Unreal Tournament 2007.. er, 3

lol.........

 

the most important thing to fix for ut3 anyways is to get some decent netcode, ut2k3/4 have the worst netcode of any game ive ever played.

 

Heh. Well you should try Unreal MP then, pre patches. It was barely satisfied by a 10Mbps LAN, back in the day. Or a host of RTS games such as Tiberian Sun or AOE2. Both of those get horribly laggy even on modern hardware and on a 100Mbps switch. I hear Doom's initial IPX networking was horrible too. It brought company LANs to a crawl back in Doom days.

 

ut2k3/4 become completely unsynchronized at times. this is at 30 to 60 ping btw.....not to mention all the other problems u experience.

 

Luckily steven polge is the god of bot a.i
many times its preferable to play against the bots rather than people...

 

Haven't read through the whole thing but just wanted to comment, UT2004 is better than UT2003. The fact that Epic have not add UT2003 to the Unreal Anthology Pack speaks volumes imo.

 

um... well UT 2004 is UT2003 + a ton of new maps + assault + onslaught + new weapons. The story is extended, but you can still view the 2003 story bits. There'd be no point identifying UT2003 in the Anthology because it's all included in UT2004.

 

Still, they could've added it, but as you've said and has been stated herein, UT2004 is just so much better than UT2003.

I can't see why people want to stick to UT2k3.

As for UT3, I say ' Bring it on!"

US

 

What do you mean "added UT2003 to the Anthology"? UT2003 makes up a part of UT2004.

 

Actually while the bots may be hard, they don't play like people at all. They do cheat, knowing exactly where you are at all times and able to hit you from the other side of the map even when they can't see you through fog. They are also pretty easy to exploit because they make the same dumb mistakes over and over.

For instance on the single player ladder when you play against Xan on Hyperblast, he will hit you and kill you the moment he has direct line of sight, while he runs a circuit to pick up the power-ups. He also does quite a lot of jumping around on the outside of the ship. The solution is to grab armour and the shock rifle, and run outside. Every time he jumps from one part of the ship to another, just shock him into space. He's got all the weapons, armour and health, but he always makes the mistake of jumping into space where you can negate all his advantages and kill him with one shock hit. He makes the same mistake over and over again, but he can't help it because he's pathed that way.

The bots can also be pretty useless in team games. They will get in and out of vehicles without using them, just unlocking them for the enemy. They won't link up, they don't know where to go and often just ignore flagrunners and won't chase them down.

So while bots can be a challenge, they are much to simplistic and two dimensional to be considered human-like at all.

 

True for the bots to be more human like
25% of your team would have to spend the whole game waiting for their favourite vehicle to spawn,

1 player would have to spend the game hunting down a team mate because "he took my tank, i was only in the toilet for a minute ive waited ages for it to respawn and he comes along and takes it"

2 players must spend the game typing messgaes just to remind the other players how gay they are

1 player must spend all his time tring to get anyone who kills him kick banned for cheating

 

Ah well, it was a nice discussion anyways. But be it DM, CTF or Onslaught, the gameplay of UT2k4 is too simplistic for my taste, and as icecold puts it, relies mostly on aiming skills. I do ocasionally like to play CTF on small maps because it is fast and heavy action. But for the rest of my needs, like complexity and depth, I still turn to my still favorite FPS multiplayer game, Natural Selection.

 

I think 2K3 is transformed once you patch it up. I have it installed right now and it is basically just like 2K4 as far as I can tell. Obviously other than the Onslaught stuff.

 

I just picked up the latest issue of "Games for Windows" which had a great spread on this and I must say it looks great. The level of detail is out of this world. Definitely looking worlds apart from GoW, yet same level of post-apolcalyptic detail in it's environments.

 

Well I am looking forward to Unreal 3. Unreal 2 was a joke, but '03 and '04 had very polished multi-player, at least in close quarters DM maps and fun CTF maps. . Also the fact that '04 could play on '03 servers was great. Unreal Championship 2 The Liandriconflict also let Epic test out new ideas in close quarters like melee weapons. It got great reviews, had great AI, and let them figure out how to best use a console controller.

Gameplay

Onslaught game play was nice, but it varied from map to map and server to server. I think they have realized this and took the cream of the crop they learned from in '04 to make open vehicle combat more enjoyable. Another thing is in '04 voice support was implemented fairly well. You could join custom channels or by default be in the main channel for your team. Never got much use though. The hover board should also help out with getting to the fight, and not having to sit around for vehicles. Fast and Furious game play should also set it apart from shooters which seem to have slowed down.

