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zombiescantfly · 6 years

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Words About Games: Unreal Tournament (Epic Megagames, 1999)

In 2291, in an attempt to control violence among deep-space miners, the New Earth Government legalized no-holds-barred fighting.

291 years earlier, I heard that for the first time. Unreal Tournament begins with a narrated flythrough explaining two very simple things: there is a Tournament, and you are going to win it. After the lonely melancholy of Unreal, that's a pretty abrupt pivot. Why, after getting through most of the 90s with platformers, pinball, and fighting games, did Epic Megagames barrel in headfirst to the multiplayer arena shooter market, a playground run exclusively by industry already-giant id Software?

Because they wanted to.

As I mentioned in the Unreal essay, that game's multiplayer was a fun shell filled with horrible, horrible problems. Epic set to fixing it, but realized that beyond some quick and dirty surface-level patches, there wasn't a lot they could do within the same scope. So they broke away from a simple expansion pack and landed on creating a full separate release by the name of Unreal Tournament.

Unreal Tournament, UT99 from now on, was released on November 23, 1999, to an almost absurd level of praise. Quake 3 Arena, id’s latest offering in the Quake franchise and first multiplayer-only title, would come out just over a week later on December 2, pitching the two games into a deathmatch of their own which still rages to this day almost 20 years later.

Let's talk about Quake a bit. Shooters, up until around the time the first Quake came out and probably still after that, were commonly referred to as ‘Doom clones’ because, well, many were. Any unambitious dev could buy an engine license, whip up some sprites on a lunchbreak, and ship a game. There's a parallel to be drawn between that era and the current ongoing avalanche of Unity and Unreal asset flips, but you can turn to others for opinions on all that.

Quake was, famously, id Software’s followup to Doom 2, and an early frontrunner of fully-3d shooters. It was so popular and noteworthy that it even caused the term Doom Clone to fall away in favor of Quake Clone. Quake expanded the popularity of online play, and saw the creation of the some of the first AI bots made exclusively for deathmatch. Quake 2 came along not too far after and pulled in even more interest. If you remember from my Unreal essay, that was when it grabbed my own interest, and I became a frequent over-the-shoulder spectator of many a Quake 2 deathmatch.

But then, UT99. When I first played Unreal Tournament, I was blown away. By the bots. Meaning that they killed me a lot. I was very bad at it. I didn't even strafe back then, just ran forward and turned with the mouse. But I learned.

UT99 is actually quite an accommodating game. Bots have 9 skill levels ranging from drooling idiot to a fittingly-named godlike, and I remember bumping them up a level at a time over the years. UT’s bots were one of its largest selling points back then, and the cornerstone of the Tournament part of its name.

The titular Tournament in Unreal Tournament is a series of botmatches of increasing difficulty over the game’s five primary gamemodes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Domination, and Assault. A final series of three 1v1 matches caps off the Tournament, the third of which pits you against the Big Bad Reigning Champ, a robot named Xan Kriegor.

There were a handful of firsts in that short bit, so let's take a look.

As stated, Quake 2 was the de facto king of online shooters at the time. But Quake 2, for all its fame, only had three gamemodes available: deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag. Unreal had dabbled with alternative styles of deathmatch and team deathmatch, but all of them were, more or less, the same gamemode, save one. In a unique take on King of the Hill, the first player to score a kill got a permanent damage boost until they were killed, at which point that buff was transferred to their killer. Killing the King awarded more points, matches were first to X points, you get the idea. RtNP added Cloak Match, a take on this KotH concept where instead of a damage boost, players fought for permanent partial invisibility and infinite jump boots.

