Mike Capps Admits That Epic Has Been Neglecting Unreal

I don't have much faith in Epic to get a new UT right after the UT3 debacle.

As far as I'm concerned, since I don't play single player games and only play online multiplayer (to satiate the needs of my e-penis), the only value of an Unreal 3 is that it could serve to introduce new people to the series and be an advertisement for a UT4. However, I do think that at this point they would need to make an Unreal 3 for that purpose.

If they really wanted to do it, I think it should be PC-only and that, from a marketing perspective, they need to treat it as an almost entirely new title lacking a built-in fanbase. Unreal 3 needs to be heavily marketed as a hyped-up premier title to appeal to the new generation of gamers who've never heard of Unreal or Unreal Tournament. The movement and feel of the game play should be that of the near-perfect UT99. I'm not sure it should be called Unreal 3, either, since the target audience wouldn't be familiar with the previous games. Perhaps call it "Unreal Revolution" or "Unreal Rebirth" or "Unreal Extreme". Include a Deathmatch component.

Follow it up with Unreal Tournament Revolution/Rebirth or whatever you call it. How about calling it Unreal Tournament Extreme with a large caption reading, "The return of the greatest online multiplayer first person shooter cybersport."

Also keep it as a PC only title, get rid of Gamespy, and go with a UWindows-based user interface. They also need an online community focus; it should have built in chat windows and IRC access. Unlike UT3, it needs to be polished and perfect. I think it should include options for both UT99 and UT 2004 style movement (selectable by server admins and the market can decide which is better for which game types) and the gametypes should be Deathmatch, Capture-the-Flag, UT99 style Domination, Bombing Run, Assault, Invasion, and Onslaught with hoverboards.

For marketing, they should promote UT4 as an online multiplayer cybersport.

One other thing they need to do is to make it easier for server admins to host and manage servers and also make it easier for people to manage custom content. UT3's file structure was a huge mess. I say give the big middle finger to Microsoft and their Application Data folder and return to the UT99/UT 2004 file structure. Maps go in the Maps folder, textures go in the Textures folder, etc.

Unreal Revolution? lol... I don't even know where to begin with how derivative that is.

It was one thing when there was maybe one title out there using "revolution", when our mod team did it 6 years ago. Today? Different story.

The bigger point here is that if you want to market Unreal to a new crowd, and you don't want to call it Unreal 3 because that would make it seem like a sequel, a name like "Rebirth" tagged on the end ain't gonna be any better.

If it's going to be Unreal on a new engine, then simply "Unreal" will do. Plenty of products have been created with the same name as something 10 or more years older, why not Unreal?

And if you MUST tag something on the end to differentiate it, then make it relevant to the story. Unreal: Desolation or Unreal: Prisoner 849 or something.

I would say Unreal-3, but the prospects of seeing Unreal become a Console explusive, mediocre GoW'alike corridor shooter where the hero is a steroid popping douche, well, do not want..

I have no faith that the Epic of today would do anything other than the above, it seems to be all they know anymore.

well, supposedly Gears is CliffyB's dream game, so the only conclusion is that we would have gotten it with Unreal had the "'Roid Popping" technology been available at the time.

Anyone else rather want them to do something with that Samaritan demo?
( At least the character isn't on steroids, eh Epic ;P )

Grobut said:

where the hero is a steroid popping douche, well, do not want..

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Like as always since UT?
Seeing GOW2 and GOW3 maybe they can make an Unreal game with an interesting story - for once.
Can't wait for GOW3 now anyway.

UBerserker said:

Like as always since UT?

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1) UT != Unreal.
2) The protagonist in either of the Unreal games is not a 'steroid popping douche', including Unreal 2, which came after UT.

UBerserker said:

Seeing GOW2 and GOW3 maybe they can make an Unreal game with an interesting story - for once.

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Did you play Unreal?

Unreal had an interesting main story? Unless you take something such as "escape from a prison ship crashed on a planet, find a way to escape" remotely interesting.

Also I don't get the "steroid popping douche" thing (not that I care). Anything is better than a mute character.

Unreal's story was mostly hidden in the translator messages.
The whole "escape from the planet" thing was maybe the goal of the game, but not the story.

Translator events had sub-stories, and the only real and working sub-story is the Kira one across the Sunspire/Bluff section (also the Dark Arena messages and the Skaarj experiments are worth being mentioned). Then you get all stupid crap like bathing in the water which causes Skaarj to magically pop up from nowhere; and I hated those magical stuff. Maybe because Na Pali is mystic, but come on, that's cheap storytelling.

Most of the stuff is left unexplained of course. And that is what you get if you change the main concept of the game several times. Maybe Epic should pass through all those kind of troubles like what happened during the development of Unreal, and they'll end up with something just as good. But now they're sticking to one-tricky pony ideas.

The main story is Prisoner 849's own goal - escape from Na Pali. It's the most important thing he/the player has to do.

P.S.: the less is said about the story of RTNP the better is.

Flame me if you want but I still have not completed the original Unreal yet. I find it extremely boring, and I am a sucker for old school games. Probably the reason why I like Unreal 2 since it was my first venture into the series.

Capt.Toilet said:

Flame me if you want but I still have not completed the original Unreal yet. I find it extremely boring, and I am a sucker for old school games. Probably the reason why I like Unreal 2 since it was my first venture into the series.

