Some of the more important enhancements that the new game will offer are improved network play, stunning new graphic details such as true curved surfaces, dynamic shadows, volumetric fog and more! Stay tuned for what is bound to be another revolution in gaming technology, fun and addiction! 
 
WEAPONS   >>>   
The speed at which you change weapons has been increased to allow you to cycle through all your weapons better. The speed will not be quite as fast as in Quake 1, but faster than in Quake 2. This has been accomplished in part due to reducing the actual animation of the change to 6 frames. If you want to see a simulation of how fast the actual weapon cycling will be go here: http://www.algonet.se/~spk/q3/ 
Drop Weapons - In Quake 3 Arena you will be able to drop your weapon for a 20 % speed increase. 
Muzzle Flashes - most weapons will also have more of a muzzle flash. 

MACE - It looks like Q3A will include Mace melee weapon that should be a nice addition, especially if you have the Beserker item. It's always been fun to run into an unsuspecting character and chop them down with the sword in CHAOS DM, so this melee weapon should be equally fun. 

MACHINE GUN - For now the machine gun is the default weapon that you will start when you spawn in the game. It is supposed to have about the same damage and rate of fire as the machine gun in Quake 2. I think that it is a great idea to start with a fairly powerful weapon when you spawn so you have a bit of a better chance of surviving if you spawn into a firefight, unless of course you're playing versus Thresh. 

SUPER SHOTGUN - Not sure how this is going to look like yet, but it looks like there have been a couple of modifications to the Super Shotgun. The rate of fire has been increased by about half, the damage has been reduced as well as the splash radius. The damage you take from a Super Shotgun blast will also be reduced the further away the shot comes from. 

GRENADE LAUNCHER - The grenade launcher will now have a faster rate of fire, will launch grenades faster, and the explosion damage on each grenade also might be increased. 

ROCKET LAUNCHER - This favorite weapon of many quake players has remained mainly unchanged. The rate of fire will probably be faster than in Quake 3, but not as fast as in Quake 1. Since the game will incorporate light, medium, and heavy classes, rocket jumping will depend on which class you are playing. 

FLAME THROWER - Still unknown whether this weapon will make it into the game, but it would be interesting to set other players on fire. 

PLASMA GUN - The plasma gun is a new weapon that appears in Quake. It is very similar to the plasma gun that was found in Doom. When you fire it will shoot out a blue stream of plasma as well as induce some nice splash damage. The gun is said to have a high rate of fire, but is also supposed to almost blind you when you fire it. 

LIGHTNING GUN - Still not finalized as being included in the game, but it looks like ID Software wants to bring back the classic Lightning gun back from Quake, except this time it has a bit of a twist. If included you will be able to wave the gun around in any direction and cause damage to that entire area, except the area of affect will cause smaller damage as opposed to if you were to concentrate the fire on one area. 

RAILGUN - To accommodate complaints by some gamers that rail-gun damage visibility was non-existent ID has allowed to rail gun to create an explosion after it hits an object. It will not be easier to tell if you actually hit something or not. The firing rate of this gun has also been increased slightly. 

BFG - This weapon although still resembling the BFG found in Quake 2, will now be more like the Hyperblaster found in Quake 2. The weapon will be highly overpowered and will allow for some massive damage. It will deliver a stream of energy at high speeds. 

There is an interesting weapon chart created by one of the writers at the Adrenaline Vault who got to playtest Quake 3 Arena that details his assessment of how many of the weapons will work, including rate of fire, damage and more. You can check it out at: http://www.avault.com/articles/q3arena3.asp 
 
ITEMS   >>>   
The ideas behind the powerups and items that you can grab are pretty much the same as in Quake 2, but the visual effects that some of these power ups produce is unmatched anywhere in the gaming world to date. Here is a list of the powerups and what they do. 
HEALTH : These packs regenerate your health. They have been described as see through globes that have a 3D red cross inside of them. 

FLIGHT : May be similar to the jetpack found in CHAOS DM 

HASTE: Increase only your movement speed this time, no double rate of fire. 

TRIPLE / QUAD DAMAGE: It would only make sense to call it triple damage now since it has been toned down to just that, but I know some of you like Quad. As seen in the Mac World Quake 3 Arena demo by John Carmack, as soon as a player picks up the Triple Damage power up they will be surrounded by a field of electricity that perfectly encapsulates their body. This field is quite bright and will be dynamically changing. Triple damage will last for 30 seconds. 

REGENERATION: This will simply regenerate your health at a rate of 15 points per second until you reach 200% health. 

REGENERATION STAND: A type of spherical stand that you will be able to enter and regain your strength at currently an unknown rate (perhaps 15 points per second). 

INVISIBILTY: This has got to be the coolest effect. In Quake 2, the invisibility power-up in Chaos DM produced a type of bubble effect that was barely noticeable even if the player was 10 feet away. There was also a distinct noise you could hear when someone had obtained the invisibility power up. In Quake 3 Arena the invisibility power up will make your character appear virtually invincible and the effect will resemble the one used by the Alien in the movie Predator. 

