Terminator 3: War of the Machines

Wow! I heard everyone was asking about War of the Machines?

[readers: We were not.]

You really want to hear my thoughts on some terribly-rated movie tie-in from 2003?

[readers: No. No one cares about Terminator 3.]

*claps hands together* Hooray!

Atari had locked down video game rights for what would, assuredly, be Arnold’s next beloved summer blockbuster. The console games were sorted, but Atari must have been wanting to do something different for their PC release. Something better suited to the platform. Something taking advantage of technology and multiplayer trends. Something like… copying Battlefield 1942 wholesale.

On the surface, this is not a dumb idea. Fans have long been clamoring for a full-length feature version of the “Future War” flashbacks in the films. The only attempt at Terminator multiplayer up to this point was in SkyNET, featuring the same 8-player arena deathmatch as similar ’90s games. I’d even argue that the post-apocalyptic setting wasn’t as played-out then as it is today – until Fallout went 3D, the Terminator franchise was the biggest name in bombed-out nuclear ruins.

Meanwhile, Battlefield had blossomed into a popular PC series, challenging the way online multiplayer was done. The 8 and 16-player enclosed arenas of Quake III or Counter-Strike were replaced by comparatively sprawling, open maps with 64 players among two teams. Instead of having the most kills, teams won by working together to capture and hold marked bases on the map. Teamwork evolved organically, especially in crewing powerful tanks or aircraft that players could freely hop in and out of. A well-coordinated vehicle could change the tide of a match by itself, with driver and gunners working in tandem to flush out a capture point.

So there’s actual merit to the idea of playing alongside swarms of rugged Resistance soldiers clashing with the chrome armies of Skynet. And if you want to drive vehicles, cap bases, and shoot metal men in the shattered ruins of L.A., this game does deliver on those basics. The concept at least has the appeal of a fan mod (so, free) but to their credit, Atari was charging a reduced $40 price tag. This all was enough to get me to buy the game on release in 2003, but that’s an awfully low bar – I’ve already mentioned how I would buy a box of shit if a Terminator was on the cover.

Unfortunately, the execution of this concept stumbles around as awkward and useless as when the TX hacked Arnold in the film. Whether the developers were inexperienced or not, it’s clear that this game is unfinished. Even with the final 1.16 patch, which clears up networking and performance issues that plagued its release, features seem missing and balance doesn’t feel final. The basics are there, but the game tangibly feels like it needed months of additional development, which I’m sure a licensed title with a release deadline didn’t give them.

First, let’s look at what does work. War of the Machines is strictly multiplayer, with no single player campaign at all. Any solo play just replicates one-off online matches with bots filling in. Matches play across 12 maps in one of three modes. “Termination” is the most like Battlefield – there’s five control points on the map, one of which is your home base. Capture control points to let your team respawn there. You can never cap the enemy HQ, so unlike Battlefield, you’ll have to play to the time or frag limit. “Team Deathmatch” removes the control points and awards victory when one team hits the designated frag limit.

“Mission” has pre-determined attacking and defending teams (based on the map) with a simplified objective – capture a bridge, defend two control points, pull data from a crashed vehicle and take it back to home base, etc. Basically, go somewhere and interact with a thing, or stop the enemy from interacting with the thing, before the mission timer runs out. These usually cut action down to one section of the larger map (like just the bunker area within Canyon) and work well in terms of guiding the match. With the possible exception of missions that put you right next to the enemy’s only spawn point – ensuring your quick death when the respawn timer ends and a whole firing squad suddenly appears – I have no complaints about any of the modes.

In Battlefield, both sides are essentially the same, barring some historically-accurate weapon variations. Here, there’s some real attempt at making Skynet mechanically (har) different than the humans. Terminators don’t have an armor meter, or health points over 100, but they clearly take less damage. Humans mostly use bullet-based weapons which audibly ping off of their metal chests and require sustained fire to have any effect. Terminators primarily use plasma weapons and humans can only take a few of these shots before seeing the respawn screen.

To balance this, Terminators walk slowly, cannot crouch, and cannot be healed. Humans move slightly faster and can crouch behind barricades or go prone. Your gun seems to get blocked by geometry a lot while crawling, but it does lower your profile and offers some cover. Terminators, authentically, can only lumber forward and soak up damage. This roughly extends to vehicles as well. Humans often have fast sedans or scout Jeeps while Skynet has glacial tanks with devastating plasma cannons.

