An Open Letter…
Today is a bit of a different update, and is more of an open apology to the group who is working on the community mod, Reaction Quake 3. A bit of background before I get to the heart of the matter. Reaction Quake 3 is a “port” of Action Quake 2 to the Quake III engine. The mod is community based around the desire to “breath new life into Action” and maintain those features which made Action Quake 2 so great!
Back in January I composed a rant titled, “The Porting of Levels” which centered mainly around level designers in the Urban Terror Community desiring to recreate famous Action Quake 2 maps for the mod. While we ask for the cooperation from the community, most respect our request and have not introduced these levels to Urban Terror. Not even Gerbil’s Urban! I did make numerous statements which shed a negative light on the Reaction Quake 3 project by asking the question, “Are mod developers no longer being creative? Can they not decide on what type of levels to create, that they must take a step backwards?” This same sort of question was asked of Urban Terror after the release of Beta 1 by Oddjob himself, who’s opinion I respected as I defended our project as it resembled Action Quake 2.
A few days ago, a link to that rant found its way into the Reaction Quake 3 Forums [Click here to read thread] and their community took offense [rightly so] to some of the comments I made. I can accept that, as everyone is entitled to their opinion. Unfortunately when that rant was written, the mod was still fairly new and not much information [on the web site] was available. The only real information was obtained via the RQ3 Forums and ICQ.
I had no intention of creating bad blood between the mods, but some has surfaced based on the comments I made. The porting of levels and bringing to life a “re-Action” is what this community is about. They are out to port Action Quake 2 over to Quake III. While they intend on porting many of the popular levels, like Sludge, Kumanru, TeamJungle and the aforementioned, Tequila. There will be also be new levels created for Reaction Quake 3.
While I will stand behind the comments I initially made, I have been brought up to speed on the scope of their project, thanks to many “colorful” e-mails, ICQ messages and the RQ3 Forums. Hopefully they will accept this as a form of apology, as I was not attempting to discredit their work or mod. At the time I was a bit misinformed in some of the statements I made. Good luck to RQ3, as I know there will be many AQ2 faithful who will stand behind your product.
