Id Software's John Carmack made an unexpected announcement in his .plan file (see below) late Tuesday afternoon. Quake III, announced by Carmack last March, has been canceled in favor of a multiplayer-only game to be titled Quake Arena.

　　Id's decision to concentrate on the multiplayer elements of the Quake series is not surprising, considering the multiplayer capabilities of Quake and Quake II have been instrumental in the series' longevity. There will be a single player portion to Quake Arena, but it will reportedly consist of a series of deathmatch levels that will emulate the deathmatch experience through the use of AI-controlled bots.

　　The long list of changes that id has announced over the last few months includes dropping the official Quake II add-on pack and refocusing the company's efforts on Quake III. Originally, Carmack said that the third iteration in the series would be a major graphical revamp, aimed at people with faster, 3D accelerator-powered systems. Running Quake III in software would not even be an option.

　　The next wave of first-person shooters (Half-Life, Sin, et al.) is promising a more compelling single-player experience - making id's decision to move toward a multiplayer-only format that much more intriguing.

　　The link below will take you to the complete text of Carmack's plan file:Carmack's plan file:

　　My last two .plan updates have described efforts that were not in our original plan for quake 3, which was "quake 2 game and network technology with a new graphics engine".

　　We changed our minds.

　　The new product is going to be called "Quake Arena", and will consist exclusively of deathmatch style gaming (including CTF and other derivatives). The single player game will just be a progression through a ranking ladder against bot AIs. We think that can still be made an enjoyable game, but it is definitely a gamble.

　　In the past, we have always been designing two games at once, the single player game and the multi player game, and they often had conflicting goals. For instance, the client-server communications channel discouraged massive quantities of moving entities that would have been interesting in single player, while the maps and weapons designed for single player were not ideal for multiplayer. The largest conflict was just raw development time. Time spent on monsters is time not spent on player movement. Time spent on unit goals is time not spent on game rules.

　　There are many wonderful gaming experiences in single player FPS, but we are choosing to leave them behind to give us a purity of focus that will let us make significant advances in the multiplayer experience.

　　The emphasis will be on making every aspect as robust and high quality as possible, rather than trying to add every conceivable option anyone could want. We will not be trying to take the place of every mod ever produced, but we hope to satisfy a large part of the network gaming audience with the out of box experience.

　　There is a definite effect on graphics technology decisions. Much of the positive feedback in a single player FPS is the presentation of rich visual scenes, which are often at the expense of framerate. A multiplayer level still needs to make a good first impression, but after you have seen it a hundred times, the speed of the game is more important. This means that there are many aggressive graphics technologies that I will not pursue because they are not appropriate to the type of game we are creating.

　　The graphics engine will still be OpenGL only, with significant new features not seen anywhere before, but it will also have fallback modes to render at roughly Quake-2 quality and speed.