Like Battlefield, you pick a class before each respawn. These are preset kits that can never be upgraded or customized, though you can switch between a few different weapon options. Human Hunters carry basic assault rifles and are your bog-standard forward attackers. Heavies move slower but carry cannons or rockets that can bring down Skynet vehicles. Scouts use sniper rifles, which are the most effective one-or-two hit weapons in the game. Supply soldiers are the lightly-armed support class that run around dropping health and ammo for everyone. Heavier weapons like the minigun come with no reloads and need the Supply class to keep them fed.

The Skynet side has no assault equivalent, instead combining Hunter and Supply into one Supply Terminator. They can drop ammo pickups, but also have a decent plasma rifle. Terminator Heavies carry stonkin’ big plasma cannons to tear up humans and vehicles. They can also call down airstrikes in certain maps. The Infiltrator class looks human and uses machine guns, but you simply have to put your cursor over them to see them show up in red as an enemy. Friendly fire is always on, so infiltrators can cause hesitation at a distance, but they seem mostly like a way to include human weapons on the Skynet side. Finally, you can play as a flying FK – basically a hovering drone with missiles and plasma cannons. It can’t capture any control points, but it moves as fast as the Jeeps and makes an amazing scout/harassment unit.

Most of the maps take place in a destroyed L.A. Three of them do not, instead existing in the “present”/2003. In Terminator 3, Skynet was now a military project instead of something cooked up at Cyberdyne’s Silicone Valley office building, so these levels are appropriately-themed Army bases and tech labs. Proper Terminators haven’t been invented yet, so players are either the flying FKs or the mobile T-1s from the film. T-1s are tracked vehicles with twin cannons – basically Johnny Five if he’d stayed a member of Los Locos. You will only play as them in the “present” levels. The Human side mostly stays the same, but without access to plasma weapons, EMP grenades, Snipers, or the Supply class – requiring players to rely on the stationary ammo boxes near control points.

The final exception is The Governator himself, available to the highest-scoring Resistance player. If that’s you, then you get the option to respawn as The Terminator, with a spinning minigun and the increased health of a Skynet machine. He also tosses out lines with Arnold’s authentic voice, allegedly recorded just for the game. If true, it’s hard to tell, with such bangers as “Affirmative” and “It’s time.” Most of his dialog seems tied to the in-game command menu on the F1 key, but they clearly didn’t record enough lines to match. Select an order to attack a base and he’ll call out how he needs ammo.

Again, if you really want to play Battlefield as, or against, Terminators, then this will offer up that experience. And to its credit, I can’t say I encountered any blatant glitches while playing with the 1.16 patch. Aside from flaky bot intelligence – which we’ll cover shortly – the game plays fine, with aiming and movement working like it should. Instead, it’s design flaws, missing features, and general user experience that cause issues. I can see what they were going for, as laid out above, but the version they have here still feels like a tech demo. It just isn’t polished enough to be fun to play.

My major complaint is with weapon handling. Weapons have no recoil whatsoever. They have spread, in that holding down the fire key expands your crosshairs out and increases the radius in which bullets may land. I feel like half the game’s weapons are useless because of this, with the minigun especially having no obvious effect at anything other than close range. You can kill something if you’re lucky enough to land a headshot; otherwise you can burn most of your ammo and feel like you’ve just drawn your enemy’s outline in bullets. 

But sniper rifles hit the center of your crosshairs every time, while that center never moves. No recoil, no sway, no reload after shots. This makes the two sniper rifles wildly overpowered. The Scoped Rifle for humans even has automatic fire with a sniper’s scope. It puts its entire 30-round clip exactly where the crosshair is, and if that crosshair is over Terminator noggins, they’re dropping almost instantly. It’s clearly broken, waiting for a balance pass that never came. Meanwhile, Skynet has no sniper class at all. All Terminators can zoom with the X and C keys up to about half the zoom of the snipers. You can land headshots this way, but not effectively at long distance when your target is still so small.

Otherwise, explosives rule the battlefield. Assault Humans and Supply Terminators both have grenade launchers instantly available on the right mouse button. Heavy Terminators get a cannon that creates explosions wherever it hits. Explosions are instant kills, even taking out multiple enemies if they’re clustered together. Sending grenades at torsos or feet feels cheap, but is incredibly effective. It also negates virtually every other weapon in the game, or any sense of strategy. I guess I could trade clips of ammo with the enemy, or I could just ploop a grenade at him and be done with it.

