The new Unreal Tournament (Unreal Engine3) new screens!

Inovation is always possible, one can still do new stuff, otherwise I don't see the point in making a sequel instead of a patch/epansion pack.

I'd go as far as saying, not only innovation is possible, but I'd say that we have only scrathed the surfase of games in these past 20 years.

People seem to forget all the time how infant game industry still is, it's like people in 1910 said "I think this will be the high of movies and I'm not seeing it to go anywhere from this point", so be reasonable, it's just a innovative depression time right now, till the old school game designers like Peter Molyneux, John Carmack and others who have been in the business from the beginning move away and give room for new designers with fresh ideas.

And besides UT and Half-Life are cornerstones of this time just like Doom was back in the day and what that means is that we have a sturdy foundations and we can build all kinds of wacky strucktures on these fine foundations.

FPS Singleplay stuff yes, a lot to do with but with fast paced arcade action multiplay games like Quake or UT ? I dont see that much possible

New gametype ? Offer a hardcore player CTF and some weird new gamemode and he wont even try to play the new mode, hell just stick to CTF right away...

UT1 and 2004 both have so incredibly many options and gametypes that the entire playercommunity is split up online, you may have 1000 players online for example but theyll barely see eachother because they are all spread out trough dozens of different gametypes and mutators

Adding more wouldnt really help. Im suprised they havent deleted more gametypes actually

When pushing game to a genre like "fastpaced arcade multiplayer game" it hardly leaves any space to move, and no wonder there isn't any innovation, if they move a step to realistic they lose the arcade and it no longer is the"fastpaced arcade multiplayer game", besides Epic told that they are going to change the "fastpaced" to bit more slow paced and more in your face action than the current snipers nest that it is.

There are plenty of ways to improve this genre, like example vehicles when they were introduced in UT2004, they are in their first release so how can you say that no innovation happens? Or are people thinking that innovation is like Zelda 1 (topscroller), Zelda 2 (sidescroller) and Windwaker (completely 3d)?

It's not that the developer doesn't do anything new, it's the players who don't use it, like Counter-Strike you could still say that it's completely the same game it was years ago, AK47, MP5 and de-dust.

Ofcourse the problem is players wont use whatever is introduced, apart from a few exceptions. Onslaught was an exception but didnt at all appeal to the already excisting public of UT, it only appealed to new people. All serious players ignored it

The game currently already is deadslow compared to UT1, suddenly making it another type of game and more semi realistic (like there are dozens of games already) is not going to help. You will seriously piss of all your excisting customers/players by doing that, is that the way to go ?...Youll get pissed of people, flame and bad mouth to mouth publicity

You want the middle way, enough new and fun stuff to attract new people yet still please the old group and let them move along instead of loosing them, but that isnt simple to do. Just polishing it to death might be the best in such case, quality vs quantity

Yeah but think about this, most of your core players are happy, but some say that original UT was better than this one, some new players leave because there isn't much to keep their minds occupied other than the onslaught, and core players will be pissed if you change the game. Which comes to the conclusion that you are damned if you don't, and you are damned if you do. So why not change the game around, see all the happy people coming in, see HC players leave and badmouth, and the old players won't return. What did you actually lose/win?

That is the hard part of series, you can't steer too far too fast, but you can go pretty far with little steps.

You should sometimes go and check some MMOPRG forums where this "problem" is best seen, some say that the game is gods creation and best there is, some say that the game is worst ever and they hate it and the players, why should you try to please both of them. There will always be badmouthing, HC gamers and newbies.

Kosmo the "video games philosoph"

looks like i need a comp upgrade

Quote from Kosmo

I think Epic is too hard trying to make engine to others than to make engine for them to make the best damn game ever. They got loads of talent, but they are too committed to make a great engine for different game types.

It depends on how you look at it. It's seems to be sort of a trade off.

Epic builts their engines around the idea of licensing the engine to other developers, therefore they tend to create a more user freindly, fully-featured engine than say, id or Valve. As a result, and for good reason, Epic licenses their engines to far more developers than id or Valve.

Valve and id seem to design their engines around whatever game they are currently creating. While this seems to result in a more solid game, the engine ends up being more difficult to use and modify for the third party developer. It also seems much slower to work this way. How long were HL2 and Doom3 in development? Yeah.

And when you're a leading game developer looking to crank out AAA quality games, you pick what's best for development and the game you have in mind to make, while considering development time and cost. So far UE3 seems to be the prefered choice of the three.

Quote from mikezilla

well unreal 2 looked amazing and beyond anything ever concieved when they revealed it.when it came out it was old hat and sorta crappy.

That doesn't decribe how Epic "falls behind the pack", just the aging of a game. I'm not disagreeing with you about Unreal2 though.

Let us face it, source engine has been already outdated when HL2 came out. yea, it has some cool shaders (best water effect in a game so far) and the artists have done a very good job as well. But if Valve really intends to use source for HL3 (they said so), I would say good night...

