I stopped by my buddy’s place last night and put my ET: Quake Wars beta key to use on one of his Windows boxes. After downloading the client, I hopped in to a random ET:QW running about 8 on 8.

One word sums it up: Fast. It’s Quake3 / Quake4 fast. I’ve always thought and heard that Q3 was considered faster than UT2k4, and if that’s true, than Battlefield 2 is molasses.

There is only one map for the beta, and it feels a lot like the Assault mode on UT2k4 with timed objectives. I played human (GDF), and we were the attacking force. Once you met your objective, your spawn point became that forward way point, and the Strogg’s objective was to keep us from moving forward.

I played almost all of the classes, and in the 90 minutes I played, it was hard to form an opinion, but due to the speed of the game and the respawn, I was mostly assault, playing all 3 classes with the assault rifle, heavy machine gun and rocket launcher.

I tried Medic out briefly, and due to the speed and chaos, it was pretty easy to rack up some experience bringing back soldiers from the dead.

Speaking of dying and respawn, respawn is fast. Twenty seconds tops, on average about ten seconds before all the dead soldiers are re-deployed as a group at the most recent objective / spawnpoint.

I intuitively understood the layout and the icon structure, but feedback from my friends has been they’ve struggled with that so far. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’ve been reading the fan sites off and on over the past few months and had a clue what to expect, but I was able to navigate the map and the objectives fairly easily.

You get experience based on kills, but more based on choosing an objective out of a few available, and then completing it. I was promoted to Soldier during one run where I had the rocket launcher, and my upgrade was that the lock-on for the rocket launcher went from about 7 seconds to 2. So there is definitely an advantage in going after the objectives than just randomly kililng people.

It remains to be seen if the maps at release are bigger, which reduces the speed and chaos, as it will give you and your fireteam (squad) a chance to get organized and go in together. The game also needs voicechat, you can’t keep up with the text on the screen with the speed of the game.

I’m going to need to play this a few more times – with UT2k7 on the horizon, I’m not sold on ET:QW as much as I was, just based on how fast the game was moving. I want my squad to move together as a team, not just keep rushing like lemmings against the objective.

Truth is, I’ll buy it to support gaming on Linux, but my first impression was cautious optimism. I may play a rounds of ET: Wolfenstein this weekend just to compare how fast the gameplay was in the orignial.

In related news, Michael Larabel of Phoronix notes that ET:QW has been delayed again, this time until Sept. 3rd.