Both sides get vision modes on the Q key; green nightvision for humans and red Terminator vision for Skynet. Levels aren’t dark enough that you need them to navigate, so there’s not much point to either. It’s a big disappointment that Terminator vision doesn’t highlight enemies – only the Sniper and FK classes get target boxes with health indicators, and only when their cursor is over someone. This leaves red Term-o-vision as a pointless headache, though I suppose they didn’t want to make every Skynet player too wall-hacky in a competitive FPS. You at least can turn it off with Q, which you couldn’t do before the patches.

The biggest issue – oft-complained about in contemporary reviews – was that Atari didn’t host dedicated servers. From what I remember, this is absolutely true. Though I’d take it a step further and say there were barely any servers at all. I don’t think I bought the game on launch day, but it was surely within the first month, and it was already impossible to find a full game. I vaguely remember a pre-release demo that did have full matches of 32 players, but it must have turned nearly everyone away from buying the final release. Coming out four months after a lukewarm reception to Terminator 3 in cinemas surely didn’t help either. For those that still bought in despite everything (like me), a few matches were enough to cement that this just wasn’t happening and go back to Battlefield instead.

Nowadays, of course, there’s no servers at all. Matchmaking was Powered by GameSpy and that support has been down for decades. There are ways, and there might be a Discord somewhere where you could organize a match, but I kind of doubt ready and willing players are just standing by with War of the Machines installed. Instead, both then and now, you’ve got to fight the AI bots. And that AI is not great. 

Similar to Battlefield, servers under the player limit fill up with bots. Multiplayer caps at 32 players, with AI standing in for up to 24 of those. If you play offline, this means your games will cap at 25. There’s three possible skill levels, but these don’t seem to make anyone smarter, just adjust aim and damage received. I do like that you can tweak team balance, pushing a larger force against a smaller force, if you want to change up the scenarios.

Bots all have names appropriate to their team; “Ruben Beck” and “Jean Maxwell” for the humans, “F-S1-B” and “T-1002” for the Machines. Bots are programmed to be pretty active in the team chat at all times, whether it’s useful information or not. Prepare for a lot of “Terminator spotted!” and “Attack the base.” The caller’s arrow blinks on the minimap, so you can kind of see where what is happening, but it usually just ends up as background chatter in a single voice for each side. You cannot turn the voices off independent of other sound effects, so that voice will drone on for the length of every match.

Termination mode is your only option through the single player menu, but you can start a local server to play the other two modes. Those populate with bots as well. Bots aren’t programmed to help with mission objectives, but they are capable enough at shooting and taking bases. They’ll switch to spawn at the nearest point you just captured, most of the group will push forward in the correct direction, and they’ll shoot back at any enemies they see. They’ll even throw grenades and take over stationary turrets. If you request health or ammo, a bot will usually try to run over and give it.

Past this, not much else can be said for them. They won’t take cover; opting instead to strafe-dance around, or throw themselves prone in the middle of the street. I’ve seen human bots get in vehicles and drive them into walls, but they won’t get in your transport or take over its guns. Terminator bots don’t touch their tanks or transports at all. This effectively takes vehicles out of the equation, which is a pretty huge part of the Battlefield experience. No crashing into a capture point with turrets blazing, or figuring out how to flank a deadly tank. Bots are terrible about coordination in general,  but to be fair, this is awfully accurate to any public match with real players.

Just as a side note, if you use F1 to send tactical commands, like “Cover me!” or “Attack” – essentially anything other than a request for health or ammo – a bot will immediately reply with “Negative!” I find it hilarious that they don’t just ignore the order; they were actually programmed to give you a “lol, nah.”

Graphics are dated, even for the time. Character models look a lot like ones from Team Fortress – the Half-Life mod – from four years back. Weapons look like PS2 models. Animations are stiff and seem incomplete, with a lot of running legs connected to rigor mortis upper bodies. Everyone has Road Runner dust clouds at their feet for some reason. At the same time, lighting looks great and I can’t really complain about textures. Twisted steel and crumbling brick look like they should, while the destroyed locations all look believable. They managed a lot of mood with the fires, moonlight, and plasma blasts zipping by in the background, which is worth some praise. Again, there weren’t a lot a of post-apocalyptic 3D games then to offer inspiration.

