I spent a half hour writing a very similar post to this at my school comps, and when I tried to post, it logged me out... so I logged back in, where it then told me the forum was invalid, so I went back and bye-bye post. Argh. It won't do it from my home comp though. 
So here goes.
Epic needs to make sure that they do UT2007 right, the first time, on the head if they wish to bring the two sides (Oldschool UT and the 2kx crowd) together in one perfect, harmonious game... or to baptize them in blood, depending on your barbarity. In thise rather lengthy post, I will pinpoint 10 places where Epic should make sure aren't overlooked.
1) Characters. We want Gladiators. Don't give us bipedal tanks passing off as humans. Don't give us Gorge. DO give us Mr. Crow, cause he's one of the few things good to come out of the abortion known as UT2k3. DO give us Xan. DO give us female models who look like they can fight and aren't merely in for Tits and Ass Factors. DO give the characters PERSONALITY. The fact is, in UT, you had four models and a myriad of skins, but each character had a PERSONALITY. You went through the SP ladder, and you could click each opponent and get BACKGROUND on them. It wasn't just clumps of Geneboosted Humans, or Genetic Experiments gone Awry. Make them badass killers in Armor and now we're talking. Then inject them with personality and it's perfect.
2) Necris. Keep them simple, stupid. Black and Gray, unless it's a Teamskin, obviously. No sissy emo-punk looking crap. If I want that, I can go to my mall, where a kid in a Trenchcoat with Blue Hair and Black Mascara will cry and tell me their life sucks while I can hear "Crawling" from Linkin Park blasting over their $400 iPods while they show me their arms full of failed attempts to remove themselves from the Gene Pool. Give us our Phayder, give us our Blademaidens, and keep it simple, please.
3) Character Visibility. This was no problem in UT. You could clearly see your foes across the map on CTF-Face when zoomed in, right down to their faces. You could clearly tell if they were on your side or not. In UT200x, that's IMPOSSIBLE to do unless you have Dynamic Mesh LOD set to highest - and then with the dark, murky colors it's still very tough to do. Which led to the community to create brightskins, which make me want to puke every single ****ing time I see them. Get it right, get it BRIGHT, and save us from needing more uber-1337 bull**** like this.
4) Character Scale. Assuming I'm Six Feet tall ingame, I should be roughly as high as a Scorpion, or maybe a little over it. I shouldn't be giant next to some things, but dwarfed next to others. Pick a scale and stick to it (12 UUnits was real easy - One UUnit = 1 inch. Simple!) and THEN model things around that scale, as opposed to changing the scale before the game ships, which is painfully obvious to anyone who played Beta 927.
5) Maps. The community is VERY scared here. I'll be blunt: The general consensus is your maps suck. Now without DE, you really need to step up to the plate and hit one for the Gipper here. Give us maybe 35-45 maps we can all crow over, as opposed to 85 of varying quality that will only see a third of that total in actual play a year after release. The community is talented and will take care of the rest, trust us. And if you want to release more, there's nothing wrong with Bonus Packs - UT nearly DOUBLED its map count through them, and more Bonus Packs is ALWAYS a good thing, fellas.
6) Fall Damage. OK, this is one area where the Shield Gun will be sorely missed, as I play a lot of Onslaught and this thing's saved me from probably hundereds of falls that should have killed me. But I really didn't have a choice, not like I had a parachute (Hmm, that's an interesting alternative. You listening, Epic?) or something. Anyway, let's say I fall 300 feet. This fall will kill me, but while falling and quickly seeing my life flash before my eyes, I spot an enemy combatant! I manage to steer myself right onto his head and do... 1 point of damage and then bounce off? What the ****? If I fell 300 feet in real life and landed on someone, I'd probably not only die anyway unless he broke my fall, but I'd probably also kill him. For the love of god, if you're falling, momentum should be translated to soft, fleshy targets like bodies, and maybe even light Vehicles. (If a body slams into the top of a Manta from the heavens above, I could see a nice, large dent in the frame of that Manta, along with it taking 25 or 30 points of damage...) Some people would LIVE for these kinds of frags, too, I'm sure, especially if they bounce back up a considerable distance after they hit. That'll always be good for a laugh.
7) Poly Useage. Let's not be wasteful here fellas. Poly Useage should be judicious and well-applied. What good is a 6500 Poly First-Person model of a gun if that player will only see 4500 of it on 90 FOV? Lop some off and save us a little unnecessary calculation. However, I don't think this'll be as much of a problem, as nearly everything will be tricked out 10 ways to Sunday, with Bumpmapping, Specular Mapping, Phong Shading... but don't go overboard on these either, lest the game become too "loud" for some.
