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If I may suggest

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Leo T_C_K
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If I may suggest

Post by Leo T_C_K »

If I may suggest it could be good to make a section about game like Devastation by Digitalo (not digital extremes but digitalo has had past/cross developers with the unrealty team and even epic). It started life as an official UT Addon Pack that got discontinued, transformed into a new game called Unreal: Devastation before being cancelled by Infogrames and when they found new publisher they remade the game into Devastation on the UEngine 2. The same publisher then went on to publish Pariah and Warpath for Digital Extremes. Devastation still has ties to Unreal and can be seen as a prequel game due to appearance of Liandri on one of the game maps, its just a reference but it counts but the weaponry is also quite Unreal with the Bolta gun being part of the original addon thing, the game having own versions of minigun/automag (but also tons of unecessary pistols).

Pariah and warpath have instead some ties to the whole unreal warfare stuff as possible addons for that game and started developement around 2002 as did avaris that turned into Ut2005/UC2.

They are all not perfect games, but I do have soft spot for Devastation despite the bugs because in exploration and interactivity it tops the other games, yes it is incredibly buggy at times but they at least tried to use all that karma physics to full potential while other games only used them for stuff like ragdolls in practice. And honestly it was like mixing Duke3D with Unreal with the interactive cameras fire hydrants that you can make shoot water and all that kind of stuff.

Basically those games are both cancelled Unreal games/reworked into spinoffs that are not spinoffs/unreal in name. Warpath is the most stable one even though its like UT with not a "real" singleplayer.

Those games are like borderline bootleg Unreal to get around idiotic publishers not wanting to have more unreal games and prefering publishing ps2 port of UT instead of a new game.

EDIT: in a strange way, Devastation is a better Unreal "sequel" than Unreal 2 as it got released, as it is most similar in the form of the level design, not content as its not on Na Pali, it is earth and there are no aliens only human enemies robots and such, but in spirit otherwise it is much closer to original Unreal than any of the other games within the Unreal series and that says something. It has a very sandboxy feeling and cool cheats, many of them not even listed by sites. Lots of untapped potential still as hardly anybody made custom content for the game which is sad.
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Neon_Knight
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Re: If I may suggest

Post by Neon_Knight »

Let me see if I understood correctly:

* Digitalo Studios, which was developing the fifth BP for UT, then remade their project into a game tied to the Unreal world, then made its own game but with certain unofficial ties to the franchise, isn't it?
* What exactly are Pariah/Warpath roles regarding the Unreal franchise? Spiritual successors or Dolled-up installments? Or something else?

http://www.tvtropes.org/Main/SpiritualSuccessor
http://www.tvtropes.org/Main/DolledUpInstallment

EDIT: Looks like there's a problem with the URL parser...
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Leo T_C_K
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Re: If I may suggest

Post by Leo T_C_K »

It wasn't really a fifth BP (a lot of people thought that but no, in fact it was developed before the fourth bp was out iirc, more like a standalone expansion to be "maybe" bundled with another GOTY like edition. The expansion had a singleplayer element to it and focused on the non-Liandri sponsored tournaments and fights, maybe even revisiting the original miner conflicts.

Then indeed it got made into a game with a full singleplayer component, that was during 2001, then it was cancelled and turned into the new game with new publishers. This is documented in reviews and from my own personal conversations with the people who developed the game,but some of it is harder to find.

Pariah and WarPath history is even more complex and lacks proper documentation unlike this, but I was able to find some clues and infos despite the tight lipness. The story and themes in Pariah are extremely similar to unreal warfare and it seems like it was meant to be developed as some kind of spinoff/addon for WarFare at first, since UW didn't contain real singleplayer unlike the later UE3 iteration, it was only supposed to have something similar to the tournament with few cutscenes. But Pariah, whatever the original project name was, instead focused on singleplayer but obviously expanding on what Epic was building at the time. The Shroud are basically just Geist skin swaps, literally more so with warpath and its "ohm" because theyre internally called still shroud, but we know that there were late changes to warpath to make it less like a sequel to pariah on the surface.

It goes further with Pariah and WarPath because it also contains weapons cut from Unreal as well, like the bonesaw and also another weapon that can be found within warpath's files that wasn't finished but is beta pariah actually. The story in warpath also features the line "witness our perfection" and that whole robot boss was obviously meant to be tied to Liandri stuff as well. While the changes in pariah were even more heavy while devastation can be still counted as a prequel its clear those are still Unreal game spinoffs to the core. pariah's story is almost like a remake of original Unreal and it had a lot of unused content and cut content as well, evidenced by early trailers, the earliest of which is late 2004 for example. But by then it was already called Pariah and didn't have Unreal in its title.

