Idc about XMP. I just wanted my money's worth.

[©ÑØØß_Kræw™]

Dear Atari/Legend/Epic,

I payed about 30 dollars for this game for the "Special Edition" back in 2003. It came with XMP which is what people played before UT2004 came out.

Whatever. It had a solid design. Badass weapons? Check. NPCs? Check. An actual story? Crappy, but check. Enough levels? Ha! No. Networking? WRONG!!!

I didn't get my money's worth for this 'game'. More like I wasted 30 bucks for an offline Do-It-Yourself sandbox mod, Unreal-style. And a bad one at that.

And then Legend goes out of business. Good riddance, GTFO. There are still bugs in the code, half-assed tree structure in Unreal Ed, maps tend to crash, and half the game is just plain missing.

This could have easily been the game that saved pc gaming, and they just threw half of it away. For what? You're not talented enough programmers to handle a project as demanding as a commercial project? You charged me 30 dollars for me to look at what? A showcase of ten maps of your heyday? You weren't like this the year before. Unreal Gold offered me more gameplay, more fun for years to come, to this day in fact, for about 1/7th of the price I payed for it.

And then there's XMP. Sure it was no Team Fortress, but that's what we played before UT2004 came about. But that's your excuse for multiplayer, isn't it?

And then Atari shuts it down shortly after the release of UT2004. Fortunately UTXMP came along and saved the day. But the bots suck ass despite being on the UT2004 engine. And now nobody plays that anymore.

And I suppose everyone moved on to UT3, because Epic made that game themselves, right? Sorry, last time I checked, everyone's playing TF2 instead. That has to suck, because I wanted to build a new pc, but without games like Unreal 1 out on the market, the cause seems lost to me. Might as well get a job to help pay the electricity bill for all those hours spent on REAL games from the 90's.

If you people are actually reading this (.0001%/chance), then I hope you realize your mistake and hope never again to repeat it, and plan on making a true Unreal 1 sequel as an apology sometime this generation.

Sincerely,

Disappointed.

[GreatEmerald]

You're not seeing the whole picture. You should blame UT2003 and Atari for all that. The thing is that Legend had developed the game to almost fantastic levels, they even had working netcode, when Atari representatives come and say "Hey, we have UT2003 which is our new multiplayer game, and we don't want any competitors to it, understand?" That means Legend had to delete the whole multiplayer part of the game. And just as they finish doing that, Atari come again and say "You're taking too long, release it next month or we're not paying you any more!" So Legend is forced to delete 50% of the game content just because it wasn't finished enough to be in the full game. After the release, a part of Legend that later on named themselves Free Monkey Interactive, worked on a watered-down XMP version that we now know as U2XMP. They didn't have enough people working on the project and they didn't get paid for that, yet we have U2XMP that is still a great game released for free.
And just after that, when Legend was about to start working on a new project, Atari once again comes and says "You're all fired!" for no apparent reason. They just outright closed the company without rhyme or reason. The fact that FMI even made UTXMP is a miracle itself.

If you want to see what U2XMP was supposed to be, read this:
http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=181802
Also, I'd love to be able to remake this somewhere, maybe UT3 or UT2004. Unfortunately, to pull something like that off I'd need a dedicated team...

[©ÑØØß_Kræw™]

What I'm saying is that if I were to spend a good $30 on an fps, then I expect it to be the full game. Idc what executives say about deadlines, or any content disputes. I care about what I am getting for what I pay for.

See the thing is here in America, is what we call a 'free market'. We care to make any decision about whatever we want to buy with our hard earned money. We do not care what some corporate asshole thinks the product should be. The consumer decides that. If the product is not satisfactory, then we decide to boycott the company until it goes out of business, which is exactly what happened.

In this particular case, I alleged that I was ripped off for $30 after finding out that the other half of the missing content was taken out due to time constraints. I have spent $30 on other games that lasted longer than Unreal 2, like RTCW. But that's not the point.

If what you say is true about the discovery of the missing Unreal 2 content, what became of it? It's 2010, the game was released in 2002, and still I found no closure to the money I have sunk into Atari.

You ignored my other argument. I have NO interest in XMP whatsoever. I wanted bug fixes, more maps, more content, co-op, and networking for the money I shelled to this damn game. If you have a better idea, I welcome your input on what to do with the 3 gig install on my machine that consists of nothing short of ten playable maps. There's no other game exactly like this. I hate to see it go to waste.

[Pravin]

I'm going to have to agree with Dante, here. I paid $50 for it (albeit, the XBOX version, way back when I didn't have a PC powerful enough to run it) and the game was obviously not worth anywhere near that amount of money. I blame myself for not having done the research, but also must frown upon obviously crappy decisions made by Atari and/or Legend.