8) Weapon Balancing. It's good to know UT2007 will be more "In Your Face" like UT99 was, cause let's face it, 2kx is so Hitscan dominant it's not funny. I play at our Local FragBU every week and some of the players on there (whom I'll not name; they know who they are) are so damn good at Hitscan that they can virtually shut down whole teams unless a similar player is on that team as well. I'll REFUSE to play certain maps with certain people playing simply because of this. The Shock Rifle and the Lightning Gun have become WMD's when in the hands of these people; the latter for its High ROF and relatively High Damage; the latter because it's got High Damage for regular shots, let alone the Headshot potential. Wanna fix the Shock? Keep the Damage, lower the ROF to the original UT, and voila, magically fixed, STILL EFFECTIVE shock without it being completely nerfed. Maybe the Sniper Rifle should have a cone of firing, much like the current Assault Rifle does, if it's "fired from the hip" - that is, not zoomed in, not kneeling. That will balance THAT out, while still making it a deadly weapon.
9) Headshots. A little off the beaten path here, but Headshots simply don't work quite as well as they used to. While I realize with UT it was a bit cheap and pretty easy to pop heads, in 2kx some shots that SHOULD... don't. If I shoot someone in the jaw in real life, it's probably going to incapacitate or kill them. It's not going to be like any other old body hit. Simply put, if you hit the head ANYWHERE, it should be a Headshot. Forehead = Headshot. Nose = Headshot. Ear = Headshot, though in this case if it Grazed them, I could see it doing less damage, since potentially it won't go through the brain. Simply put, if this thing touches the brain at some point, it's a Headshot. If your Physics is capable of getting people to stick to Scorpion Shears, this should be easy to do a trace to see where the bullet would go through the model. Half the fun of UT was running around and dealing death like this, a feeling that's oh-so-missed in the current installment.
10) Play Balancing. This is a tough cookie. Play Balance could make or break this game. Some people won't play Onslaught because most of the maps suck Balancewise. (ArcticStronghold, I'm looking at YOU.) Some people won't play VCTF because 1) No good maps really exist for it and 2) They thing getting run over by vehicles is a rather cheap way to get a frag. And let's not forget some of the strategies everyone worth their VCTF salt has seen, like Manta Runs. There needs to be a fine balance here between tactical options and fairness, Epic. Perhaps the Manta can be used for troop Transport, but the "Magnetic Field" or whatever of the Flag makes it impossible to do these sorts of tactics - or maybe it simply slows the Manta down, because in a case like that, unless you can get ahead of it, or have a Cicada or something in the skies, as soon as that Manta is out of your LOS, your flag is as good as capped. Unreal Warfare, which is so ****ing promising, will be CRIPPLED if it becomes exploitable like Bombing Run did. Get it right, and get it right the FIRST time. Try everything a player will do. Then try things a player probably WOULDN'T do on Intuition. Then have SOMEONE ELSE do things. A demo here before a full release would be helpful, because the Community has a knack for finding these things for you and both parties win - they get a taste of the game, you get free bug reports and valuable, precious feedback.
11) INI settings/Tweaking. I'm going to get flak for this from some of the community, I know. But I can't stand people who will have mega-powerful computers - Dual Core Processors, Dual GeForce 7800 GTXs, 2 Gigs of RAM... and then play with everything Off/Low/Minimal so they get hundereds of Frames Per Second. It's a waste of goddamn hardware. I'm a firm believer in playing with the stuff on if you can, so a small suggestion: Make some settings forced if your hardware passes a certain spec! A 7800 GTX will take almost no hit from Textures regardless of size, so force them to be at least Normal! A Athlon FX-57 should be able to play the game on damn near supreme settings, so if one of those is under the hood, don't let them turn everything off. Play with a sense of fairness if you're going to use that hardware! What happened to the days of "As long as it's over 30 FPS?" Oh wait, I know what happened: They went out the window, thanks to that pro attitude of "Win at all costs." You can bet I'm going to upgrade my system to run the stuff on High - and then you can bet I'm going to TURN it to High. Give my computer a workout, my eyes a treat, and my sense of realism shattered. Not Muddy Textures, no details, and crap visuals. If you want that, go back to Doom 1/2 or Quake 1/2.
And now I bring this long, long post to a close. I welcome any thoughts and/or feedback from my fellow forumers on this, as well as criticism, or plain old discussion. Hopefully someone from Epic will see this and consider some of these points as well.