GRAPPLING HOOK: Still undetermined whether this will make it into the game, but would be cool. The grappling hook I found always added an extra fun element to the game. This time around ID has said that if it does incorporate it into the game they will change the grappling hook to be more realistic. 

BERSERKER: If you get this powerup and have the mace as a weapon you'll be able to kick some serious butt. Go nuts! 

PERSONAL TELEPORTER: This is an item that you can use to teleport yourself to a random point on the map or a respawning area. 
 
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS   >>>   
The only thing that we know about minimum requirements come from a .plan file made by Brian Hook: 

"Right now we'd like the game to be playable on a Pentium/200MMX w/ 32MB of RAM and a Voodoo. This is a pretty common place machine, and hopefully things will be scalable enough that you can run at 512x384 with minimum detail (both geometric and texture) with a Voodoo 1 and get decent performance (although, obviously, not earth shattering)" 

Quake 3 Arena will also be simultaneously released on the Mac and Linux platforms. If you own a Mac, you should be able to run the game if you have a 200MHz G3 with a Voodoo1 or equivalent. 

So to recap:

- 200 MHz processor
- 32MB RAM
- Voodoo 1 (at least)
- 4X CD-ROM
- 28.8 Kbps modem (since it is really a multiplayer game only) 

The game does not include a software renderer so a 3D accelerator card is a must. Most computers still do not ship standard with 3D Cards, but that is the general trend in the community, so don't complain and buy a 3D card because within the next little while you will be able to play very little games without one. 

As for recommended specs, who is to say. Brian Hook has said that in their tests thus far a RIVA TnT has had the best performance overall. That is not to say that getting a Voodoo 2 (or better yet the yet to be released Voodoo 3) with a fast processor with tons of RAM won't run this puppy like a dream. 
 
VIDEO CARDS   >>>   
Here is a bit of information from Brian Hook on some of the Video Card tests that they have performed running Quake 3. The following info is from a Brian Hook .plan update on Dec 14: 
RivaTNT: I expected a significantly greater performance difference 16bpp and 32bpp performance, but since this test is primarily throughput limited, it makes sense that the difference between the two color depths wouldn't be that large. However, I'm a little disappointed that its performance dropped
by quite a bit since our last test 

Savage3D: Holy cow! Phenomenal performance for this chipset, major kudos to the S3 engineers that worked on this. This is great performance, especially
given that this is without multitexturing capability! The performance
difference of S3TC vs. non-S3TC was actually very small, under 5%. 

Voodoo2 (beta ICD): Much improved performance, but it still has room to grow. 50% faster than their older ICD, so props out to the engineers that have been working on this. 

Intel i740: Probably the most impressive of the bunch, it pretty much has the lowest
claimed numbers of ANY of the existing boards. 33% less fill rate than the
Voodoo2, but it hangs in there. Shows what great drivers can do for you. 

Riva128ZX: Decent performance, but it should be a little faster -- at least on a par with the Intel i740's numbers, since the Riva128ZX theoretically has higher fill rate and throughput potential. 

Banshee (beta ICD): I'm fairly disappointed with the performance here, but it's understandable since this part lacks the MT capability of the Voodoo2 boards. 

OTHER HARDWARE: We have not tested the Matrox G200 (waiting on video cards, and Matrox has warned us not to expect too much from their early drivers); we didn't bother testing the V2200 since it is pretty old tech. However, the V2200 drivers are very well done 

So what's up with the Voodoo 3? 

Here's a little quote that I found in an interview with Brian Hook on Dec 8 with Brian Hook. This is Brian talking about 3Dfx's upcoming Voodoo 3 chipset that is supposed to have 22-bit effective rendering: 

"I have no idea what their "effective rendering" thing is all about, but it seems like marketing fluff to combat the fact that everyone BUT 3Dfx has a 32-bit accelerator." 

That can't be good for business. 

Also some more good info on 3D Cards from John Carmack, it looks like you might want to avoid the Riva 128 or the PowerVR: 

Riva 128: no specular lighting, although it is fast enough, which will highly impact gaming value 
Permedia 2: no proper blending, no specular lighting 
PowerVR: no ad-mode blending, a feature used everywhere in Quake3: Arena. Almost certainly unplayable with QA. 
All upcoming S3, nVidia, 3Dfx, and Matrox cards will be fine 

OTHER DISPLAY ISSUES: 

John Carmack also mentioned in an August 17th 1998 .plan update that he has added support for HDTV wide screen type displays: 

"On a normal 4:3 aspect ratio screen, a 90 degree horizontal field of view gives a 75 degree vertical field of view. If you keep the vertical fov constant and run on a wide screen, you get a 106 degree horizontal fov. 

Because we specify fov with the horizontal measurement, you need to change fov when going into or out of a wide screen mode. I am considering changing fov to be the vertical measurement, but it would probably cause a lot of confusion if "fov 90" becomes a big fisheye. 
 
