How to Install Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Join a Server

When a human soldier dies in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, the body stays on the ground. A Strogg technician can walk over to it and convert it into a spawn point for his own team.

Your dead teammate is now enemy infrastructure. Somebody has to go and destroy the corpse.

There is no other shooter that does this, and it tells you what kind of game this is: an asymmetric objective shooter where the two sides are not mirrored, do not carry equivalent equipment, and require different habits from the player. Listings collect on the game's hub.

Where it came from

Splash Damage built this after Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, which is one of the most-played free multiplayer shooters ever released and is still running now. Quake Wars is that design — objective chains, engineer-built structures, medics reviving people — moved into the Quake universe and given vehicles and a much larger map.

It runs on id Tech 4, the Doom 3 engine, extended with terrain streaming technology that let it render outdoor maps far bigger than anything the engine had managed before. That was the technical headline at the time. What matters now is that it means the game runs comfortably on anything modern and looks better than its age suggests, provided you let the textures finish loading before you judge them.

The honest state of it

This game did not sell the way its publisher hoped, and its official online infrastructure is not something to plan an evening around. What has kept it playable is community effort — the same pattern as every shooter of its generation.

It is also not a game you can casually add to a library. Availability has moved around over the years, so check before assuming you can buy it tonight.

The reason to persist is that nothing has replaced it. Objective shooters with this structure are rare, and the asymmetric-faction version of it is rarer still.

How a match actually works

Forget capture points. A Quake Wars map is a sequence of objectives, and the attacking team has to complete them in order against a clock.

Build a bridge so the vehicles can cross. Escort the vehicle to the wall. Blow the wall open. Then get inside and steal the thing. Each objective completed extends the timer and moves the spawn points forward, so the map physically shifts as the attack progresses.

Defenders are not trying to win in the same way. They are trying to make the clock run out. A defence that holds the first objective for the entire match has won as decisively as an attack that finishes everything with time to spare.

Several maps strung together make a campaign, and experience earned along the way unlocks upgrades within that campaign. Play the whole thing rather than dropping in for one map if you can — the escalation is the point.

Classes, and why the two sides are not the same

Five roles each side, and the Strogg version of each does the same job by different means.

Soldier and Aggressor are the assault roles. They carry the heavy anti-structure explosive, and on most maps they are the ones who actually complete the objective while everyone else keeps them alive.

Medic and Technician keep people upright. The GDF medic revives and heals in a way any shooter player will recognise. The Strogg technician does the same for his own side and, in addition, is the one who turns enemy corpses into spawn points. That asymmetry alone changes how both teams treat their dead.

Engineer and Constructor build. They repair vehicles and construct the objective structures, and they plant the mines that ruin somebody's afternoon. On a map where the objective is "build the bridge", this class is the match.

Field Ops and Oppressor are the fire-support roles. They call in the artillery and air strikes, and a competent one is the most demoralising thing on the other team.

Covert Ops and Infiltrator do reconnaissance and sabotage. Disguises, hacking, long-range rifles. The Covert Ops kit in particular rewards patience in a way the rest of the game does not.

The practical advice for a first match is simple. Play the engineer or the constructor. The objectives tell you where to go, the class has something useful to do at every stage, and you will learn the map faster by building things on it than by shooting across it.

Deployables, vehicles and the stuff nobody explains

Two systems sit on top of the class structure and both are worth ten minutes of attention.

Deployables are structures you call down from orbit onto a spot you choose — radar coverage, artillery, anti-air cover, whatever each side has of its own. They cost the team a shared resource. They are visible to the enemy, and destroying them is a legitimate way to spend a match. A team with radar up is seeing things the other team does not know it is showing them.

Vehicles run from something small you use to cross open ground quickly through to armour and aircraft, and the Strogg's walking machines. Several are multi-crew, and a vehicle with a driver and a gunner in it is worth more than two vehicles with one person each.