There are some very good things about the game, in my opinion. The guns are (for the most part) great - the hydra was a really great idea, allowing the user to choose which situation to use which grenade type in. The dispersion pistol could actually hold its charge, unlike in Unreal 1. The rifle was simple and to the point, with a nice graphical effect on the zoom (and the ability to zoom in and out, instead of just in, like in Unreal 1). However, one of my gripes is that you NEVER get much ammo for any gun with the exception of the assault rifle. I never held more than 20 magnum rounds at any time, 50 charge for the shock lance (except for the first couple missions), etc... It basically came down to spamming the assault rifle. Since there's practically no ammo in the map, if you waste it early, you're screwed and might as well restart the level.

IF Unreal 2 had coop, I'm certain that it would be an extremely good game, today. Why? Because, as we all know with Unreal 1, coop brings together the community and promotes development. Sure, there was XMP, but by in large, new players won't know or figure out about XMP, as there's no obvious hint that Unreal 2 has online capabilities.

They just don't make games like they used to, anymore.

[GreatEmerald]

Nõõb_Kræw, like Pcube said, you need to do research before you buy anything, so it's your own fault. Besides, buying it that early is never a good idea anyway. Today you can get Anthology for like $20, and you'll not only get U2, but also U1, UT1 and UT2004. And no, nobody boycotted Legend, it was all done by Atari. And who is it to blame that you don't care about XMP, anyway?

[©ÑØØß_Kræw™]

Excuse you? My fault for getting ripped off for a product that should've been shipped in one piece in the first place? Maybe they do that in your country, but here we demand a worthy product for the money we have left over after paying all the expenses. According to your logic, I could have just waited 7 years to buy some game that's taken off the shelf after a year of shelf life in some compiliation that the community has lost interest to for Modern Warfare 2. How about I spend the $30 now and get some fun out of it while there is still a strong community, rather than buy it for two bottle of piss and find that the only people left are you?

Besides, Idc whose decision it was to cut Unreal 2 in half. My message remains the same: Grow a pair and ship the product as intended in the first place. Else my money goes to the "competing title", or unlike wise, which ironically was related to the same damn series, UT2003.

And should I be to blame for not liking XMP? You had a better idea before the release of UT2004?

[GreatEmerald]

It's an SP game. It doesn't matter when you buy it since the community offline is, well, you. So if you hold off for a while you'll get the same game for less. Or a whole bunch of games, as it is with Anthology.
Either way I don't see your point. Unreal II, while it's not full, it's still an awesome game. Especially the environments and dialogue system for the time. Of course, they could have done things like in Mass Effect for replayability, but still, replaying it even a few times is worth it. The immersion when you're in the Drakk Homeworld or in the Dorian Gray is very much worth it.

[©ÑØØß_Kræw™]

Well yeah of course, but consider that just like RTCW for Xbox, they made COOP for Unreal 2 for the Xbox. Of course I knew better than to waste $50 for that (just like Unreal Championship). Can you imagine after getting the pc version of a game, only for a shitty port to the Xbox, but it has the one thing you wanted most? Yeah I still stand by my original argument to Atari. Legend made a bad move dealing with them.

[Leo T_C_K]

You're not seeing the whole picture. You should blame UT2003 and Atari for all that. The thing is that Legend had developed the game to almost fantastic levels, they even had working netcode, when Atari representatives come and say "Hey, we have UT2003 which is our new multiplayer game, and we don't want any competitors to it, understand?" That means Legend had to delete the whole multiplayer part of the game. And just as they finish doing that, Atari come again and say "You're taking too long, release it next month or we're not paying you any more!" So Legend is forced to delete 50% of the game content just because it wasn't finished enough to be in the full game. After the release, a part of Legend that later on named themselves Free Monkey Interactive, worked on a watered-down XMP version that we now know as U2XMP. They didn't have enough people working on the project and they didn't get paid for that, yet we have U2XMP that is still a great game released for free.
And just after that, when Legend was about to start working on a new project, Atari once again comes and says "You're all fired!" for no apparent reason. They just outright closed the company without rhyme or reason. The fact that FMI even made UTXMP is a miracle itself.

If you want to see what U2XMP was supposed to be, read this:
http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=181802
Also, I'd love to be able to remake this somewhere, maybe UT3 or UT2004. Unfortunately, to pull something like that off I'd need a dedicated team...

That's mostly correct...however there was a remake of U2XMP in works actually on unreal engine 3, but Atari hold rights to it still and they made a fuss about it and didn't allow it.

