Paul Jaquays from id Software has made a huge followup on the lost Quake3 maps story that went up yesterday in the comments here. He covers all kinds of topics like why the railgun trial changed, what happened to those nifty pulsating textures, and some in depth detail on Q3DM8 among other things. Pretty interesting stuff. Here's a bit:

OK, now let's talk about that weapon with the particle trail that the 'xian' model is shooting. I'm pretty certain that was an early version of the plasma gun. It looks cool and I like the particles. We could have done some awesome things with them as the shader functions matured, but as a game feature in Q3A, they were problematic, at best. Everyone talks about how cool the rail trail was in early shots of Quake 3 Arena (pretty much just like the Q2 rail). However, while testing Q3Test2 (now Q3dm17), we learned that a single rail shot added an instant hit of 3000+ polygons to the map. In bigger space maps, it would have been worse. Ouch. So the art changed. We had similar problems with other functions using particles. And so, particles left the game.