Unreal Tournament was a little more ambitious than just reflavoring deathmatch, however. Domination used its own unique rotation of maps centered around controlling three points. Your team scores one point per every couple of seconds, per point held. Touching a point is enough to flip control of it to your side, and the result is a fun, frantic match with enough additional focus to guide it away from just another deathmatch. Map control becomes something more than just controlling various weapon spawns, and demands you keep your attention between the three points. Random respawns instead of near your team’s current territory and the instant capture of points meant the game never ground down to just being spawncamped, and helped reduce the prevalence of one-sided victories. Domination was great, the extra effort put in to creating its own category of maps was great, and games today still use the gamemode. That said, Destiny 2 really needs to make capture instant and not have you sit around for 5 seconds in a tiny room, like come on.

Domination may have been new for the time, and DM, TDM, and CTF made their own waves that I'll get into later, but Assault is what really caught people's attention. Assault was an attack and defense mode where one team was tasked with completing a series of varied objectives, while the defenders tried to stop them. The most similar thing we get in games now is pushing a cart down a predetermined path in TF2 or Overwatch. Payload gamemodes in those games are similar in the sense that one team must progress down a path to get to a specific location, and I suppose it might come across as a streamlining of the idea, but Assault is just more interesting.

UT99 shipped with seven Assault maps, and each one presented a different scenario. Assault was not just replacing the objective on an existing map, the same as Domination had its own maps. Each one had a little story it presented, from the attempted hijacking of a supersonic train, assaulting an ancient fortress on an alien planet, sabotaging an underwater research facility, stealing a Navy battleship, escaping a medieval castle, destroying an experimental battle tank, and even a recreation of the D-Day landing. Assault maps varied in how linear they were, with maps like Guardia, HiSpeed, and Overlord being fairly straightforward, to the more open-ended OceanFloor and Rook. It was, by design, an asymmetrical experience, but that design went so far as to change in-level as the attackers pushed further and further in. On HiSpeed, for example, the attackers start in a helicopter hovering over the rear of the train, and drop down largely uncontested. There's a full car where they can grab weapons and powerups, and then they reach where the defenders have spawned.

As objectives are met and various places in the map are reached by the attackers, spawn points start to change. On the same map, attackers spawn with a serviceable loadout of shock rifles and pulse guns (we'll get to the weapons later), both good options for the mixed-distance encounter they'll be facing as they move towards the next car. The defenders, however, spawn with access to flak cannons and rippers, which in the close quarters of the car’s interior are absolutely brutal. Once the attackers push far enough in to it, though, that car becomes their spawn point and the defenders are moved further back, thus giving the attackers access to those weapons for the next part of the map.

The same sort of design echoes throughout all seven Assault maps, and it creates a varied and frantic experience that was new at the time and still hasn't really been copied. The feeling of actually taking part in an event in the game’s world added so much to even the relatively sparse setting, and it remains a great example of an excellent piece of very quiet but highly effective worldbuilding.

The other gamemodes were again, team and free-for-all deathmatch, and as standard as that was at the time, UT99 made some weighty impressions on the genre. At the time of Quake 2’s release, it was common practice to just repurpose singleplayer campaign levels as the multiplayer maps. Quake 2 would get its own suite of maps designed explicitly for multiplayer later in its life, and Unreal shipped with 14 multiplayer-only maps, with a further 9 added later as free updates. UT99 shipped with multiple dozens of maps, each one presenting a different take on design and execution. You have a standard collection of flat-ish arenas, some truly impressive vertical design, maps with stage hazards, big maps, small maps, maps with areas of low gravity, and maps with secret passages leading to hidden weapon spawns. A handful of Unreal’s maps were even remade for UT99, and two in particular became series mainstays - Deck 16 and Curse. Both are still thought of as iconic maps, and for very good reason. They're well-balanced and play to the strengths of the game they're in while also, going back to Unreal’s bit here, feeling like they're a real space.

Because while UT99 may be a multiplayer-only fragfest with no real story, it has lore.

