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Sometimes

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Leo T_C_K
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Posts: 3655
Joined: Sat Aug 27, 2005 6:24 pm

Sometimes

Post by Leo T_C_K »

Sometimes I'm so sad that so many things, unreleased, or released, got lost and sometimes I wished that there were
further addons for Unreal official ones in anniversary. But now I see what's happening with other games *zenixmedia cough* and i realize...maybe its for the better because even if they'd release a good pack, the chances of ruining Unreal further would be great afterwards. So I guess 3 was right when he said that it should be just in the hands of players. He was damn right. Well, hope that stuff like "The One" gets us the needed and wanted desire by many.
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Victor Delacroix
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Joined: Sun May 21, 2006 2:16 pm

Re: Sometimes

Post by Victor Delacroix »

I think it should both be in the hands of players and third party companies.

Did I enjoy Doom 2 Sunlust (player creation)? Hell yes. Did I love Doom 2 Perdition's Gate (third party commercial)? I did too. Same if you compare a lengthy campaign for Duke3D made by players to Duke it out in DC for instance. Both would have their charm. There honestly isn't anything inherently bad in third-party commercial add-ons. It's just a matter of, whether they're quality or not, and that seems to be totally independent of the fact that they're commercial. There's no real correlation.
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Leo T_C_K
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Joined: Sat Aug 27, 2005 6:24 pm

Re: Sometimes

Post by Leo T_C_K »

The only difference between mod teams and commercial ones seem to the fact that the commercial ones can get the funding and incentive of people to stay on the team so the project gets finished. But even that is not a guarantee. If something like AWGD for Unreal was finished (and it was in developement for most of 1998 as it turned out) and released for free that would have been a different story. But I think after Joe saw what is happening to Deadly Kiss I think he's reluctant to hand something unfinished of his own anymore. Just like peridition's gate it was to be published by wizardworks. And while wizardworks was hit and miss it was after all a sub division of GTi yet those things are often de-canonized. Like with the ZeniMax, there's no Perdition's Gate or HP in their roster. I never played through them fully myself but from what I played I enjoyed PG a lot more than HP, possibly due to the fact they didn't try to replace enemy/weapon sprites like that. And the Level Design seemed better in PG as well. And better than some official id stuff.

Those were still authorized addons, although not "official" or canonical. But I have no understanding why Bethesda doesn't ackolwedge their existance at all while they put "official addons" as all kind of garbage out there, sometimes only for the reason that some team member of their own teams worked on it...

But my point is more like...someone would again decide on the canonicity of stuff and say "No, this addon is the canon now deal with it, this is the face of this game now", no matter how much it might miss the point. And no matter that these companies have zero understanding of how it was all meant to be back then.

Commercial and financial backing can make a differnce on quality of addon especially if authors are otherwise stuggling to pay a rent or whatever, then the commercial has chances of being finished and polished up.

But yea...its just...I would hate to see an official Unreal addon approved or even made by some internal team at Epic that would have cringy level titles like "The Revenge of the 1000 Nali Spirits" and it would take place in an industrial factory located on one of the floating islands on Na Pali. That kind of nonsense would then be "official and canon" both. If its a mod you can just ignore it without it being reminded on this and this wiki that its a thing now and is bundled with future products forever.

EDIT: sorr for the typos, this keyboard tends to miss key presses.

edit2: The financial backing can of course be asset or downfall too, especially if the backing suddenly stops (see the gti budget cuts and cancellation of nearly 12 unreal engine titles like emissary). Or similar business decisions that then cut developement of something, sometimes the authors are smart and rework it into something else like the game Devastation which started life as UT Addon and then a separate Unreal series spinoff/prequel, only to be dropped the Unreal title in the end when it was cancelled for good by Infogrames. The original UT Addon dealt with the non-liandri sponsored tournaments possibly even going to revisit the miners stuff "founding of deathmatch" etc, but don't quote me on that. What I got from interviewing the people was firmly that it was supposed to be focused on the street tournaments instead of the liandri stuff and was japanese/asian in theme for a large part.
When it was developed as separate game in 2001 before the ultimate (and basically second) cancellation, less is known about it because the people i spoke to had little to do with the game at that phase, but it was even advertised by Mark Rein himself, just that Infogrames then canned it saying they can't support all those unreal titles so either this or the UT PS2 Port gets dropped and of course they chose to release UT PS2 instead....
And Devastation became a "bootleg" unreal prequel lol, where you can still clearly see influences and references, like Liandri already exists as mining company etc and some of the weapons are obviously even from the ut addon days(that harpoon gun).

EDIT3: Oh and just for the info, I almost managed to get the Digitalo UT Addon recovered, but...lockdowns put stop to it just like with the other very important contact, again storages elsewhere etc...by this point some of it might be destroyed if some of those people got into financial troubles during it and couldn't pay for it anymore. That is after all what happened to that last unreal beta disc that Eric Reuter still had. Purged in a storage, but before all the lockdowns and all that.
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