After last year's highly-anticipated but perhaps a little underwhelming Doom 3, id is looking to rock gamers' faces with the return of its other legendary blockbuster franchise, Quake. To the surprise of many, this task will not be handled in-house but rather by the crew at Raven Software, known for the Hexen and Heretic franchises as well as the more recent X-Men Legends games. The two studios are working closely on the project, however, and are making a conscious attempt to draw from what they consider the strong points of the Quake bloodline in developing Quake 4. What this means is that the single-player component of Quake 4 is set in the Strogg-centric world of Quake II, and the multiplayer is reminiscent--to an extraordinarily high degree--of Quake III Arena's breakneck deathmatches.

I have made two slight modifications to the preview, pasted here: "Raven has informed me that when unzoomed the machine gun operates the same as it did in Quake 3. When zoomed it does slightly higher damage at a slightly lower rate of fire." "Raven has informed me that there are in fact two more multi-player modes that will ship with the final version of the game: a Tourney mode and an Arena CTF mode."