I like both ET and ET:QW, each offers something different yet share similarities, team/class based objective gameplay. People liked ET for different reasons and their idea of what ET meant to them personally will differ from someone else, you only have to see all the mods that emerged that took the game in different directions to see that, ET Pro isn’t the only version of ET… No reason to bash each other for holding a different opinion as to what qualifies as an ET style game.
The big problem with ET:QW for me was that half the maps weren’t that fun to play (pretty much any MCP map) so half the time spent in public was just a total spam fest due to those maps, the other half played well and offered so much tactical depth, if you can accept vehicles, turrets and aliens that is.
I personally had no problem with vehicles, they were necessary to traverse the maps and to speed up gameplay and also to hold and contest the larger choke points. They offered players another role to play besides straight up shooting and that’s what ET:QW did so well, it offered players a chance to contribute to the match by a number of means, sadly though this kind of fell apart on public servers due to the ranked servers and stats and reward progression system that rewarded players with shiny useless medals for repairing x amount of vehicles or hacking x amount of turrets so you had people grinding instead of playing…
The turrets were a bit of a problem though but depending on the map you could deal with them and they were more of a nuisance than anything else, also they serve as a distraction for vehicles so they focus on taking down the turrets rather than the infantry. However they were just too many of them in general, I would have implemented them differently personally and limited their use. I restricted the amount of spots you could use them in my own maps that allowed them, I left them out all together on most of them. Also Radar was such a fail.
The Strogg were such a non issue for me, the whole idea of ET:QW was having two different teams which played differently, stroyent up and down, spawn hosts, hogs and such symbolised what the strogg are meant to be, aggressive and ruthless and that’s generally how you end up playing like when on the Strogg team, you could be a bit more self reliant. I never felt they were over powered, the GDF were more than capable of holding their own but required you to be a bit more cautious and stick together more. If you look at the vehicles for each team you’ll notice every Strogg vehicle only holds one player and besides the Cyclops have pretty weak amour, they encourage you to make direct individual aggressive attacks on the enemy, the GDF vehicles however hold multiple players and can handle more damage, they’re more about getting to the objective in one piece together. I can kind of like that asymmetry, it would have been nice to see more differences between the two teams but guess it would have made it more difficult to balance.
Anyway, as I said I liked ET:QW, it was flawed but so was ET…
