THE BEST OF UNREAL TOURNAMENT 99

On the Future of Unreal Tournament

PLANET UNREAL el 05-01-2009, 16:17 (UTC)

There wasn’t much festive cheer around the Unreal community towards the end of 2007 – in fact there was probably enough doom and gloom to result in a few regular posters on the Epic Forums receiving a visit or two from the Ghost of Christmas Past. While reviews of Unreal Tournament 3 have been mainly positive, scores are generally lower than previous UT titles – UT3’s MetaScore is a pretty tepid 83 at the moment (versus UT2004’s 93).

I have a personal disdain for review scores in general, reflected by the ridiculous ratings system I adopted for our UT3 review. If I were to stage some sort of armed coup and take over IGN’s editorial departments for a day, I’d probably insist that the silly percentage system were replaced with “recommended”, “highly recommended” or nothing at all. It’s pretty stupid to say that UT2004 was 10% better when it was released than UT3 is now. What the MetaScore shows however is that critical reaction to UT3 on the whole hasn’t been as great as it was to UT2004, even if almost everyone agrees that UT3 is the better game. Admittedly there are some sites like 1Up that have awarded it stupidly low scores –presumably due to either a deep disliking of Unreal Tournament or a massive hard-on for downgrading triple-A titles – but many other sites have consistently put UT3 at 8/10 rather than 9.

And 1Up’s dickery also can’t explain the fact that UT3 hasn’t been selling brilliantly so far – according to the NPD Group the PC version shifted just over 30,000 copies in the US in November. Admittedly though these numbers only cover a sample of American retailers and don’t include those maverick whizz-kids that buy their games online or via our marvellous Direct2Drive service.

This has led some to speculate that this might be “it” for Unreal Tournament; that Epic might choose not to make another UT when for the same money they could create a Gears of War game that would move millions of copies and buy Lamborghinis for everyone.

For what it’s worth I don’t think we need to worry about this. For starters, the grumbling in the community at the moment is nothing compared to the explosion of wrath that would occur were Epic to march UT off into the sunset at gunpoint. To paraphrase Mark Rein in the “History of UT” feature – “I can’t ever see Epic not making Unreal Tournament games.”

Maybe it’s premature to even talk about a sequel at this stage. UT3 is still a massive amount of fun, and that’s only going to get better when you factor in mods and Epic’s outstanding post-release support. Nevertheless, I’m going to be awkward and talk about sequels anyway and say that I think we’re pretty much guaranteed more Unreal Tournament games in the future. The only question is whether it’s Unreal Tournament 4 or Unreal Tournament 3.5. Epic is still contracted for another Unreal game under Midway, and it’ll be interesting to see whether they decide to go all-out on another full title or go for a UT2004-style game which builds on UT3’s many successes. In their recent GDC 2008 post-mortem of UT3 Epic pointed out several failings of the game that could easily be fixed given another year of development time.

With that in mind, the rest of this article is going to focus on a few suggestions to make the next UT game all the better.

For all the noise that was made about UT3’s single player campaign before release, I think it’s fair to say that it was one area of the game that didn’t live up to the hype. It was essentially a glorified ladder campaign wrapped around a generic sci-fi story with unlikeable, clichéd characters. The campaign missions don’t really do the rest of the game justice, especially when you’re ridiculously outmanned in many of the team games. Driving around Torlan in a Leviathan while getting raped by a dozen Krall stands out as one of the worst experiences in any Unreal game.

The game’s called Unreal Tournament, but there’s no tournament. I would say that the single player campaign in any sequel to UT3 needs a serious re-think. Go back to the central idea of UT – you’re a (probably unfeasibly muscle-bound) future person who enters the Liandri Tournament for some reason – and take it from there. Unreal Championship 2’s storyline isn’t in any danger of winning a Pulitzer Prize – you’re the typical fallen hero type who’s out to kill current tourney champion (and also Nakhti Empress) Miss Evil McBoobs and claim the crown for yourself. However UC2’s story does drive the action forward and isn’t quite as ridiculous as it might be because it’s based around the idea of a tournament. When you’re capping a flag in UC2, you’re doing it because it’s part of the competition. This stops the story becoming a tangled ball of contrivances in which your enemy’s high-tech respawners are somehow powered by a rag on a sodding pole.

A lot of cool stuff seems to have been cut from UT3’s single player campaign too – there was pre-release talk of real persistence and changing allegiance between corporations, which didn’t make it into the box. Features like these might’ve gone some way towards redeeming this part of the game. A proper ending for the single player story would also be nice. I’m all for killing off the annoying sidekick characters, but it’d be nice to add Malcolm to that list too. Presumably the final showdown with Malcolm was cut to avoid tearing a hole in the fabric of the universe, as Malcolm is alive and well in Unreal Championship 2, which is set after UT3.

Also, more Xan please.

Conquest mode was a big talking point for UT fans around them time that UT3 was first announced – from what was revealed early on, Conquest seemed to be a fusion of Onslaught and XMP across massive maps populated by a number of bases. Perhaps the biggest mistake made with regards to Conquest was talking about it before it’d even been implemented. When the first UT3-related interviews went out in 2005, developers gleefully talked about Conquest’s resource management (Tarydium) and real-time necrification across huge maps as control shifted between different teams. It even saw UT venturing into greasy neckbearded MMO territory, with talk of playing “campaigns” across multiple Conquest maps. It’s unknown whether this gametype was ever anything more than a twinkle in Steve Polge’s eye, but regardless it looks like Conquest was hacked off like a gangrenous limb pretty early on in development, likely dismissed as being too ambitious an endeavour.

A pretty consistent complaint from reviewers is that UT3 is basically more of the same. While this is great if you already like UT, the inclusion of a truly epic vehicular gametype like Conquest would’ve certainly made UT stand out a little more from the crowd of shooters that emerged in the latter half of 2007, as well as doing something to placate the gaggle of disgruntled reviewers calling for the return of Double Domination and Bombing Run.

Conquest sounded awesome, and given enough time I’m sure Epic can make it awesome. Let’s bring this one back for UT4, guys.

Epic struck gold with the original UT’s “UWindows” interface. It was clean, intuitive and familiar to PC gamers. In fact, back in 2000 the only thing setting it apart from the average online gamer’s Windows 98 desktop was the lack of Bonzi Buddy, Gator and some sort of hideous Active Desktop page. For a PC shooter, the UWindows interface just worked, which is why there’s been constant whining ever since to bring it back in UT2003, 2004 and now UT3.

Of course, UT isn’t “just” a PC shooter anymore, and there are console versions to think about. Nevertheless, even console reviewers have criticized the game’s interface, and Epic themselves have admitted that the out-of-the-box UI “isn’t perfect” (with Epic’s president later going on to call it “fucked”). So although I don’t hate the UT3 interface, and the lack of UWindows in any sequel certainly isn’t going to stop anyone buying it, it’s still going on the list. At the very least an improvement over UT3’s grey-and-red soup would be appreciated.

It’s easy to concentrate on the negatives, but I’m convinced that the future is still bright for Unreal. With more bonus packs and mods on the way, there’s plenty of life left in the latest instalment in the series, and there’s sure to be more Unreal games on the way. The only question at this point is what direction the series takes next...

<-Volver

Siguiente->