The opening narration is just a small bit of fluff, but it sets up a whole lot that the various designers had a ton of fun expanding on. Official weapon descriptions in the manual talk about the (in-game) real-world applications of each, and even set some up as not even being explicitly for combat. The Translocator, a personal teleporter by way of launching tiny disks, is a repurposed tool given to miners to help escape cave-ins. The GES Biorifle is a vacuum cleaner for toxic sludge instead of dust. The Impact Hammer is a jackhammer but sideways. The in-universe justification for those few weapons doesn't mean anything to the gameplay, but given that the Tournament was set up by Liandri Mining Corporation, it adds a bit of fun sense-making to the whole thing.

Maps, too, are part of that lore package. Each map throughout the Tournament ladder has a short description, and it's almost always about what this particular arena’s place in the world is. Most boil down to “this is a site built for the Tournament” or “Liandri bought this and made it a Tournament arena,” but it's about the tiny details hidden in the lines. Deck 16 is a toxic sludge refinery, but it's also a single deck of the spaceship Gaetano, rented out to Liandri whenever it's in drydock. Curse is an ancient temple that was an archaeological site until Liandri bought it after funding ran out. Arcane Temple is a Nali worship site on Na Pali left abandoned after the Skaarj invaded. Oblivion is a Liandri passenger ship that tricks Tournament entrants by being their first arena. Hyperblast, the final stage of the Tournament, is Xan Kriegor’s personal spaceship made specifically to be an arena.

The whole thing paints the Liandri Mining Corporation as this quirky half-malicious corporate giant, as big and influential as any sci-fi megacorp but out of an innocent love for their decidedly not-innocent game. It's a world where humanity spent seven days on the brink of destruction at the hands of the Skaarj, where the Corporation Wars tore entire planets apart, and where despite that everyone can get over it, crack some beers, and watch people blow each other away on live television, kept safe by technology that respawns them within seconds.

Character backgrounds, too, drop hints in their two to three sentence lengths. The bots you fight against or with all have tiny snippets of who they are, making reference to revolts, arrests, rebellions, other worlds, secret government experiments, and revenge.

The important thing to take away from this is that all of this was put in but none of it had to be. It doesn't affect the game and it's not even immediately noticeable unless you let every map and character description load before entering a Tournament match. Just going to map select for a practice session/instant action game doesn't show the same descriptions, so you have to go through the singleplayer ladder. It's work put in that shows a genuine and earnest excitement for the world the devs had created, and I still get a smile thinking about it. Unreal Tournament is such a weird celebration of every gritty science fiction trope, but turns them all on their heads to create a world for this game that feels exactly as expansive as it isn't. Because Unreal Tournament doesn't have anything to do with the lore it hides in all these corners, it's just a multiplayer shooter with no story beyond “kill better than the other guys.” And boy do they ever make that part feel great.

For better or worse, Wolfenstein 3D cemented FPS weapon progression. Ever since and with only a few minor alterations here and there, the loadout progression is melee weapon, bad pistol, automatic weapon, shotgun (though those sometimes switch position), a better version of one or both of those, some kind of explosive option, sniper rifle (that was a later addition), and then a superweapon of some kind. From Doom to Quake to our old nemesis Half-Life to our slightly newer nemesis Halo to Call of Duty, you get those weapons in roughly that order.

So let's talk about Unreal again for a second. I didn't mention that game's weapons because I wanted to bring the whole discussion in at once, but it does require me to go back in time a year and talk about where the series landed on its own weapons. The first thing to know about Unreal is that it was not immune to the Holy Progression of Gun, but it did make some incredibly noticeable changes. Unreal saw a videogame gun, famous for being a thing you can left click on men with, and asked “what if you could also right click on men?”

I'm moving a rough sort of progression, so be aware that this is only the general order you get these guns in. In Unreal, the first weapon you pick up is the Dispersion Pistol, a projectile-firing semi-auto gun that doesn't do a whole lot of damage. One fun thing about it is that its projectiles cast a real-time light on the environment so you can use it as a way to peek into dark areas before going in them with your vulnerable body. But another thing about the Dispersion Pistol is its alt fire, where you hold down the right mouse button to charge up a shot which then acts essentially as a rocket launcher shot - it deals better damage, it deals splash damage, and it can gib enemies. In-universe, the Dispersion Pistol is a Skaarj weapon, and you can also find hidden upgrades for it that boost the damage of both firemodes at the cost of taking more ammo per shot. Luckily, as your holdout weapon, the Dispersion Pistol recharges its ammo passively.

