WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF PURGE JIHAD?
WHY IS IT CALLED PURGE?
WHY IS IT CALLED JIHAD?
It is the sequel to Future versus Fantasy (FvF). FvF was a Quake Total Conversion first developed in 1996 with a strong holy war theme. Both "Purge" and "Jihad" were game modes in FvF.

FvF had a primary game mode that was called Purge or "FvF: Purge". In FvF: Purge, an Altar was placed in the middle of the map. On top of this Altar was the Artifact of Divinity. Teams fought around the Altar, essentially making it the central point of the game. The player who collected the Artifact of Divinity became the Deity, a super class with limited combat ability. However, the Deity could grant Mass Bless while standing on the Altar. The Deity player would listen to the requests from his teammates e.g. "Ammo plz". The Deity player then would grant a Mass Bless of his choosing. (A good Deity would listen to his teammates; a bad Deity would bless out of random.)

In 1997, the FvF Quakeworld team lead by Gaylin Yee (aka Mazurka) invented a new game mode called Jihad or "FvF: Jihad". FvF: Jihad solved many of the problems presented by FvF: Purge. In FvF: Purge there was only 1 Altar and 1 Artifact of Divinity hence there could only be one Deity. As you can tell, the team with the Deity had a severe advantage to the team that did not have the Deity. Also, many maps simply did not have a good midpoint for the Altar. In FvF: Jihad, each team had their own base (instead of both teams fighting for the sole centralized base like in FvF: Purge). In their base, each team had its own Altar, its own Artifact of Divinity, and its own Deity. This made for a better balanced and overall more fun game.

Purge Jihad is based primary on FvF: Jihad... except this time... it is a holy war between the followers of Mabus and followers of Evod, instead of two unnamed deities.

HOW IS PURGE JIHAD DIFFERENT THAN FVF: JIHAD?

There are many things that make Purge Jihad a vast improvement over FvF: Jihad, as a whole. As for Deity-speific things, Purge Jihad makes fundamental changes.

A player no longer plays the Deity. Each team, the Order and the Chosen, has their own Deity: Evod and Mabus, respectively.
Players now have Piety Points awarded for Three Truths: Valor, Aid, and Martyrdom. Piety Points favor low leveled players over high leveled players.
The Deities ability to grant blessings are no longer bound to his life energy. The Deity can now grant divine favors based on an individual player's Piety Points.
The Deity can no longer be killed. He is no longer physically on the map, only his Altar is.
The Altar is now an invulnerable statue of the Deity.
Players can no longer ask (or pray to) the Deity from across the map for blessings. A new UI has been created for easy praying. Players must be near the Altar the to pray.
Players near the Altar can spend their own Piety Points on Mass Blessings to help teammates throughout the battlefield.
Deities now can grant an "individual" Bless. These blessings are completely different than the Mass Blessings and cannot be duplicated by any player character skills. An individual Bless will last the entire life or round of the player (whichever comes first). Individual Blessings include: Armor Blesses, Weapon Blesses, and Divine Interventions.
Players can save their earned Piety Points for future games when playing in RPG Mode.

WILL THERE BE A PURGE JIHAD DEMO?

There is no need for Purge Jihad demo because the Purge Jihad download contains the full game including the all the maps, music, weapons, and prayers. "Unregistered" users are limited to only 4 classes.

HOW LONG CAN PLAY PURGE JIHAD WITHOUT REGISTERING?
WHAT IS THE TIME LIMIT TO THE "TRIAL"?

Purge Jihad is a little different that other ESD (Electronic Software Distributed) games. There is no time limit at all for "Unregistered" user. You are simply limited to 4 classes. You can play in "Unregistered" mode for as long as you like, and when new features are added to the game, use the same upgrade patches as Registered users.

SURELY, YOU MUST DO SOMETHING ANNOYING TO MAKE ME BUY IT.

There are no nag screens, time limits, or ads. We have an innovate new business model. We hope you will purchase Purge Jihad to help support our independant game development.

CAN UNREGISTERED PLAYERS PLAY WITH REGISTERED PLAYERS?

Yes. The only difference is Registered players have access to all 8 classes.

HOW CAN I FIND THE TIME TO BUILD UP MY CHARACTERS? THE KID DOWN THE STREET PLAYS 10 HOURS A DAY MAKING UBER CHARACTERS.

If you are a new or casual player, Purge Jihad allows you choose to play in "FPS Mode". You will start at level 11 with 512000 XP in all classes, but your Experience Points and Peity Points won't save. You can immediately play and learn the game with a strong character. Also, some servers have fixed levels, so no player has an advantage.

WHAT IS MASS BLESS?

Mass Blessings are something very unique. In both FvF and Purge, Mass Blessings are the functions of Deities. Mass Blessings allow a beneficial effect from the Deity to every player on his team, regardless of location in the map. Mass Blessings in Purge are related to the normal skills of the player e.g. "Mass Heal", "Mass Ammo", etc. For example, if a Deity grants "Mass Ammo", it would completely refill the ammo of every player in his team.

I DON'T UNDERSTAND PURGE JIHAD, ISN'T IT JUST DEATHMATCH?

No, you will find Purge Jihad very frustrating if you play it as simply deathmatch game. Its a hybrid FPS/RPG and players should read the manual to understand all the skills and constructions characters can build in their own base. Purge Jihad is strongly a teamwork game.

SCREW TEAMWORK, COULDN'T I JUST KILL 10 PEOPLE IN A ROW LIKE I DO IN OTHER SHOOTERS BY MYSELF?

