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PC.IGN has posted a preview of id SoftwareQuake 3: Team Arena. The preview is based on a visit to the id offices, as they played test games against the developers. It contains quite a few interesting details about the modifications to the Quake 3 engine, such as the new organic landscape rendering engine, which produces visuals on par with Tribes 2. The preview also includes a series of new high-resolution screen shots that certainly show what Team Arena is capable of. Here is an excerpt:

The next game we played was harvester, my favorite new game type, on a Cathedral level with plenty of jump pads leading to the skull drop-off point and a bridge spanning the central "skull" room. To keep balance between the teams, most of the maps in TA are mirror images of each other with a central area for the skull generator and to house the flag in one flag ctf. This is where the Scout power-up came in real handy, the added speed allowing me to easily avoid rockets whizzing by my head, which seemed all that more realistic with the addition of a new Doppler effect. I played clean up on this level, picking up skulls and delivering to the enemy drop-off point as fast as I could...when I could get in. Again, the opposing team had some wicked railgun snipers. Several times they would just wait for me to hit a jump pad, get in mid air, and snipe me right before I passed through the skull drop-off...very frustrating. Since there were only three ways into the enemy base, a couple of snipers could cover base pretty well, so we had to coordinate our runs as a team and divert the enemy snipers. The strategy worked pretty well, and we ended up winning the harvester battle 15 skulls to nine.

Team Arena preview at PC.IGN

IMG Mac Team Arena Demo Status Update

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