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Quake III: Team Arena Map Pak 1b

Working together with id, some of the most talented...

Quake III: Team Arena Map Pak 1b

Working together with id, some of the most talented mapmakers in the Quake community have created four team-style maps that have been polished and balanced for the Team Arena game modes. This version 1b fixes a clipping error in An Iteration of Hell (hal9000_ta.bsp).

Players who download user-community made Capture the Flag maps for Quake III Arena will recognize that these are not exactly brand new creations. They already have a bit of history behind them. They were selected for this pack because they had already made their marks as superior virtual playgrounds. Yet a closer look will reveal they are also not the same as the maps originally released for Quake III Arena. More than just adding a few new textures and game entities, these maps have been upgraded, polished, and in some cases radically overhauled. The new versions not only accommodate the new Quake III: Team Arena game styles like Harvester and Overload, but also include the play and appearance improvements that the map makers themselves wanted to see in their maps.

Japanese Castles TA by Mike "g1zm0" Burbidge (japanc_ta.bsp)

Features the two Japanese fortresses from g1zm0's original Japanese Castles CTF map, along with caves, bridges and roaring waterfalls. This is a fast, exciting map with a lot of intersecting action.

Schadenfreude TA by Jason "Cornelius" Gill (schad_ta.bsp)

When we contacted him, Cornelius was already in the process of upgrading the appearance and play of the original Schadenfreude, one of the first community made CTF maps for Quake III Arena. We made a few suggestions for improvements as to how the game might be made to best play Team Arena game types and he turned them into a shiny gemstone of a map.

Crossed Paths v.TA by Dan "Drunken Boxer" Lanicek (dbox2_ta.bsp)

Drunken Boxer had already made some changes to his original version of Crossed Paths, making it even more competitive. We helped him set it up for Team Arena play and pointed out a few things he could do to smooth out some of the rough spots.

An Iteration of TA Hell by John "HAL9000" Schuch (hal9000_ta.bsp)

The Team Arena remake of this map is our token "really, really, quite very large" map in this pack. We helped HAL9000 find and fix a few sticky spots in the map, and showed him ways to improve the in-game performance, but structurally, this map is probably the closest to the original.

Project History

Well before Quake III: Team Arena was complete, we tossed around the idea of putting out some additional maps for it. Free maps. Our internal resources were still heavily committed to finishing the expansion pack and anxious to be getting onto Doom production. So, we looked to the creative talent of the Quake community. Although the team style maps were not as numerous as free for all and tournament style, we had quite a number to choose from. Using sites like ..::LvL and ZAxis and Spankenstein's Reliquary as referral sources, it didn't take long to find, play, and winnow our way through the most popular team play maps out there. In this regard, a debt of thanks is owed specifically to Tigger-oN and his brief reviews on his website, ..::LvL (http://www.planetquake.com/lvl/) and the Quake III Arena fans who downloaded the maps and rated them for play quality. That sort of ranking made our lives just that much easier. Maps that looked good, that were balanced, that embodied a design philosophy in keeping with Quake III Arena (as opposed to earlier id CTF style games), that had a layout adaptable to the Q3: TA game types, and that were enjoyable play experiences against bots made the first cut. Before Team Arena was even on the shelves we had a selection of maps that would suit our needs.

The selected maps were winnowed down through "live" play test to a double handful. We approached the designers of those maps and invited them to participate in the project. The response was unanimous.

At this point some folks outside of id got involved on the production side. Astro Creep, a map maker and moderator of a number of forums at Quake3World (http://www.quake3world.com), including the Level Editing forum and the Team Arena forum worked with me to evaluate and critique each of the maps, suggesting changes to layout, architecture, entity placement, and texture decoration. Drunken Boxer, another mapmaker who moderates the CTF and Team Arena forums at Quake3World provided additional input and counsel. The last step was to run each map past MrElusive, to fine tune the maps for bot play.

And yes, there is a Team Arena Map Pack 2 in the works. As with this map pack, announcement of its contents will come at the time of release. Please note that we are not and will not be asking for additional map submissions.

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