The second weapon you get is the automag, a basic hitscan pistol. Primary fire shoots a fairly accurate shot, alt fire has you hold the gun sideways to increase the fire rate at the cost of accuracy. It's dumb and I love it to this day.

Third up, the Tarydium Stinger, a projectile-based minigun with an alt fire that acts as a projectile shotgun. Here's where the lines start to get a bit blurred, but we're not totally out of the usual progression just yet.

After the Stinger you get the ASMD Shock Rifle, a famously curious gun that, as its primary fire, shoots a hitscan beam, and shoots a fast-moving projectile orb as its alt fire, trading perfect precision and speed for a little bit of splash damage. The thing about it is that if you shoot the orb with the beam you get a giant explosion that does an absolute ton of damage.

Moving from that piece of sweet hardware brings us to the GES Biorifle, a rapid-fire goop-throwing mine layer with a charged shot as its alt fire.

Then, the Eightball Launcher, a rocket launcher that has not two but four firemodes. Click primary fire to shoot a rocket, fast moving and with splash damage. Hold primary fire to charge up to six rockets that fire in a spread pattern, or click alt fire while charging to shoot them in a spiral formation. Also, you can get a mild lock-on effect by holding your mouse cursor over an enemy for about half a second. Alt fire is the same as primary but with grenades - click alt fire once to lob one, hold to charge up to six. The grenades bounce around for a set period of time, and also blow up on contact with an enemy.

Then possibly the series’ most famous weapon, the Flak Cannon. Primary fire is a projectile-based shotgun that fires individual shards that bounce around the environment for a bit, allowing you to fire around corners or even up at the ceiling to bank a shot over cover. Alt fire is another grenade launcher, though this one fires its shells at a shallower angle, a higher velocity, has a smaller up-front splash radius, and still creates little bits of flak that bounce around for a short time. This gun is my and many other people’s favorite gun in videogames.

The Razorjack is a strange gun that fires disks that bounce around the environment at scarily high velocities, and even have the ability to decapitate enemies if you hit their head, a useful feature in the Skaarj-infested levels where you first find it. Alt fire is a tricky system that lets you influence the path the disk takes, though its high velocity, bad turning radius, and small size makes “influence” a more appropriate word than “guide.”

Next is the Rifle, a high-powered hitscan primary fire with an alt fire that zooms in. Headshotting enemies decapitates them but other than that it's just a sniper rifle, let's move on.

Finally, Unreal has the Minigun, a hitscan bullet-spewing beast that shows up near the end of the game, leaving you with just barely too little time to get to use it as much as you want and also to realize that hey, it's just a minigun. Primary fire shoots with a short spool-up time, alt fire shoots faster but less accurately. Unfortunately this does not make you hold the Minigun sideways like the Automag.

So that was Unreal’s loadout, and it made some big waves at the time. Physics-based projectiles? Well sure, Quake had the bouncy grenade launcher, but the Flak Cannon and Razorjack made being aware of and using the environment second nature to players. The ASMD’s ability to produce a BFG shot on demand if you could combo properly was amazing. And the upgradeable nature of the Dispersion pistol made what was usually a loadout slot reserved for being sad about having to use a legitimate late-game complement to your arsenal.

So it stands to reason that Unreal Tournament barely changed it.

UT99’s arsenal did change a little bit, but not too drastically. Most changes were to damage or fire rate, and every weapon got a new model. Some weapons were slightly renamed, like the Automag becoming the Enforcer or the ASMD receiving its full title of ASMD Shock Rifle, the Eightball Launcher was just called the Rocket Launcher, the Rifle became the Sniper Rifle, and the Razorjack was renamed the Ripper.

