Your Favourite Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars Moments

To commemorate Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars’ fourth anniversary, we asked you community to send in your favourite ETQW moments and memories, and we’ve had some great responses in the forums, via Splash Damage Twitter and our Facebook page. It wasn’t easy picking just a few select ones from all the submissions and we hope you enjoy reading these as much as we did. Take it away, community:

Seze: Quarry… last 30 seconds of the round. Strogg had just cleared any defenses we (GDF) had left. I was the last alive player in the ship and saw about 7 Strogg approaching, including the carrier of the last Energy Cell. “Well, that’s it…” I thought. “We need a miracle to hold that last push”, when suddenly a Dark Matter Cannon hits the entrance of the ship. Seven team kills for the poor Oppressor and GDF won the round.

tokamak: QW got me into so many different bizarre situations that there’s no way I can include them all. So many last second saves, heroic last stands, pure chaos, or brilliant team-work. Escorting a data transfer while in disguise to finish him off the last second, or jumping in a group of enemies only to cause enough havoc for the charge to explode, perfect/lucky artillery and air strikes, simply being so well positioned that you can hold off entire waves or most satisfying of all, well-timed forward spawn captures causing huge delays in your opponent’s attack.

Snotling: Almost every game has great moments on ETQW but my favourite times are definitely clan wars. Being able to fight with some of your mates, getting your ass kicked by great players and feeling that you and your team are improving in a game providing so much fun is just the best.

Holding Quarry as GDF 10 minutes with just one cell remaining is part of the most epic moments I’ve experienced too!

Kimerex: After sneaking through the Strogg and capturing the data-brain in the Outskirts map, a friend of mine (in the room across from mine) began yelling for help since he was now being chased by every defender in the building. I told him to get to the platform and jump while spamming his “get in” button. From his point of view, he made it to the platform and didn’t see anything, but still, it was either jump or die at that point. Right as he leaped off the roof spamming his enter vehicle button, I went ripping by in an Anansi and managed to get him safely in the gunner seat in mid-air. We managed to get to the broadcasting center and begin the upload before any of the Strogg were able to react.

Elendiger via Twitter: Favorite ETQW moment: 10 friends, a LAN and only one copy of ETQW… one week later: 10 friends, a LAN and 10 copies of ETQW!

Humate: I had a clear view of the GDF base so I could see that GDF were spawning. I knew someone would rush for the anansi, and try to fly away as quickly as possible. So I got as high as possible with the Icarus, to avoid being seen by the flyer, and dumb-fired rocket on it for the kill.

spng: My greatest moment was playing the Clanbase Nations Cup with Team Italy. I knew some people that still now I go to meet every year. One of my bestest moments on my online gaming experience.

Apocalypse_Pony: My most memorable moment happened in one of the first games I played after ET:QW’s retail release. I was playing as a GDF engineer on Area 22. I had just heard that those evil Strogg had planted explosives on the jamming generator.

I ran towards the icon indicating where the explosives were and started to disarm. Behind me I could hear guns and lasers and explosions everywhere. I took some damage and figured I would just keep disarming until I died. Then suddenly, my life bar began to fill up. I finished the disarm, with a little sigh of relief and turned around anticipating dying in a blaze of laser fire.

What I saw was a medic healing me with med packs and three other teammates in a semi-circle around me gunning down any Strogg that dared come near me. At the time, the game did not have built-in VoIP yet. This coming together happened amongst strangers on a public server, without a word being spoken. This being the first game I had played from this company called Splash Damage, I had never seen anything like it.

That’s when I knew SD had made something special and I had found the game I had been looking for since I first learned you can play video games with people over wires. Coincidentally, it’s also when I became a huge fan of SD.

laban: Two ‘noobs’ getting crushed by a AVT 😀

U.K. Visuals: My greatest moment when i was invited by Splash Damage to the community event back in 2007. It was great to play ETQW the first time on a LAN with a lot of other ETQW fans and the devs. Thanks again to Splash Damage and Activision for this great day.

BMXer: Best moments in ETQW for me were at Quakecon 2008. Meeting online friends and playing together in real life was super fun. Winning 4th place and taking home $1000 bucks wasn’t bad either!

Sam Lydic via Facebook: The day that i picked it up off the shelf in the store back in Nov. 07′. First PC game i ever bought. Best PC game i ever bought. In fact it was so good that i actually built my first PC (with a lot of help from a buddy) just so i could enjoy it even more. Unfortunately it’s been broke since spring but with winter coming up I’m trying to fix it and get back into it. 3500+ hours in the 3.5 years i played it. Time well spent IMO.

light_sh4v0r: Watching Greased Schotsman’s VoD’s, and playing the game in general. Not much of an author, but the game has so many awesome moments I can’t just summarise. Although winning a round against mamut.si was rather enjoyable.

*goo: I guess my biggest memory would be the 1.5 beta where we spearheaded players testing (even got my name into the release notes as a thank you!) by setting up 32 player matches. Quite a few of the Splash Damage guys turned up to play/test which also meant lots of players wanted in.

On the individual level, clutching victory from the jaws of defeat are my fondest memories. Backstabbing the transmission on Island and Outskirts are great examples of where we were pretty much done for but one cheeky play turned the game from an almost certain loss into a win.

Susefreak: One of the most intense battles happened on Outskirts for me. We as Strogg were overrun at the first objectives and had to defend the last objective with 13 minutes still on the countdown. We managed to pull through and held the map thanks to excellent Hyperblaster and Dark Matter Cannon work.

Cory MacLean via Facebook: I would say that out of many moments that I’ve had, I would say killing an entire enemy team with a single Hammer/Artillery strike was my most pleasurable memory.

Scrupus: I can’t really point to any specific moments, it’s been so many of them and they have been great in very different ways. To mention some of them:

• The really well-balanced matches you sometimes experience on pubs, with plenty of players and both teams working really hard, and offense have to fight to the death for every inch of progress – but still progress to the final objective for a last-moment dramatic finale.
• The funny moments on the custom maps, like hoggin around on the hoggin map, shotguns&walking only mode, jumping around on the sky map, or crazy end transmit chaos on Andes – etc etc etc. Including cheat mode when everyone spawns vehicles and stuff, until the server eventually dies trying to handle all the extra objects
• The moments of satisfaction within the SDK, when you after a rebuild finally see something new working as expected, after endless hours of digging through script code, declarations and documentation.

If I should pick one favorite all-time-high type of moment, I would go for the really close plant/defuse situations where everyone fights to the death inside the end objective area, both teams desperately following the orange defuse bar on the final HE objectives while spamming grenades and rockets and everything everywhere, trying to kill – or protect – the defusing engineers. Especially if it was a multi plant where a new white bar pops up just when the orange defuse bar was completed – mostly to the defenders’ horror. Those moments are priceless!

There they are, your favourite Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars memories. Thanks to everyone who took the time to send in theirs – it’s been great fun going through them all. A special shout-out goes to tokamak for providing the image-based hilarity for this piece – check out his awesome ETQW gallery for many more. Finally, we’ll leave you with this epic ETQW frag movie sent in by beasto2 via Twitter.