After playing QuakeLive I was going to slit my wrists. All the negativity surrounding the game used to irritate me but when I got a beta key and played for a while I realised the negativity is justified. Quake needs to be allowed to die peacefully instead of repeatedly diluted and rehashed Star Trek style.

I was looking for something to replace it and while I didn’t have much hope for seVerity I took a look at the forums. While browsing the forum I saw a couple of videos linked that don’t give that much information but sound quite positive:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8OmnIjIUsQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GafRW-_p-w8

People may have seen those videos before but the only video I'd seen was Romero's original announcement. The key points in the videos I picked up on were:

-Attempting to combine Quake and CS into a single game so there’s a single platform for competitive gaming and a single community
-PS3 and Xbox 360 versions with cross platform play leading to a potentially much larger audience
-Focus and making it enjoyable for spectators to watch which may improve the game’s chances at getting more attention and wider coverage
-The option to vote for your physics model so players who want CPM style physics can have that and players who don’t can have VQ3 style physics

Everything about this sounds promising and he seems intent on making a high skill, high speed, highly competitive game. This is the complete opposite to id(iot) Software whose only interest is in dumbing down Quake until it’s not worth playing. id have never cared about the competitive gaming scene, shipping Quake 2 without multiplayer and Doom 3 with a pathetic multiplayer mode. It’s these long gaps between decent multiplayer games that has killed the competitive scene.

They’ve also been lowering the skill requirement since Quake 1 by slowing the game down and simplifying the movement control. Johnny Carmack even tried to remove strafe jumping in Q3Test by implementing a two jump limit because he thought that having people jump around the map looked stupid. It’s clear they care more about the appearance of the game than how it actually plays. They’ve been incredibly lazy with QuakeLive, rehashing old maps, failing to include advanced physics, ignoring the spectators by not even including GTV, and ignoring the console market.

While idiot Software have been very lazy and have got everything wrong it seems Tom Mustiane knows exactly what competitive gamers want. Instead of dumbing it down he wants to increase the skill level with advanced movement and greater speed so hopefully we won’t need multiple mods to make the game playable as you do with id games. It’s great to have someone who really cares about competitive gaming leading the project and I just hope he’s able to deliver on his vision.

There’s not much news on the seVerity forums but Tom Mustiane has posted as recently as April saying “Severity is still very much an active product. We are continuing to keep it in the dark until there is something really ready to show. The closure of the CPL doesn't affect the game at all.”

EDIT: I don't understand the negativity towards seVerity. If it was someone completely inexperienced working on the game I could understand the lack of optimism. However, Tom Mustiane has a lot of relevant experience:

http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,23505/

I've got high hopes that he'll deliver.