UE3 is gonna rock, but I'm not sure if Unreal 3 will do so, because Epic has some great coder but almost very few good artists. (they should recruit more mapcoreans )

Quote from sensee

(they should recruit more mapcoreans )

Then their next game would look like old industrial buildings and apartment complexs beside dried up waterways and sewers. Ooooo! Slam! lol

As over-the-top and cheesy as it is, I like the art styles of the Unreal series games. It's a refreshing break from the repetitive, "lets see how well we can render something that you'd see if you walked down the street in real life".

yea it's probably a matter of taste :wink:

I don't like these futuristic overused-displacementmapping landscapes with all these abstract looks-like-they-used-maya objects and stuff. Maybe unreal 3 is gonna be a bit diffrent but it surely remains "unreal".

I agree that these city17 stuff is definitly getting boring, but when HL2 came out it looked pretty cool.

I think, according to my experience, that modeling/mapping/texturing "real world" stuff is indeed harder than sci-fi stuff.

Realism is easier to create, for fantasy/sci fi/whatever you need to design elements yourself, from the smallest thing to the biggest. With realism you can just copy what you see, the things you actually see you dont have to design yourself, only recreate...

The initial design and styling process is one of the most complicated and hardest parts of level design while realism barely requires that process..

They used max btw

It's a double edged sword, when you create sci fi stuff you have the liberty but also the problem to create an individual style. When you create realistic stuff the style is already given but you are forced to do it "like this". Everybody knows how the real world looks like and you can see when something just doesn't look "real". Achieving this real look and level of detail is hard and doesn't make it easier than Sci-Fi themed games/art/levels.

I want to point out, that creating real world stuff isn't just copying the real world. If you create a building for example, you have to take care about the right proportions (a door can't be 3m high), you MUST use photorealstic textures and you have to design a believable architecture because if the player in a "real world" game is walking through a weird and unrealistic looking building, he will notice it, but if he's walking through a weird building in a sci-fi / fantasy game, he will take it as a part of the fictional world.

What I wanted to say is that for a bad mapper it's much easier to make sci-fi stuff look good than realistic stuff. But on the the other hand, a well designed sci-fi game needs just as much talent as a well designed realistic world. So FrieChamp you're right :wink:

(blah forgive for my bad english )

And one of the biggest problems creating realistic sci-fi setting is that, if we are speaking logically, all unreal games don't look anything like a sci-fi, more like cyberpunk (a sci-fi fantasy) future will propably look more like in Star Trek with spiffy interiors, no pipes and steam I'm afraid.

Problem being that the map maker should be an arcitecht AND have very solid knowledge of current technology and history to use as a point to compare the future styles of interior/exterior decoration, that is why they like to create fantasy settings and not hyper realistic sci-fi settings.

But this would be something you all already know, I just said it out loud *blush*

But I like to play with idea that was Source outdated when HL2 came out or was it our hardware that was actually outdated when it came out? There were some pretty advanced stuff, but everything was scaled down in the hopes that pople wouldn't complain that it doesn't run well on any machine. Something that they learned from Doom3 perhaps? I mean, does it run well even current machines? The latest test at Tom's HArdware show something like 60 fps in Doom3.

Epic makes solid technology with minimal risk, the decision to hop in the physics card bandwagon shows mentality like that, they don't want to sacrifise their precious physics so they have support for them IF they ever become popular, and the fact that it is the most licenced engine makes it all that much easier to do so, they don't have to be afraid of thta flopping because of minimal support.

This is very wise when compared to the competition, HL2 was an instant success even before it was released, it has thousands of fan sites and registered fans in them.

Doom3, well people were looking forward to it becuase of the "cutting edge" technology, and it was a blockbuster. Epic has their core players and not that much competition actually, the gamytype they have is actually unique, their only competition at the same genre was quake 3, I'm not counting HL2 and it's mods since they are more towards the realistical shooters than UT and it's arcade style gameplay.

Using photo tex, correct door sizes and square rooms is dead and dead easy compared to basically being a concept artist for every single element in the world, doorhandles and lightswitch designs included

Non realism might indeed end up more unique and thus more artist specific but on the other hand you have this problem for any theme so also for realism. Style <> Theme. HL2 city 17 for example looks pretty realistic (apart from the zombies and whatever:) yet it feels different. It has a certain style layed on top of it, the colors, the feel and atmosphere.

Getting all your level designers to work in the exact same feel and style is a prob that you always have. I admit that is easier to do with realism tho but not non excistant

Both themes are just as hard for a bad mapper btw

Depends on the dude and his talent and prefference

The cyberpunk stuff is true and Epics and DE's fault, not all Unreal games look like that, eg Unreal 1, but unfortunally theyve dumped just about every castle or inca temple/whatever other theme..

Doom3 and Quake4 have just as many pipes

Usage of pipes or not is a concept thing, nothing to do with sci fi theme or not, pipes/steam etc are style elements and an art direction

Epic just bought the Reality Engine. http://www.beyondunreal.com/

lolololol