, we expect that people will run very large servers just for the lemming-like fun of it, but the sweet spot for coordinated teamplay is currently between 16 and 24 players.

Question: What will be the benefits for players with higher rank?
For the persistent military ranking, and unlike other multiplayer combat games, you will not gain significant promotions without playing a combat role effectively with your team. The game doesn’t reward playing XX hours, or endlessly ‘griefing’ the enemy: a higher military rank is a valid reflection of team-playing ability. A high military rank in ETQW is something a player can be really proud of, rather than a reward for bloody-minded persistence.

Question: Will the game have a ranking system in place?
Wolf ET originated the use of rewards and military ranking in multiplayer combat-shooters, and so it was very important to us that the ranking system in ETQW continued to reward players effectively for good teamplay, without unbalancing the gameplay itself. On that basis, Kevin Cloud and I decided early on that while player status should be reflected persistently, player rewards should and could affect gameplay but would be re-set at the start of each new campaign. That way you get the advantages of kudos ranking without unbalancing the game or penalizing players who’ve joined more recently.

The full story can be read here: http://www.cgonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1054&Itemid=1

Magazine Games for Windows devoted three pages to ET: QW in their latest issue.

Hidden on page two, the magazine says: "Release date: Summer". The reviewer also writes the game still needs a little finetuning, but hey, it isn't even beta yet!

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Game Informer met with id Software’s John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead to talk about ET: QW and alot of different gaming subjects.

GI: Are you planning on adopting DX10 for Quake Wars?
Carmack: Not for Quake Wars, for sure. It has come up as a question for our internal development projects, and we weren’t even expecting to ask that question. There’s no massive pull for me for DX10. It would be more a question of if we don’t think we’re going to get done until Vista is broadly adopted, it might just save us development and support things to say it’s a DX10 game--but there’s no huge thing where we’re dying to use any particular DX10 feature. It would just more be a question about practically, is the market there where we can write off everything else? Quake Wars is definitely not DX10.

Splash Damage Senior Game Designer Edward 'Bongoboy' Stern talks about creating a backstory for the Quake universe in an interview with GameSpy.

 The QuakeStory isn't just a page of blurb to help fill out the game manual. It inspired cool immersive stuff like unique map plots and compelling objectives (more later) and best of all it gives us two very different teams, and thus the asymmetricked-out gameplay we craved: team-unique player classes, abilities, items, weapons, vehicles and deployables. In this diary I'd like to give a bit more detail about how we wrangled the QuakeStory, and what it'll do for you in the game.

To complicate things further, instead of Wolf:ET's maps where the Axis always defended and the Allies always attacked, we wanted a balance of maps where the Strogg are attacking. This was really tough. Why don't the Strogg destroy everything from orbit? What could they be after and where would the GDF keep it that they couldn't just nuke it? Again, the QuakeStory constraints pushed us to come up with more distinctive map ideas. We knew the Strogg had antigravity, which meant they can drop things in from orbit without needing them to be lightweight or streamlined. If the Strogg are in the habit of dropping things in from orbit, what could the GDF do to stop it, and what could the Strogg do to stop that? Where did the Strogg get the idea for their EMP defences in Quake II? The old GDF EMP Jamming Tower, which would need a Generator. And the Strogg need a destruction objective? Hmm...

Full article.