Dante:
You know Epic was never in such a position like Legend, beacsue Atari owned them directly, it happened when Atari bought GT, basically Legend were like their servants since.
There are still some players in Unreal 2 XMP, although official master server is shut down you know, so you either need to configure it to use new master server or get the community edition, although there are few servers and it is not always populated as well.

It is all incredibly stupid they also changed the game from alpha versions or original drafts quite a while and made it more linear, because of a new target audience for the game so even new gamers could play it, that was incredibly stupid as well.

But all in all, Atari(Infogrames) are incredible dicks and had cancelled many Unreal titles which were forgotten over years even or some even not announced.

[GreatEmerald]

That's mostly correct...however there was a remake of U2XMP in works actually on unreal engine 3, but Atari hold rights to it still and they made a fuss about it and didn't allow it.

That's interesting. I've heard something about that from EQ2, but I didn't think they denied that. Although thinking about it, it was on UDK, and UDK policy states that there should be no Unreal game ports there. Though I'd say that beta XMP wouldn't count as one.

[Leo T_C_K]

That's mostly correct...however there was a remake of U2XMP in works actually on unreal engine 3, but Atari hold rights to it still and they made a fuss about it and didn't allow it.

That's interesting. I've heard something about that from EQ2, but I didn't think they denied that. Although thinking about it, it was on UDK, and UDK policy states that there should be no Unreal game ports there. Though I'd say that beta XMP wouldn't count as one.

It wasn't on UDK, it started before UDK was released even, as it was developed by one of the designers from UT3 originally, or so it seems. They were going for a full game.

[GreatEmerald]

Hmm, interesting. I wonder why, as a mod for UT3 they wouldn't have any problems.

[Illuminati]

Dear Atari/Legend/Epic,

I payed about 30 dollars for this game for the "Special Edition" back in 2003. It came with XMP which is what people played before UT2004 came out.

Whatever. It had a solid design. Badass weapons? Check. NPCs? Check. An actual story? Crappy, but check. Enough levels? Ha! No. Networking? WRONG!!!

I didn't get my money's worth for this 'game'. More like I wasted 30 bucks for an offline Do-It-Yourself sandbox mod, Unreal-style. And a bad one at that.

And then Legend goes out of business. Good riddance, GTFO. There are still bugs in the code, half-assed tree structure in Unreal Ed, maps tend to crash, and half the game is just plain missing.

This could have easily been the game that saved pc gaming, and they just threw half of it away. For what? You're not talented enough programmers to handle a project as demanding as a commercial project? You charged me 30 dollars for me to look at what? A showcase of ten maps of your heyday? You weren't like this the year before. Unreal Gold offered me more gameplay, more fun for years to come, to this day in fact, for about 1/7th of the price I payed for it.

And then there's XMP. Sure it was no Team Fortress, but that's what we played before UT2004 came about. But that's your excuse for multiplayer, isn't it?

And then Atari shuts it down shortly after the release of UT2004. Fortunately UTXMP came along and saved the day. But the bots suck ass despite being on the UT2004 engine. And now nobody plays that anymore.

And I suppose everyone moved on to UT3, because Epic made that game themselves, right? Sorry, last time I checked, everyone's playing TF2 instead. That has to suck, because I wanted to build a new pc, but without games like Unreal 1 out on the market, the cause seems lost to me. Might as well get a job to help pay the electricity bill for all those hours spent on REAL games from the 90's.

If you people are actually reading this (.0001%/chance), then I hope you realize your mistake and hope never again to repeat it, and plan on making a true Unreal 1 sequel as an apology sometime this generation.

Sincerely,

Disappointed.

Unreal II along with UT3/UT2007 were planned to be much bigger than they actually turned out. As said before by other posters this was due to legal issues, time constraints, disagreements etc.

I remember the first magazine exclusives for Unreal II, it was supposed to be huge. Freeform gameplay, multiple endings, being able to fly to a planet of your choice and choose your objectives, a full backstory to the Human vs. Skaarj wars, the ability to recruit different species and expand your team. An introduction into the Liandri corporation and how they came to power in the first UT, a full backstory on all alien species and their history. And of course a full story to coincide with the first Unreal. They hyped it alot, what 'could' have been THE game, ended up being very mediocre and another cheap generic immature shooter. An entire engine went to waste because of it. So I doubt you are the only one thats pissed off.

If you play the training mission in U2, Raff takes you on a practice DM game and and tells you that he has invented a respawning machine and says "I think I should sell it to the guys at Liandri". Which implies that at somepoint - he did, otherwise there would be no UT in the storyline. Its parts like this that you can tell they really wanted to explain the story but it was cut down and saturated so much that it never made actual sense. Listen to the audio too, you can tell some of the sentences don't make sense, like its missing an entire set of dialogue.