I hate the Terminator designs here, though it’s not their fault. These Terminators are called “T-900s” and are a redesign explicitly for this generation of licensed games. StudioCanal held the rights to the classic Endoskeleton design, and apparently, somebody didn’t wanna pay somebody else. So, you get these goofy-looking dime store mannequins with undercarriage lights. The lights are to help differentiate them for gameplay purposes (here, red for Support and blue for Heavy) while details and mechanical bits are stripped out to make them easier to render. They look like Terminator knockoffs inside an official Terminator game, and yeah, I feel like authenticity matters in a licensed title. I hate that the explicit Future War game doesn’t look like the movies. But, they were used in all the other Terminator 3 games because they “had to be,” and clearly, it’s the least of this game’s problems.

Ultimately, the biggest question is how these battles feel. On the Terminator side, pretty miserable. That slow, Jason Vorhees pace works to build tension in the movies, but not when you actually want to get somewhere. It is a long stroll from the back of the map to the front lines, with nothing to do on the way. Terminators absorb a little extra damage, but they’re far from indestructible. Depending on how the bases are currently captured, you could be walking for minutes to the next conflict, only to die immediately and wait 15 seconds to respawn to do it all over again.

Again, Terminators cannot be healed. This seems like a strange decision, maybe made back when they had even more armor than they do in the release version. Skynet’s going to need a lot more coordination than bots or a public team are going to give. Things like fire support from tank crews, or someone running the armored carrier back and forth between spawns like a dedicated taxi. The lack of any Skynet counter-snipers means the nimble FKs are the only real recourse to break up enemy nests. There’s also no way for either side to repair vehicles, and Skynet tanks are enormous targets, so replacements will have to keep slowly creaking back up from their HQ at the edge of the map.

Humans don’t fair much better. Nobody really runs in this game, so the issue of spending time to get to the front and immediately dying applies here too. You really feel tender and underpowered as a human, but without many ways to mitigate this. Manning stationary turrets just make you an easy target. Crouch and prone aren’t separate keys, so you have to awkwardly cycle through stances. No popping up and down from cover to snap off shots. Loose sandbox walls or piles of debris don’t offer as much defense as something like Battlefield’s pillboxes. The game is also programmed to shake your screen if shots land near you, even if behind walls. This was always confusing and left me unclear as to when I was actually taking damage.

In battles, I feel like my lives on the Human team were measured in seconds. Way more than the Terminator team, you show up at the control point and immediately see the respawn screen. I think the bots may be programmed to exploit headshots – so you’re probably dying in bot matches far faster than you would in real ones. Add the weapon issues, and it’s hard to feel like you’re actively contributing, playing, or having fun.

But the absolute killer is the lack of any real player base at any time in the game’s life. This a multiplayer game, designed to play with and against armies of (intelligent-ish) human players. There’s real considerations for tactics built into the design that bots just don’t support. The shaky parts could have been solidified with patches. But even if you accepted the game’s state as-is, it never had a player base large enough to let you actually play the game you bought as intended. Most games at least get a few months of full matches before players taper off, but this one was dead on arrival. Unfortunately, when the game feels as clunky and imbalanced as it does, it’s understandable why players didn’t stick around.

So, we’re left with a game that isn’t as a good as the one it tries to copy. Cloning Battlefield definitely could be done, but not with this team and not with this deadline. Given the state of the Terminator franchise, I really doubt we’ll ever see another attempt at large-scale multiplayer like this ever again, so it’s a bit of a shame that the concept was blown on an unfinished title that landed with a whimper. It’s just too clunky and incomplete to even be worth trying out.

 

The Good

Well, there’s Terminators, humans, and vehicles, like it says on the tin. There’s no other game with large-scale Future War battles like this one. Asymmetric differences between the two sides change how you play. The bombed-out maps look the part.

 

The Bad

Vicious cycle of the game releasing unpolished and incomplete, leading to hardly anyone playing online, leading to no reason to fix the game, leading to no players sticking with it. Battlefield 1942 still existed, and was better. Bots don’t use most of the available features, so solo matches aren’t exciting. Terminator 3 the movie wasn’t too popular, which didn’t help enthusiasm for this game. The T-900s make this title look like some kind of unlicensed clone. I love that the TV ad  is mostly cutscenes from the unrelated PS2 version.

 

 “Talk to the hand.” – The Terminator when you order the Human team to defend the base.