That 1999 Unreal 2 Document

[Leo T_C_K]

After confering with Bob Bates again, he has allowed me to release some of those documents as whole, but we need to proofread/approve it before release, so this is now OK to post publically/verified. Now I can't upload this to ftp yet, so I will wait until someone who is sleeping is awake again (this is why the UT egypt map release is delayed too).

There are all kinds of small internal documents around that might not be OK to post public so everything needs to be verified when its done this way.

So right now I am attaching it as attachment to the post, meaning only people who are registered at the forum can get it for now, until its on the ftp.

Basically this is a "deliverables" document all the way from January 1999. Before Return to Na Pali was released. In fact here they refer to it as Level Pack and it was after the side-Legend team got the go-ahead from Epic to develop the pack as replacement for their own Level Pack that shared the same name (yes its confusing really).

It was the oldest document avaiable to Bob still after all those years and he didn't have any other earlier than 2002 in practice because he only joined the active developement by then.

Note that not everything was fleshed out yet and this is for the UE1 phase of the project, this predates the early 2000 alphas and shows that the carifle and all that was created first for Unreal2 believe it or not or basically simultaneously. That is why the early skin seen in screenshots is out of touch with the theme of Unreal. It was meant to be a slightly different theme. The early model screenshot/sheet that I showcased earlier is from this phase of developement and the team already wanted to use the skeletal meshes in the game even when the engine didn't support it yet, that is why so many of the models got made in 1999 even without them ending up in the game yet. This is why Epic themselves wrote skeletal mesh support in the first place, to support Unreal 2 first of all (and Legend was not satisfied still thus they wrote the Golem system later).

Since the person who had the UE1 models went silent and hasn't been succesfuly re-contacted, we do not know if there is still chance for them to resurface. But there were more people on that early team including the people who worked on the wheel of time models (The Sherer team), and those have not been contacted yet, just the heuristics people. They both worked on the game, sometimes they even created different models for the same thing or different artistic take. And later on they went for outside contractors fully in the later UE1/start of UE2(UW) phase. So yea, a lot of changing content all around especially in the early days. The Izarians went through several re-designs.

Some of the company names are also temporary. For example the FTL relay stuff is directly tied to the Inuit Corporation and it evidently returns, yet here its vague and not explicitly mentioned that they run the stuff on Hell. If it was meant to be Unicon is unknown, whatever the predecessor of Axon was. But its like it switched from that to Inuit to Axon over the course of developement. I assume also that the reason the weapons didn't have altfire yet or most of them is because they were too used to what they were doing for Wheel of Time. They were a bit out of touch with the proper Unreal world and this changed over time too (back and forth). Its like when they finally got it right, team changes took place and it was all thrown out of window and now Unreal 2 is like almost a separate timeline (and in the future or whatever). While the point of it was that it took place at the same time and the later documents make explicit story hook to Unreal and Atlantis picking up Prisoner 849 (that is not in this document yet, its too early for that, remember RTNP/UPak wasn't released yet lol).
So...I hope this makes this a little more in context and less confusing. As you can see by the time Unreal 2 was released they did revert to this linear-game scheme shown here, but...something was still lacking. Despite the story not being as fleshed-out here, the game narrative is way more coherent in my opinion than the rather random mess it ended up being.

[Leo T_C_K]

Alright so now its uploaded to the ftp and quickly converted to rtf and pdf versions too.

Doc original

rtf ver

pdf ver

[GEARvision]

Unreal2 will be unreal, too. Welcome to a new adventure, a voyage to exotic new worlds that will bring you face to face with hostile aliens, corporate mercenaries, and the best combat soldiers in the quadrant. This chapter of the Unreal saga will ship with updated multiplayer capabilities, but the focus is on a single-player game with a mission-based structure, cool new settings, several new types of game play, and a number of technology improvements to the Unreal game system.

"... updated multiplayer capabilities ..."

You can see they were full about it being a full-packed sequel... But many things turned the wrong way, including the development team
All of this got caused by this not being Epic that developed it, but Legend
Epic chewed out of their plate (their ideas) until it almost ran empty
UT was released, so the multiplayer had to go, etc.

If Legend was not there, then no Unreal sequel would have happened... Interesting to think about

I believe all had to turn this way sooner or later, you release a killer game with killer technology, people will ask for killer gameplay, with matrix moves and banging soundtracks, something that any casual can pick up to play with their friends, marketing wise this is the ideal path (for a sequel)

Quake 1 -> Quake 3
Unreal 1 -> Unreal Tournament

You can spot this on Unreal Warfare too, you are not a lone warrior there, you fight with a team, so a cooperative mode can not only be implemented, but enhanced, with class-based attributes and stuff like that

"navigate-a-level-and-kill-everything-that-moves game play"
"extensive interaction with NPCs"

Kill the NPCs?
This is called testing the waters, I think both do not go too well
Brief cutscenes like in 7 Bullets in the other hand are appropiate, they are not interactive, instead you can lay back in the couch, eat popcorn and watch!
Operation Na Pali would not pass if it weren't that the scripted sequences and dialogue look too cool and keep me awake to kick butt!

[Leo T_C_K]

Someone should still access Tim Sweeney's vault and...

RELEASE THE SNYDERCUT!!!111

but yea Epic abandoned all singleplayer stuff by the end of 1998 completely. This is why Jeremy War left Epic basically. His maps didn't even ship with UT and one of his levels was repurposed into the Fusion Mappack instead. How twisted is that? On itself.

[Leo T_C_K]

I am also talking about it here and sharing some other insights:

https://ut99.org/viewtopic.php?p=153734#p153734

[Leo T_C_K]

How would you imagine alternate reality where....Game Mill Entertainment (publishers behind Big Rigs over the road racing) were publishers for Unreal 2 and it had less than a year to release