NetCode

I feel the net code was much better in '04 than other vehicle based multi-player games, like BF 1942 and Vietnam which used server side collision detection, which should have been done away with after Mech Warrior 2 came out which used this model. It isn't fun trying to aim ahead to hit the vehicle or player when you actually have to be aiming ahead to hit the vehicle where the server sees it. BF2 and the latest BF2142 have issues using client side detection. Case in point in '04 riding on the mantis caused no problems and added the ability to ferry more players to nodes or having them repair you without stopping adding to the game play. While in other Vehicle based multi-player riding on a vehicle counts as a collision and kills you ramping up team kills.

Physics

Physics should also be very good even if they use an in house solution. Unreal 2 had better physics then Half-Life 2 which came out later with the havok physics, but it didn't put them to much use in the game. Incorporating third party Ageia physics could also be done as I have seen the videos using the Unreal 3.0 engine to demonstrate it.

I think that Unreal 3 with it's single player and much more refined vehicle game play will easily rival Quake Wars which seems like a battlefield clone with a few differences.

 

Well, remember that the Unreal series is more a single player FPS. Unreal Tournament is the multiplayer game. Unreal II did suck, but it didn't even have multiplayer until a long while after release.

I don't think there is an Unreal 3 in the works.

 

Neither do I, unless they expanded their company. Currently (afaIk) they have two teams. One was working on Gears of War and the other on UT3. Both are now working on UT3 to get that done. Not all of the team would be necessarily working on it either, and I'd find it likely that some members of the Gears team are doing stuff for the Gears sequel. Maybe once UT3 is done, parts of the team not working on community stuff will be working on Unreal 3 or something else altogether.

 

I see a lot of people displaying distaste for Unreal 2: The Awakening. I, personally, found it to be a great game. It was visually amazing. The scenery was out of this world. I seem to remember one of my favorite levels being one of the earlier missions where you went into the stomach of some type of giant land worm type creature, and inside him was home to all sorts of strange creatures like bioluminescent flying sprites. Also I enjoyed reporting back to the ship and venturing into the rooms of the crew, sort of delving into their lives. I know without MP, it did subtract substantially from the gameplay, but I don't think it was ENTIRELY bad.

 

I played that planet-creature level the other day.

Unreal II does indeed look very nice. That's about all that is good about it though, IMO. Probs:
- The AI has super aim. We're talking REAL good aim here. The instant they see you they score a hit, basically.
- The movement speed is just too slow.
- On a Core 2 Duo it still can take a minute to load a level !! Very little HDD activity.
- On release, it was quite buggy. I had a AXP w/ R8500. The robot world was totally bugged out and unplayable. Not only was the rendering screwed all up, but it was at about 2 fps and the audio was messed up as well.
- Weapons aren't all that great. Especially that ASMD wannabe that shoots the super slow bolts.
- A few really cool and innovative levels were cut from the final product. They were in PR stuff and previews. Some asteroid jumping level and other stuff.
- Unreal was almost more about exploration of a weird alien planet with action thrown in. Unreal II is more like a run and gun shooter. It was also a LOT more seamless. The two games are so very much different. I think I liked Unreal's style better.
- The stoopid guys-in-mega-metal-armor-battle-suits theme arrived. I really don't like that look at all.

!!SPOILERS!! (highlight it)
- The end of the game is just odd too. Everyone dies, except you and it just sorta ends. After that half way attempt at RPG character development it was very disappointing... -

I found this user review on Gamespot after playing the other day. Sums up how I feel about the game very nicely. I like it when I actually find a well written piece on Gspot.
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/unreal2theawakening/player_review.html?id=424479

 

I always felt Unreal1 was paced too slow. It certainly did impress me more when I first played it, but I just got bored half-way through.
Unreal2 couldve been alot better, sure, but atleast it kept me interested long enough to finish it. The only times I had problems with the game was one of the first bosses, I simply dint knew if I could even damage it or had to search for the right way of harming it and the last section (spaceship) with the weird vortex-weapons. Everything else was doable with 1-2 attempts.
Agree with most of the negative points and especially that U1 and U2 were vastly different games - but both were/are way better than Doom3 and that game got really skewed ratings everywhere, would be interesting to see how it would fare if it would be reviewed today, way after the realease-hype died.