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For those that love Unreal

UT now belongs to the "old" Unreal as well. Supporting it for OpenGL and Sound its time to put up a board now.

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Leo T_C_K
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For those that love Unreal

Post by Leo T_C_K »

For those that love Unreal I have a question:

Do you feel like UT betrayed the core of Unreal by adding so many inconsistent texture packs in?

Now retrospectively we know why that was the case. A lot of the texture packs came from other abandoned projects like the original Epic's Unreal Level Pack or beta material and what not. Some packs even seemed to suggest they were trying to remake third party addon textures like the s3 mappack ones which had actual egyptian themes. But...there was one thing that was added for sure past the 221 versions, when they wanted to firmly separate the gameplay from being "more Unreal" and make it a standalone experience.

Now with that came a lot of map retexturing but one prominent theme suddenly appeared: The city/urban stuff.

Now some of it might have again origins in the s3 theme stuff, but I also suspect that AWGD, despite not being tied to Unreal's story, had an influence on this or maybe some textures were reused as I swear that skull thingy from slums.utx was on some old creative carnage www stuff. And it'd make perfect sense...however don't you feel like all those seemingly unrelated texture packs did take away something from the wonders of the Unreal world and that it made it feel way less "Unreal" in retrospect?

I'd love to hear everyone's opinion on this because in a way it is quite disconnected from what we knew before of the Unreal world.

Its also possible that few of the texture packs originally came with the "Unreal Level Editor" product that was pulled back from the stores and people felt was "needless".
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Hyper
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Re: For those that love Unreal

Post by Hyper »

Leo T_C_K wrote: Sat Sep 10, 2022 5:33 pm For those that love Unreal I have a question:

Do you feel like UT betrayed the core of Unreal by adding so many inconsistent texture packs in?

[...]
No, not at all. I long time disliked UT for it being a standalone game rather than an expansion pack for Unreal.
UT has been and still is far more popular then the original game and the release hurt the deathmatch community of Unreal. At some time, even most community single player and coop projects were made for UT rather than Unreal. Fortunately, this changed with the renewed interest for Unreal 1 with the 227 patches.

Having said that. UT is a great game. UT was the more successful game in comparison to U1 and when I tell people that I still play the old first Unreal game, they usually think I'm still playing UT99. Commercially Epic made the right decision to release UT as a standalone game. But I would have preferred that Unreal Gold and UT were unified into one game with one community instead of the split that resulted from UT being a separate game.
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Leo T_C_K
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Re: For those that love Unreal

Post by Leo T_C_K »

Hyper wrote: Mon Sep 26, 2022 12:29 pm
Leo T_C_K wrote: Sat Sep 10, 2022 5:33 pm For those that love Unreal I have a question:

Do you feel like UT betrayed the core of Unreal by adding so many inconsistent texture packs in?

[...]
No, not at all. I long time disliked UT for it being a standalone game rather than an expansion pack for Unreal.
UT has been and still is far more popular then the original game and the release hurt the deathmatch community of Unreal. At some time, even most community single player and coop projects were made for UT rather than Unreal. Fortunately, this changed with the renewed interest for Unreal 1 with the 227 patches.

Having said that. UT is a great game. UT was the more successful game in comparison to U1 and when I tell people that I still play the old first Unreal game, they usually think I'm still playing UT99. Commercially Epic made the right decision to release UT as a standalone game. But I would have preferred that Unreal Gold and UT were unified into one game with one community instead of the split that resulted from UT being a separate game.
Well, it was developed as expansion pack as you may know, but the decisions towards standalone game started creeping around the time of Unreal version 220. The recovered 220 botpack was not the first one ever created ever (and the 221 beta now has maps predating the 220 version even), so indeed. At some point they even planned the "Tournament edition" which was Unreal plus BotPack (as at the time those were the only "finished" addons, maybe fusion maps etc would get released with it too). So still with no return to na pali planned or even finished, that would have been the thing. But yea they drifted away more and more from Unreal and the "221" version has the first steps taken already. To the point of some maps in the released game outright contradicting Unreal or going to extra lengths to retcon it, still they backed down on this with the first bonuspack which finally brought back some maps and the Nali (the nali player was actually originally one of the new additions to botpack, version 222 of Unreal is the first one to have it as part of Unreal instead).

Still, there was too much focus on multiplayer games, first it was an attempt to redeem Unreal because the release version was perceived as poor on network play, but then they cancelled many sp addons in favor of the multiplayer ones, or ones that might have gotten released but were so obscure (the intel oem version was said to have exclusive singleplayer levels, but no clue where to find it).

I personally do feel that UT became a bit too much of a kitchen sink (especially after all that resource pouring/reuse) and the 221 version is more towards what I'd prefer if it had turned out that way. But UT release date was delayed twice over and each of the delays took it further from plain Unreal (despite them creating a back compatibility of sorts when it came to maps and mods from the 224 plus range).

So to me it was a bit inconsistent.

So I think that was not so good but still better than it could have turned out (especially the compatibility issue).

Well you can thank those early reviewers/people who had bad impression of UT when it was more of an addon pack. Because they were the ones suggesting to Epic to push it for a complete makeover, so as to compete with Quake 3. That was the impulse that made UT. But it also lost some of its soul and depth (even though arguably and ironically a multiplayer focused addon pack must have less depth, yet the early maps had more depth to them than some unreal dm maps).
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