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To be honest I never finished Unreal myself, after Quake 2 the combat in Unreal felt rather... wonky. The enemies were a little bit 'meh' too.
Quake 1 had great baddies, every one of them required a different tactic to defeat, and excelled in a different environment / map architecture.
It's also because I've always preferred smaller more dense and focused map design over large open spaces that take a long time to traverse.
Granted, the colorful graphics of Unreal were a real breath of fresh air after the brownness of Quake, and the new-age atmosphere present in UE1 games is something special -- I'm sure the music has a great deal to do with that too.

I'm a big fan of implicit storytelling though, I recently played trough the Stalker games and I think those are a good example of storytelling in a video game that doesn't try to be cinematic.

On a sidenote, I like how in Unreal, some weapons are centered and others are 3 quarters. The razorjack is awesome to switch to, the minigun had a certain charm aswell. Having that variety in weapon positioning is kinda neat.

Capt.Toilet said:

Flame me if you want but I still have not completed the original Unreal yet. I find it extremely boring, and I am a sucker for old school games. Probably the reason why I like Unreal 2 since it was my first venture into the series.

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I've never even played it. And I really don't care to.

Spiney said:

To be honest I never finished Unreal myself, after Quake 2 the combat in Unreal felt rather... wonky.

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Quake 2 felt to me really boring and ugly, full of industrial garbage. Totally killed the feel of Quake 1.

I take System Shock, Deus Ex and Unreal over any Doom, Quake (except the first one) and HL1 (ugh).
Nowadays combat in Unreal is now much better than all of those games combined with the new SP packs and fixes. It is still the most fun FPS I've played, maybe with the temporary exceptions of Sam and Bulletstorm.

UBerserker said:

Anything is better than a mute character.

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Only for those who lack own personality that cannot be put into the game's character.

I can understand if one is a 13 year old who hasn't developed his own personality nor found his role in life to enjoy actions and decision of characters in a game.

EDIT:
THis goes alongside (to a minor degree) the facts a study revealed that people with a strong personality and a happy life tend to make their avatars in games as close to their own appearance as possible and people unhappy in life and having a weak personality tend to creat awesome heroes and take weird names (Mega_Killer_666) that are the opposite of themselves.

elmuerte said:

Unreal's story was mostly hidden in the translator messages.
The whole "escape from the planet" thing was maybe the goal of the game, but not the story.

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Not even that, the Translator messages just served as exposition dumps, they where few and far between mostly (some locations like the ISV Kran had more, but usually they where scarse), and usually didn't tell you much, just small glimpses of backstory or hints at what to do next, but you could really have figured most of it out yourself without reading a single one of them.

The real story was the world you found yourself on, you experianced the story by playing it, Unreal was really a prime example of interactive story telling, where the journey is more important than the goal, and the experiances you took away from it more important than any plot device.

This is also why it's so re-playable, knowing the ending doesen't spoil it, even knowing by heart where the enemies are and where to go next doesen't, not really, because it's the journey and the atmosphere that carries it.


This is something most games today fail at, it's great to have a good story, but it will only be interesting once, you need something else to survive a second look, be that extremely enjoyable combat/gameplay (which they ruin with hard-scripting everything that happens, or by relying on puzzles you will know the trick to, making it boring and predictable the next time), or by failing to create a really interesting atmosphere and world, and a real journey worth embarking on (too short, too cliche, too broken up by scripted events, QTE's and cutscenes that don't bear a second glance or play).

Unreal may have been short on plot, relying instead on baser instincts of survival to keep the action going, at it's heart it really was just a tale of surviving on a hostile alien world. But games are in a unique position to tell such a tale, because we don't just sit on our arses and watch it, we sit on our arses and actually interact with it, experiance it, shape it with our own actions, and the hallmark of a great game is one that understands this, and makes it fun.

Capt.Toilet said:

Flame me if you want but I still have not completed the original Unreal yet. I find it extremely boring, and I am a sucker for old school games. Probably the reason why I like Unreal 2 since it was my first venture into the series.

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Unreal 2 old skool? LOL

Sir_Brizz said:

Well, if you did read the translator messages, you could imagine your character thinking "maybe there is an escape pod on that ship" and thus you end up at the ISV Kran.

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If you mean me, i did read them, all of them.

My point was simply that you didn't have to, the map design and atmosphere building was so well exicuted, you could basically figure out what was going on even if you didn't.

Spiney said:

To be honest I never finished Unreal myself, after Quake 2 the combat in Unreal felt rather... wonky. The enemies were a little bit 'meh' too.
Quake 1 had great baddies, every one of them required a different tactic to defeat, and excelled in a different environment / map architecture.
It's also because I've always preferred smaller more dense and focused map design over large open spaces that take a long time to traverse.
Granted, the colorful graphics of Unreal were a real breath of fresh air after the brownness of Quake, and the new-age atmosphere present in UE1 games is something special -- I'm sure the music has a great deal to do with that too.

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Eh, they are quite differen't games, and if what you really want from an SP game is combat, combat, and some more combat, then Q2 would probably be more your thing, because Q2 was all about the action, and actually offered very little aside from that.

Unreal focused much more on exploration and immersion, which are things i prefer in an SP game, i prefer to take my time with SP games and actually dislike unrelenting combat or beeing driven along the plot at a fast pace, so Unreal was more up my alley.