As for the Shroud, people compared them to Necris but they are more similar to Geist which were, to begin with, like mixing Necris with the Borg or Strogg from Q2. The original necris were all gothic while the geist were technologically dependend but similar to Necris otherwise. Then it turned into the "locust" later...with GOW

There's also the original Dark Sector game developed on UE1 which was in previews called a followup to UT but it was still more like spiritual sucesor, however the game WarFrame is based on its original ideas which recently featured a UT crossover event on itself...lol
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Neon_Knight
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Re: If I may suggest

Post by Neon_Knight »

Indeed, I've just checked the respective article dates on the Unreal Wiki and Digitalo's content pack predated BP4.

We need a page on the Wiki about cancelled Unreal projects, now that I think about that. There's a lot to be documented/uncovered.
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Leo T_C_K
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Re: If I may suggest

Post by Leo T_C_K »

I've been covering that on a different forum mostly that specializes on beta/unseen content. Including some quotes from developers that I talked to.

The Pariah/warpath stuff is not with that because I didn't get to speak to anyone about it of the developers, that's simply just my observations and from the fact that they said it has been in developement since at least 2002. I used to have contact for juan pancho eekels, however I didn't speak to him for years and now I think his old adress doesn't work anymore. I wish I had asked him back then but I completely forgot/didn't realize he worked on Pariah.

There were also some cubemaps from old pariah maps that looked nothing like what's in the game now. So there were some heavy changes in place and i believe that cubemap even shows a temple of some kind and it isn't ut2 stuff.
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Leo T_C_K
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Re: If I may suggest

Post by Leo T_C_K »

Well, speak of the devil, I'm just in communication with someone from the Pariah developement, stumbled upon him by accident. I'll wait for his response on several of my questions and will post about it here.

Also, as for the pre-devastation content, the original addon pack for ut apart from featuring its own tournament (like realtournament did at the time), it also featured japenese themed levels. None of the textures/maps ended up in the game,Torbjörn Åhlén who worked on the finished game had no hand in the addon, even though he created most of the japenese levels in Devastaiton. Not in the addon. That was told to me by Ben Golus.

Some textures might have been reused but it was mostly all different. But that would make the Digitalo addon the first UT content to actually feature Japanese theme, way before UT2004 and UT3. I wonder if any of the UT2004 textures might have been reused instead from Digitalo's addon though.
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Leo T_C_K
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Re: If I may suggest

Post by Leo T_C_K »

Leo T_C_K wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 5:55 pm Well, speak of the devil, I'm just in communication with someone from the Pariah developement, stumbled upon him by accident. I'll wait for his response on several of my questions and will post about it here.

Also, as for the pre-devastation content, the original addon pack for ut apart from featuring its own tournament (like realtournament did at the time), it also featured japenese themed levels. None of the textures/maps ended up in the game,Torbjörn Åhlén who worked on the finished game had no hand in the addon, even though he created most of the japenese levels in Devastaiton. Not in the addon. That was told to me by Ben Golus.

Some textures might have been reused but it was mostly all different. But that would make the Digitalo addon the first UT content to actually feature Japanese theme, way before UT2004 and UT3. I wonder if any of the UT2004 textures might have been reused instead from Digitalo's addon though.
EDIT: One other thing I gathered from talking to them is that the addon had some new gametype involving a hacking device and control locations that were little more complex than the domination ones. Basically it was like a prototype of that gametype that ended up in Devastation with the disablable spawners and stuff.

REAL EDIT: Wtf, I intended to edit my last post not quote it...I'm tired and feeling sick right now.
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Leo T_C_K
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Re: If I may suggest

Post by Leo T_C_K »

Well since I promised I will update this topic with the news I hear from one of the programmers, here it is.

He isn't familiar with the Unreal lore and never worked on the Unreal games himself, it seems he might have been part of brainbox and as for brainbox side of things goes the game was developed as "VehicleGame", he said it started as something similar to Twisted Metal Black/vigilante 8 and it was for the brand new, to quote him exactly "for the brand-new Xbox live service. Then problems with the physics engine being too cpu heavy, publishers wanting Halo clones, and GTA popularizing get-out-of-the-car designs, we ended up pivoting to First person.
We had a bunch of vehicle designs that I think carried over."

He said it wasn't intended to really overlap with Unreal lore but it seems to me like it came out of multiple sources. I believe his side of the story and what they were doing, but I believe internally at DE there must have been other stuff (like initially) given that the game does contain packages like UnrealGame etc still while many other games didn't have those. So this is not a definitive answer either way, but at least explains the "VehicleGame" side of things. Like the project then merged together. He did note though that they did have a lot of unreal warfare stuff from Epic and might have taken some inspiration from the scrapped material.

So this is all a little more muddied with Pariah. Not as clear cut as with Devastation and this is from an employee who joined to work on the vehiclegame itself.

But we should also remember that Cliff didn't really consider unreal warfare as unreal anymore either and that to him it was more indicative of the technology and maybe general style than anything else.
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