Ranger (Q3)

"Originally a slipgate explorer, the man called Ranger has faced and escaped certain death a thousand times on a thousand worlds. His experiences have left him more alien than human now.

After saving the earth during the Slipgate Affair, Ranger embarked upon an endless travelogue of blood and destruction. Now that he's ended up in the Arenas, he is resigned to his future of eternal combat. He enjoys a good challenge and becomes nasty if his opponents are weak."

- Quake 3 bio

Ranger looks exactly the same as in Quake, besides improvements to graphics. His A.I. opponent in Quake 3 Arena favors the Rocket Launcher and Plasma Gun. Also looks for Lightning Gun if the skirmish map has it.

Like Doomguy, Ranger's bot makes references to Quake such as "I'm surrounded by Quake minions. Laying down suppressing fire." and "Where have the portals taken me now?". In chat lines, he also gets mentioned as "Quaker", "Q Dude", "Frag-Licker" and "Old Timer".

After the tutorial, Ranger is the first challenge the players face in the single player campaign, fought in a duel on the Arena Gate.

Strategy
Pretty simple map layout that actually turns between 2 big rooms: dragon mouth room with Plasma Gun and Arena Warrior statues area with Rocket Launcher; both connected with tubular and forked hallways where you can find Shotgun. Arena also has some two +25 health globes at both big areas, and a +50 health at the halls. To make things a bit even perhaps, Armor Shards can be found at the RL area behind both statues.

Spawn placement and map size supports that it's a waiting game once one of the sides are fragged. Inside the dragon mouth, Heavy Armor spawns after 25 seconds in the map for the first time. After this point, it's all about guarding that area and countering the Ranger's attacks while looking for ammo.

Strategy is to time Heavy Armor with less trouble, over and over again while keeping Ranger low and pressured. It's advised to stand at the halls after scoring a frag on him to listen and locate the Ranger via respawn noise. At the span of Heavy Armor respawn time, player has to locate him quickly to stack up frags before their stock burns out.

Grabbing both Shotgun and Rocket Launcher is a good idea to fend Ranger back if he's fully stocked on armor. Trying to slip in to the dragon mouth room again by juking around the halls and minding whether he's wounded or not is another option to recover the situation.

Trivia

 * In his arena reside the statues of Visor and Major. It's not exactly surprising when you consider that his arena was designed to house Major at first in the demo build of Q3A.


 * He has a different voice than the first installment of the series, this is due to him not being voiced by Trent Reznor as in the original, but by a Soundelux voice actor instead.
 * It is said in the manual from Quake III that Ranger is more alien than human now. Ranger's sanity was possibly affected due to the experiences from Quake; his skill is also presumably inferior in Quake III.