XMP was a waste of time in my opinion. That time could have been better spent patching the game, adding features or even fixing all the bugs in the U2 editor and releasing thorough tutorials and documentations to allow modders to get stuck in and fix the shit. But seeing as they lost all the copyrights and the company shutdown - they no longer had any control over it.

[©ÑØØß_Kræw™]

Really? News to me then. I always kept thinking of Unreal 2 was going to turn out to be where you play this marine guy, and unlike Unreal 1, you actually worked with other marines on this epic scale war with Skaarj, to which sadly has been executed poorly in the second last mission (the guy stands there like a dumbass on top of the hill getting shot). Its design concepts like this that are dead giveaways to why there's no industy for sci-fi shooters anymore.

Take Halo or Half-Life for instance. Once a formula works the first time, you stick with it. Unreal's formula was merely the same one leftover from Quake, which was the same as Doom's in a way of speaking. It just got better overtime.

Unreal 2 however, failed in that department because they tried to introduce too many concepts at the same time. Then when it came time to reach the deadline, they had to cut out what was unfinished to cash in to pay for all the time the company wasted by just trying too many concepts with the engine. What you do is take an existing formula, and introduce a few new features at a time. So what if it spans across 3 games? Halo did it. Metroid Prime did it. Half-Life will do it. Call of Duty did it many times overs.

So hats off to you, Illuminati for your input and conforming to the topic's main idea, instead of just blatantly mentioning XMP for the *nth time.

[Illuminati]

Its all good man, glad I could be of help. Some people feel the need to defend it purely because it has the "Unreal" branding on it. If it wasn't for the Skaarj or the Liandri Angels or a few names mentioned that loosely relate to the Unreal franchise, it could have been any random sci-fi shooter.

If it didn't say Unreal II on the cover, it wouldn't be on this website and it would have died in obscurity a long time ago. Its hanging by a thread already, the only reason people stick around with it - is in the hope that Release Candidate 9 is released to save whatever reputation UII has left.

I agree with the games you have mentioned that have been successful, however - what you have to understand is that, demand has drastically changed. Its no longer Quake Vs. Unreal. Epic Games and id Software are still very powerful but they aren't the huge FPS innovators that they used to be.

There was a huge debate about UT3 on BeyondUnreal, lets say it did have everything people wanted, and ticked all the boxes, mods, races, customisation, maps, game modes etc - would it still be as popular as it once was? The demand is mostly driven by kids now. So this is one of the primary reasons why Halo & Call Of Duty sell so easily. And also as the old saying goes "nothing lasts forever".

Its easy to market them, Unreal is everything Halo isn't - dark, gritty, violent, brutal, fast paced, tactical. Its hard to market this in todays generation. Its mostly graphics over gameplay, with a very linear watered down storyline. Why do you think shitty film-based games sell so well? Psychological business, milking the cash cow. Now Gears Of War is also very violent but because its a basic third person shooter and easy for kids to get to grips with - it sells. Its also one of the flagship titles for the Xbox 360 - so this in turn increases revenue.

The commercial market uses a similar system of business, Call Of Duty games never really change, this is partially because of the 'successful' formula that you mentioned but its also a business move - releasing products that are similar to each other with updated graphics and some new gimmicks always sell. And because companies like Activision and Blizzard pump millions of pounds worth of promotion everyday, everyone knows about it within the week. Most of the Western world knows what World Of Warcraft is.

Call Of Duty has been around for years - however it wasn't half as big as it became when they literally spent millions promoting Modern Warfare. Now everyone knows about it. What Unreal needs is fresh blood to bring the series forward. Or another upcoming company to buy the franchise and get some new ideas and people that are willing to make it bigger than ever.

[GreatEmerald]

I remember the first magazine exclusives for Unreal II, it was supposed to be huge. Freeform gameplay, multiple endings, being able to fly to a planet of your choice and choose your objectives, a full backstory to the Human vs. Skaarj wars, the ability to recruit different species and expand your team. An introduction into the Liandri corporation and how they came to power in the first UT, a full backstory on all alien species and their history. And of course a full story to coincide with the first Unreal. They hyped it alot, what 'could' have been THE game, ended up being very mediocre and another cheap generic immature shooter.

Indeed, and that's why I feel that Mass Effect games are what Unreal II was always supposed to be. There are lots of similarities between the concept (and some of what we already have) and Mass Effect gameplay and mechanics. Not to mention that the engine is the same, just a different version.

[Hellkeeper]

Unreal 2 sucks.

Part of what you buy is good, part of what you buy is crap. U2 falls into the second category, that's sad, but nobody died because of it and no, Atari won't refund you.