Playing
QuakeWorld was an
experience. When it first came out,
online gaming over the
net was still sort of a new thing, and it felt like it needed
something to make it grow up.
Quakeworld was that thing.
Ads did a great job of describing it above, but there needs to be a little more
explaination.
Back in the day, I played
Quake; a lot of quake. I was on a really good
college LAN for the time, and that meant that my
clan was all good to play as a
low-ping team. A couple of teams we had to play were on modems, or a couple of times I played while I was at home.
QuakeWorld was
evil, and
prediction was the name of the
beast.
You see, you'd get a great
framerate if you were the only one in the
room. Predicition would
suceed, and you could
roam around freely, without a care in the
world. It was
wonderful. But when it came down to actually trading
rockets, the experienced
QuakeWorld fiend would get the experienced
LAN Quaker every time;
prediction would fail, and your
aim would be off. QuakeWorld, you see, needed a new
mentality: don't fire where they are, fire where prediction says they will be. People who got more used to the prediction
algorithms, and how they felt
in-game got really good at
exploiting them; not only to run
faster, but to nail players while in that first burst of
lag when another
player is around.
It definitely took some getting used to. Luckily I was slightly immune on my
LAN, and the teams we
played were basically other college kids, so we didn't have to worry about it.
QuakeWorld was the
56K modem user's dream, but the LAN player's
nightmare.