LEVELS   >>>   
There has been quite a bit of general info released on what type of levels will appear in Quake 3. Designers have said that there were only a couple of original Quake 2 levels that became popular deathmatch levels. The boys at ID have decided to change this. The old gothic looking levels from Quake 1 have returned, but a new mix of levels have also been included. Here are some of the features to expect from the new levels: 

Small intense levels that will be perfect for one on one play 
Medium sized levels for intense high volume player intense gameplay 
Huge levels that will allow for a huge amount of players. 
Gothic looking levels, organic looking levels, industrial looking levels. 
Levels that are designed for much air play 
Much of the levels have been designed to create a balance in the way the game is played including weapon positioning. 
From what we know so far the attention to level design and complexity has been undivided as the design of the levels has been used to address many of the complaints that appeared in Quake 2. 
Levels designed to keep skill levels in mind, yes that means that there will be levels where even keyboard players will stand a better chance than in any Quake 2 level. 
Team oriented maps 
Bounce pads, similar to what appeared in Half-Life. 
No ladders in any of the levels to accommodate the new faster arcade like speed of the game. 
 
CLASSES   >>>   
Quake 3 Arena will feature a new option that will allow you to play one of three classes: light, medium, heavy. The reason for this addition was to incorporate more variety in the game. According to developers they are looking for different players to adopt different favorite class styles, and have created balances between each class as to avoid a dominant class emerging. The main differences between the classes that have been noticed by those who have playtested the game are, speed, damage infliction and armor. There is an interesting chart that you can check out in a Quake 3 preview that has been created over at Scary's Shugashack at: http://shugashack.com/extras/editorial5_3.htm  
AI BOTS   >>>   
There will be some Quake 3 so called "single-player levels" although the levels will be multiplayer based. No longer will you have almost mindless monster type goons whose behavior you can predict. ID Software has created a system of advance bot AI players that you can compete against. These so-called bots will be smart enough to pick up weapons, health packs and more. This will allow for a more true simulation of multiplayer to get you ready to play against human players, but even the most advanced AI bots will still be no match for an experienced deathmatch Quake player.  
MODELS   >>>   
Here are some of the details of some new features that you will see with the models in Quake 3 Arena: 

New skeletal system allows for separate body movements. If you look up, a players head will tilt up 
If a player turns around, his head will move first, followed by the body, and then the legs. 
The models will be animated at 15 frames per second. 
A Level Of Detail will be used, where there will be three versions of models, each with different levels of detail. 
 
CUSTOMIZATION   >>>   
ID Software has built their fantastic legacy of games including Doom and Quake on the fact that they have given artists, programmers, and level designers from around the world the ability to create and tinker with all their games. Quake 3 Arena builds on this success and even adds more to the customization features. Both the client side and server side will be more customizable then ever. ID Software also understands that the high system requirements will deter some people initially from buying the game. To balance this effect they have offered a high amount of customizability that allows you to turn on or off a lot of graphical details that will eat a lot of cpu and ram as well as affect performance.  
GAMEPLAY   >>>   
Here are some of the gameplay improvements and features that we will see in Quake 3 Arena: 

According to Scary at the Shugashack who got to play test Quake 3 Arena, when in the game and you hit a player you hear a noticeable, but not annoying tone that tells you if you have just hit someone. This means that if you are shooting rockets blindly because you suspect someone is around the corner, you will hear the tone if you manage to get some splash going on the unsuspecting character just around the bend. 
The color of your cursor will change with the status of your health which improves gameplay in the sense that you don't have to look down to change check if you are about to die. 
Player identification - this will allow you to identify any player by simply placing your cross hair over them. It is questionable at this point whether this will be an option that you can turn off on either the client or server side. 
Chat icons - these will appear above the head of a player if he is in chat mode, so if you are a nice guy you don't blow him away while he is chatting. 
The model height is generally higher so you will feel taller. 
A standard CTF will be implemented in the game 
Frag Notification: Each time you frag someone your HUD will display exactly who you fragged. 
 
MULTIPLAYER   >>>   
John Carmack has said that in theory Quake III Arena will be able to support anywhere between 60 to 70 players. From what I have read though it would take a tremendous amount of bandwidth on the server side (a T3 perhaps?) Quake 3 Arena will also not care as to what operating system you are using, i.e. if you are playing using Windows 98 Q3A will allow you to play with players using the Mac OS or Linux. 
NETWORKING - The network code for Quake 3 Arena has been improved vastly with the following improvements: 
A gamespy type package that allows you to quickly find some servers with low pings that you can connect to. 
The network code has been designed much more differently for Quake 3 Arena. The idea behind the code is to reduce the largest amount of information that is sent between the server and the client machine to increase the speed of gameplay. Quake 3 Arena will use the client machine to serve up and deal with many more functions with regards to presenting the information that again results in faster gameplay. The server will only be responsible in telling the client on what actions to perform and not how to perform for example each frame of a BFG being discharged. This is a big bandwidth saver as well as communication between client and server cut down.