No. Players who work together are exponentially more powerful. In a regular FPS, 4 players who act as a team are 4 times more powerful than a solo player. In Purge Jihad, 4 players coordinating tactics are about 16 times more powerful than a solo player. Even uber solo skills have virtually no chance against teamwork. This is due to Purge Jihad ideas such as "cross-buffing" e.g. a Fighter can use his Hyper Rune skill on an Assassin, who use give his Invisibility Rune skill on the Fighter. There are many such team tactics discussed in the PurgeWorld.net forums.

WHO ARE THE DEITIES?
DID YOU JUST INVENT THEM RECENTLY?

The Deities in Purge Jihad are Mabus and Evod. Mabus has been long part of the storyline and fundamental to why there is even conflict. See the general storyline. Evod was planned since the beginning. His face is carved in large stone slabs in the Canopy map. The Canopy map was one of maps used in the original betas.

WHO IS MABUS?

Mabus is the deity for the Chosen. Mabus' storyline here.

WHO IS EVOD?

Evod is the deity for the Order. Evod's storyline here.

CAN I PRAY FOR AN AK-47?

No. And there are no hostages to rescue either.

WHAT IS AN ALTAR?

This is a statue of the alignment's deity. A player must be near his Altar to pray for Divine Intervention or Bless.

HOW ARE ALTARS DIFFERENT THAN FLAGS IN OTHER GAMES?

Unlike flags, Altars can not actually be "captured". It is important to secure the area around the Atlars. This is because players can pray to their deity without actually touching the Altar; they only need to be within a certain radius. (Players who praying are momentarily vulnerable as they must be very close and facing the Altar.) Thus one cannot simply touch the Altar and run away. You must maintain an active defense around the Altar, especially the enemy Atlar. The Altar cannot be damaged.

WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST MAKE A COUNTER-STRIKE CLONE OR WW2 GAME LIKE EVERYONE ELSE?

Our next game is Return to Counter Tournament. Where terrorists go back in time to WW2 and arm Nazis with AK-47s.

WITH INTEREST RATES SO LOW, I HAVE TAKEN OUT A SECOND MORGAGE. MY COMPUTER IS UBER, UPDATING TO THE LATEST EVERY 2 MONTHS. WILL PURGE JIHAD TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS?

Purge Jihad has the generally same low system requirements as Purge. Although the levels are even more detailed, Tycho and Fritz have worked overtime to optimize the maps. We are doing this intentionally. We know for a fact that many of our regular players don't exactly the latest and greatest. We know what kind of system our players have because they tell us.

HOW CAN PURGE JIHAD BE PURCHASED?

Purge Jihad is being sold online. Players can purchase the whole game.

I HAVE NOTHING BUT PROBLEMS WITH THAT SECUREROM PROTECTED CD YOU USED IN PURGE. WHAT TERRIBLE COPY PROTECTION SCHEME DO YOU USE NOW?

Purge Jihad uses a serial key system. There will be no compability problems as you simply just enter your name and the serial key.

IS IT TRUE THAT PURGE SUPPORT WILL BE DISCONTINUED?

Yes, after Purge Jihad is released, all support for the original Purge will be completely discontinued.

WILL PURGE JIHAD BE SUPPORTED BY ITS DEVELOPERS?
HOW DO I KNOW THAT PURGE WON'T ABANDONED LIKE _________ (INSERT OVERHYPED AND UNSUPPORTED GAME HERE)?

We have proven that we support our products. We released 7 updates for Purge. Not just bug fixes, but also balance changes, weapon redesigns, new skills, and new maps. We also read, answer questions, and consider player feature requests in our forums. With Purge Jihad, we will continue the same commitment of support. We play our own games.

HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE ON THE DEVELOPMENT TEAM?

Three.

YOU LIE.

No really three. We had some help from others, as noted in our credits. The actual development work was created by three people. And, our netcode is darn good too for all the things you can do in Purge Jihad.

ARE THE RUMORS THAT FREEFORM AND ITS PUBLISHER HAD DISAGREEMENTS?

Yes. The rumors are largely true. We developed Purge and we have not seen one dime from the publisher. After a breach of contract, we terminated our agreement with the publisher. There should not be a single Purge box left in any store in the world. If you happen to buy Purge, you should inform the retailer this game was be wholly discontinued and it should be removed from the shelf. We have no control over this; we don't even have "recall" power. If your purchase the Purge box from a retail outlet, we will recieve exactly 0% of it.

There are other marketing issues that have been discussed to death in the PurgeWorld.net forums.

CAN I PATCH PURGE TO PURGE JIHAD?

With Purge's non-existant advertising budget, 99.9999913% of gamers do not even know what Purge is. To avoid confusion, we changed the name of the game to Purge Jihad for the relaunch. Additionally, the foundation of Purge Jihad revolves around Deities and praying to them. These game features have long been promised to our fan base as an add-on from day one. You may check the forums for its history.

Purge Jihad has huge additions to it e.g. every single map has been modified and music. This would have made a patch nearly the same size as a full download. There wasn't any reason to release a 300+ MB patch for a full download that is approximately 333 MB.

Most importantly, Purge used Sony SecureROM copy protection which was added by the aforementioned publisher. They held the license to it. Since we no longer had a relationship with them, our legal counsel advised us to discontinue the use of SecureROM. If we kept using SecureROM, we would be technically been using SecureROM without a license. If you check our Techinical Support forums, you can see how many players had problems with SecureROM (and would blame us personally for SecureROM related issues). And then there are those SecureROM issues with us selling our game online.

Thus this required a complete overhaul of the copy-protection system. We had to drop SecureROM and implemented a "name and serial key" system. I think you can understand how, irrespective of the reasons above, this alone would make Purge completely unpatchable to Purge Jihad.

One last note, recreating Purge Jihad from scratch allows us to reorder the files in a new, patch friendly way. It should keep most future patches smaller.