After all, we're telling you what we want... you're the ones who are delivering it to us. How well we applaud is directly proportional to how well you satisfy the majority of the community...
So here goes.
Epic needs to make sure that they do UT2007 right, the first time, on the head if they wish to bring the two sides (Oldschool UT and the 2kx crowd) together in one perfect, harmonious game... or to baptize them in blood, depending on your barbarity. In thise rather lengthy post, I will pinpoint 10 places where Epic should make sure aren't overlooked.
1) Characters. We want Gladiators. Don't give us bipedal tanks passing off as humans. Don't give us Gorge. DO give us Mr. Crow, cause he's one of the few things good to come out of the abortion known as UT2k3. DO give us Xan. DO give us female models who look like they can fight and aren't merely in for Tits and Ass Factors. DO give the characters PERSONALITY. The fact is, in UT, you had four models and a myriad of skins, but each character had a PERSONALITY. You went through the SP ladder, and you could click each opponent and get BACKGROUND on them. It wasn't just clumps of Geneboosted Humans, or Genetic Experiments gone Awry. Make them badass killers in Armor and now we're talking. Then inject them with personality and it's perfect.
2) Necris. Keep them simple, stupid. Black and Gray, unless it's a Teamskin, obviously. No sissy emo-punk looking crap. If I want that, I can go to my mall, where a kid in a Trenchcoat with Blue Hair and Black Mascara will cry and tell me their life sucks while I can hear "Crawling" from Linkin Park blasting over their $400 iPods while they show me their arms full of failed attempts to remove themselves from the Gene Pool. Give us our Phayder, give us our Blademaidens, and keep it simple, please.
3) Character Visibility. This was no problem in UT. You could clearly see your foes across the map on CTF-Face when zoomed in, right down to their faces. You could clearly tell if they were on your side or not. In UT200x, that's IMPOSSIBLE to do unless you have Dynamic Mesh LOD set to highest - and then with the dark, murky colors it's still very tough to do. Which led to the community to create brightskins, which make me want to puke every single ****ing time I see them. Get it right, get it BRIGHT, and save us from needing more uber-1337 bull**** like this.
4) Character Scale. Assuming I'm Six Feet tall ingame, I should be roughly as high as a Scorpion, or maybe a little over it. I shouldn't be giant next to some things, but dwarfed next to others. Pick a scale and stick to it (12 UUnits was real easy - One UUnit = 1 inch. Simple!) and THEN model things around that scale, as opposed to changing the scale before the game ships, which is painfully obvious to anyone who played Beta 927.
5) Maps. The community is VERY scared here. I'll be blunt: The general consensus is your maps suck. Now without DE, you really need to step up to the plate and hit one for the Gipper here. Give us maybe 35-45 maps we can all crow over, as opposed to 85 of varying quality that will only see a third of that total in actual play a year after release. The community is talented and will take care of the rest, trust us. And if you want to release more, there's nothing wrong with Bonus Packs - UT nearly DOUBLED its map count through them, and more Bonus Packs is ALWAYS a good thing, fellas.
6) Fall Damage. OK, this is one area where the Shield Gun will be sorely missed, as I play a lot of Onslaught and this thing's saved me from probably hundereds of falls that should have killed me. But I really didn't have a choice, not like I had a parachute (Hmm, that's an interesting alternative. You listening, Epic?) or something. Anyway, let's say I fall 300 feet. This fall will kill me, but while falling and quickly seeing my life flash before my eyes, I spot an enemy combatant! I manage to steer myself right onto his head and do... 1 point of damage and then bounce off? What the ****? If I fell 300 feet in real life and landed on someone, I'd probably not only die anyway unless he broke my fall, but I'd probably also kill him. For the love of god, if you're falling, momentum should be translated to soft, fleshy targets like bodies, and maybe even light Vehicles. (If a body slams into the top of a Manta from the heavens above, I could see a nice, large dent in the frame of that Manta, along with it taking 25 or 30 points of damage...) Some people would LIVE for these kinds of frags, too, I'm sure, especially if they bounce back up a considerable distance after they hit. That'll always be good for a laugh.
7) Poly Useage. Let's not be wasteful here fellas. Poly Useage should be judicious and well-applied. What good is a 6500 Poly First-Person model of a gun if that player will only see 4500 of it on 90 FOV? Lop some off and save us a little unnecessary calculation. However, I don't think this'll be as much of a problem, as nearly everything will be tricked out 10 ways to Sunday, with Bumpmapping, Specular Mapping, Phong Shading... but don't go overboard on these either, lest the game become too "loud" for some.
