CPL to co-develop a FPS multiplayer game

"Long-time Ritual vice president and co-owner Tom "ParadoX" Mustaine last night announced that he had departed Ritual and is now heading up a new project for the Cyberathlete Professional League titled Severity. Severity will be built from the ground up to support competitive multiplayer gaming and tournaments and such, while being based on id Software technology."

"In fact, CPL might be hiring pro-gamers to advise directly in conjunction with the games development. As described in the press release, there will be two parts to the game. The 1v1 game type and the 5v5. The reason I would describe them as parts is because they will have almost completely different physics and game play attributes.

Although it wasn't directly implied, I can gather that the 1v1 mode will be based mostly on the Quake franchise, while 5v5 on Counter-Strike. The engine will be based on the Quake3 server-client model, using Quake3 'netcode', and some sort of, 'id Software' rendering technology. They haven't announced which, but possibly completely new. We also know that CPL has already licensed the Quake 3 engine."

This is interesting, very interesting. A game solely built with the pro-gamer in mind. I wonder what kind of art direction the game will have, being based on the pro-gamers tendancy to use fullbright models and scale down his graphics to square textures for better fps (frames per second) and to be able to spot enemies easier.

For some reason I can only think of the cel-shaded game Warsow, which is also a eSport oriented FPS. It also features some excellent trick-jumping moves.

Another thing that immediately comes to my mind, is the level design. That might just be the hardest thing to get right. It's not unusal for FPS games to be shipped with only one or two decent multiplayer levels. The Dark Zone, The Edge, The Camping Grounds, De_Dust2.

Would also be sweet to have a offline single player mode, like the Defrag trick-jumping. But even if this can become totally awsome, there's soo many chances for it to go wrong aswell. Let's hope it turns out well.

Esreality - Severity
ParadoX Runs Off Into Woods, Makes Game for CPL
CPL To Unveil New Multiplayer Game (pdf)