The habit to break is treating vehicles as personal property. On a well-played server they are transport for the objective, and the person who takes the only transport and drives it off alone is the reason attacks fail.

Installing and connecting

Installation is unremarkable — it is an ordinary PC game, and if it is in your Steam library it installs from there like anything else.Our Steam guide covers the bit before this one — making and securing the account.

Joining is where this differs from anything modern. There is no matchmaking. There is a server browser in the multiplayer menu, and there is the console.

The console follows the id Software convention that every game on this engine family shares, which means connect followed by an address:

connect 203.0.113.10:27733

The key that opens the console is set in the game's options, and on games of this engine generation it sometimes needs a modifier key held alongside it rather than a bare press. Check the controls before you need it.

Two things about the address. Take the whole thing, port included, because a host running several servers on one machine cannot give them all the same number. And take it from a source that queries the server rather than one that repeats what an owner typed in — the listings on this site are queried directly, and our notes on what makes a listing trustworthy explain why that is not a technicality.

Settings worth changing before your first match

Two things, and both are the kind of default that has aged badly.

Field of view is set for a monitor shape that was standard when this game shipped and is not standard now. Raise it. A game with vehicles and long sightlines is noticeably worse played through a letterbox.

Brightness is the other. Several maps are dark enough that the default makes infantry hard to pick out against terrain, and everybody who has played this game for any length of time has already turned it up.

While you are in the menus, find the key that opens the console and confirm it does something. Everything about joining a specific server depends on it, and discovering it is unbound while you are staring at a server address is a poor use of an evening.

The bots are not a consolation prize

This matters more for this game than for most, because the population is what it is.

Quake Wars shipped with bots that play the objectives rather than milling about shooting at things. They build, they escort, they defend the right places. A map against bots is a genuine version of the game rather than target practice, and it is the reliable way to learn what each objective actually requires before you turn up on a server with fifteen people who already know.

If you bought this game for the campaign structure and cannot find a populated server, this is not a wasted purchase. Play it against bots, and treat any populated server you find as a bonus.

Getting into a match that has people in it

For a game in this position, turning up at a random hour and hoping is the wrong approach.

Populations this size are not spread evenly across the day. They are concentrated into whatever evenings a small group of regulars has settled on, and that group organises somewhere other than the game — almost always Discord. Somebody keeps a server up, somebody else keeps a chat channel, and the two together produce a full server twice a week instead of two people staring at an empty map every night.

We wrote about how Discord reshaped the way these communities organise, and games in exactly this position are the clearest illustration of the effect. Find the community before you decide what the game is. A browser checked at three in the afternoon tells you nothing at all.

Problems

Textures look like mud for the first few seconds. Terrain streaming, working as designed. It resolves. On modern hardware the wait is brief.

You spawn and immediately die. Check whether the enemy has a spawn host or a forward structure near your spawn. Destroying it is somebody's job and it might as well be yours.

The objective marker makes no sense. The objective is stated in text at the top of the screen and the marker is where to go for it. On the defending side the marker shows what to protect. It reads identically and means the opposite.

Your vehicle explodes without an obvious cause. Mines, or a Field Ops player with your position marked. Neither is visible until it is too late.

Version mismatch on join. Servers of this era refuse clients that do not match, and community patching means several builds exist. Match what the server runs.

The neighbours

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is the direct ancestor and still the healthier game of the two. Free, objective-based, with a server population that has outlasted almost everything released alongside it. If Quake Wars appeals and you cannot find anybody playing it, that is where the same design lives on.

Brink is Splash Damage's later attempt at the same ideas with parkour movement attached, and it is worth a look if the objective structure is what draws you.

Sharing the engine: Quake 4 and Doom 3 both run on id Tech 4 and its console conventions, so everything you learn about connecting here works identically there.

The design itself has never really been bettered. Attacking a chain of objectives against a clock, with classes that each own a piece of the problem, is a better structure for a team shooter than most of what replaced it — which is why a fifteen-year-old game with almost no marketing behind it still gets asked about.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.