8) Weapon Balancing. It's good to know UT2007 will be more "In Your Face" like UT99 was, cause let's face it, 2kx is so Hitscan dominant it's not funny. I play at our Local FragBU every week and some of the players on there (whom I'll not name; they know who they are) are so damn good at Hitscan that they can virtually shut down whole teams unless a similar player is on that team as well. I'll REFUSE to play certain maps with certain people playing simply because of this. The Shock Rifle and the Lightning Gun have become WMD's when in the hands of these people; the latter for its High ROF and relatively High Damage; the latter because it's got High Damage for regular shots, let alone the Headshot potential. Wanna fix the Shock? Keep the Damage, lower the ROF to the original UT, and voila, magically fixed, STILL EFFECTIVE shock without it being completely nerfed. Maybe the Sniper Rifle should have a cone of firing, much like the current Assault Rifle does, if it's "fired from the hip" - that is, not zoomed in, not kneeling. That will balance THAT out, while still making it a deadly weapon.
9) Headshots. A little off the beaten path here, but Headshots simply don't work quite as well as they used to. While I realize with UT it was a bit cheap and pretty easy to pop heads, in 2kx some shots that SHOULD... don't. If I shoot someone in the jaw in real life, it's probably going to incapacitate or kill them. It's not going to be like any other old body hit. Simply put, if you hit the head ANYWHERE, it should be a Headshot. Forehead = Headshot. Nose = Headshot. Ear = Headshot, though in this case if it Grazed them, I could see it doing less damage, since potentially it won't go through the brain. Simply put, if this thing touches the brain at some point, it's a Headshot. If your Physics is capable of getting people to stick to Scorpion Shears, this should be easy to do a trace to see where the bullet would go through the model. Half the fun of UT was running around and dealing death like this, a feeling that's oh-so-missed in the current installment.
10) Play Balancing. This is a tough cookie. Play Balance could make or break this game. Some people won't play Onslaught because most of the maps suck Balancewise. (ArcticStronghold, I'm looking at YOU.) Some people won't play VCTF because 1) No good maps really exist for it and 2) They thing getting run over by vehicles is a rather cheap way to get a frag. And let's not forget some of the strategies everyone worth their VCTF salt has seen, like Manta Runs. There needs to be a fine balance here between tactical options and fairness, Epic. Perhaps the Manta can be used for troop Transport, but the "Magnetic Field" or whatever of the Flag makes it impossible to do these sorts of tactics - or maybe it simply slows the Manta down, because in a case like that, unless you can get ahead of it, or have a Cicada or something in the skies, as soon as that Manta is out of your LOS, your flag is as good as capped. Unreal Warfare, which is so ****ing promising, will be CRIPPLED if it becomes exploitable like Bombing Run did. Get it right, and get it right the FIRST time. Try everything a player will do. Then try things a player probably WOULDN'T do on Intuition. Then have SOMEONE ELSE do things. A demo here before a full release would be helpful, because the Community has a knack for finding these things for you and both parties win - they get a taste of the game, you get free bug reports and valuable, precious feedback.
11) INI settings/Tweaking. I'm going to get flak for this from some of the community, I know. But I can't stand people who will have mega-powerful computers - Dual Core Processors, Dual GeForce 7800 GTXs, 2 Gigs of RAM... and then play with everything Off/Low/Minimal so they get hundereds of Frames Per Second. It's a waste of goddamn hardware. I'm a firm believer in playing with the stuff on if you can, so a small suggestion: Make some settings forced if your hardware passes a certain spec! A 7800 GTX will take almost no hit from Textures regardless of size, so force them to be at least Normal! A Athlon FX-57 should be able to play the game on damn near supreme settings, so if one of those is under the hood, don't let them turn everything off. Play with a sense of fairness if you're going to use that hardware! What happened to the days of "As long as it's over 30 FPS?" Oh wait, I know what happened: They went out the window, thanks to that pro attitude of "Win at all costs." You can bet I'm going to upgrade my system to run the stuff on High - and then you can bet I'm going to TURN it to High. Give my computer a workout, my eyes a treat, and my sense of realism shattered. Not Muddy Textures, no details, and crap visuals. If you want that, go back to Doom 1/2 or Quake 1/2.
And now I bring this long, long post to a close. I welcome any thoughts and/or feedback from my fellow forumers on this, as well as criticism, or plain old discussion. Hopefully someone from Epic will see this and consider some of these points as well.
After all, we're telling you what we want... you're the ones who are delivering it to us. How well we applaud is directly proportional to how well you satisfy the majority of the community...
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