Re: The Rise and Fall of Unreal Tournament - YouTube video by GVMERS

On Wed, 25 Sep 2024 08:45:11 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

On 25/09/2024 04:31, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

"Unreal Tournament" was probably the game I played most of the
franchise. It was in many ways the last hurrah for my days of online
multiplayer gaming; I'd continue to play games online afterwards, but
with much less enthusiasm and dedication. But I played a lot of
"Unreal Tournament" online when it was new, and later using the
"Tactical Ops" mod (pretty much "Counterstrike" for UT).

>
UT is another one of those games that is considered a bit of a classic
but I've never played. I'd of course heard of it but being a online
shooter was a no buy for me. It wasn't that I didn't play multi-player
(I spent a lot of hours in MoH and CoD) but I still saw it as basically
a freebie that came with a single player game. It also wasn't something
I took seriously so just fire it up, shoot some players, die a lot and
then do something else.

It's not a game I could recommend playing _today_. It's not aged well,
at least in my opinion.

But at the time of its release (which, mind you, was four years prior
to Medal of Honor and Call of Duty), it felt very innovative. Part of
that, of course, were the Unreal-engine visuals. The Unreal engine
might not have run as smoothly as its biggest competitor, Quake, but
it _looked_ so much better. It made great use of colored lighting,
haze effects and transparencies (all things we take for granted today
but were radical advancements in '98!) and it was hard to imagine that
games might ever look bette.

But more than that, it had excellent gameplay. It was a _little_ less
frenetic than the Quake games but still very quick-paced. The level
design was jaw-dropping. The maps themselves weren't always the most
fun to play, but they were head-and-shoulders above the boring mazes
of Quake. For one thing, they were _huge_. They were also incredibly
imaginative; one level had you facing off against enemy snipers in
opposing bases, another had islands hanging in space, a third had you
leaping from the top of one skyscraper to the next.

As importantly, the AI was terrific. Yes, the meat of the game was
multiplayer, but even then it was good to fill out the ranks with
bots, and -at least before everyone mastered the mechanics- they
provided some real challenge. They also felt a lot less artificial
than bots in other games; it was sometimes hard to tell the bots apart
from players.

But these days, Unreal Tournament isn't competitive. Everything it did
has been done better by more modern games. It created a lot of what we
now take for granted in multiplayer shooters, but it lacked the polish
we expected. Going back to play it today and it feels creaky and not
very fun; it has all the bits we expect from a game of its type, but
not done to the same level we now expect.  It's not really worth going
back to give it a try anymore, except for die-hard fans and for those
with a historical bent who want to experience what passed for high-end
gaming in the late 90s.