The next level of changes was tweaking some alt fires. The biggest change here was the new Ripper losing its guided blade in favor of an alt fire that shot an explosive disk. Unlike the primary fire, it didn't bounce, and while it had only about half the splash radius of the Rocket Launcher proper, its fire rate and projectile speed were both much faster. Other than that, the only change to another gun was the Sniper Rifle getting a thematically appropriate overlay when you zoomed in, instead of Unreal’s Rifle not displaying anything. Additionally, because it seems to fit here more than the next bit, if you manage to find another Enforcer lying on the ground, you can pick it up and dual wield. It's pretty rad.

Larger changes came in the removal of both the Stinger and the Dispersion Pistol, and the addition of the Impact Hammer, Pulse Gun, and the series’ first superweapon, the Redeemer.

I'm personally a bit conflicted about trading the Stinger out for the Minigun. On one hand, UT99’s Minigun is a great piece of visual design - massive, chunky, and bold, with the added flair of seeing your arm holding onto a forward grip to really sell the vibe of that one scene in Predator. On the other hand, there's something to be said about a projectile weapon over a hitscan one, especially since so many high-powered hitscan weapons exist in the game already. But at the same time, UT99 does have an answer to the automatic projectile weapon, the Pulse Gun.

The Pulse Gun should be instantly familiar to anyone with a passing understanding of id Software’s early titles. Primary fire is just the Pulse Rifle from Doom, and alt fire is the Thunderbolt from Quake. But put together, married in this suitcase-sized brick of green polygons? A thing of beauty.

Let me at least address the Impact Hammer before moving on: it's a melee weapon you can charge up. It'll kill someone pretty good if you charge it up and manage to make contact. It has a pretty fun and inspired visual design but ultimately the only reason it's there is because you can run out of ammo with the Enforcer you spawn with. The end.

Alright, the Redeemer. The Redeemer is a man-portal nuclear warhead launcher, kind of like the Fat Man from Fallout 3 except way, way cooler. Primary fire launches a relatively slow-moving projectile that, on contact with anything, explodes in a shockwave that does enough damage to instantly gib anyone without 199 health and a Shield Belt powerup. It goes through walls, too. It's a very good superweapon. Making it better is its alt fire, where you take personal control of the missile as it travels, allowing you to guide it around the map with a surprising degree of maneuverability. The BFG may have a classic flair, but the Redeemer took the idea of a superweapon to a whole other level.

So how did all of these weapons actually play together? How did an arsenal designed for and balanced around a singleplayer game with fixed enemy spawns translate to a multiplayer arena? Quite well, in fact. Epic didn't design the game in a vacuum, and as Quake 2 was the reigning champ at the time, they didn't have to look far to see what worked and what could be changed for the better.

UT99 plays fast, hard, and unrelenting. People load into a map and immediately start running around picking up weapons and letting the lead fly. Now, it's time for my bias to show a bit. I only ever watched Quake 2 multiplayer, but I have in fact played Quake 3 and Quake Live, as well as a handful of hours of Quake Champions which I know isn't really comparable but it uses the same weapons so I'm still mentioning it. UT is my series, I have a preference for it, and this next bit is all my own opinion and observation.

Quake only has three weapons.

Quake is a game where movement is fast, projectiles are fast, and time to kill is fast. It's a fast game. But it's so fast that only three weapons end up mattering - the rocket launcher, railgun, and thunderbolt. They're the three highest-damage weapons in the game and they make up pretty much the entirety of its arsenal. Quake matches inevitably all play out as taking potshots at each other with rockets as everyone strafejumps around like crazy, switching to the railgun if someone manages to be in the open for more than half a second, and swapping to the thunderbolt if you manage to get close enough that another character model takes up more than a handful of pixels on your screen.

Quake is a very fast and chaotic game, and I'm not saying that this kind of play isn't skillful, it's just so fast that actual duels never really happen, and people just kind of end up taking damage from one end of the map when they're on the other. Quake’s other weapons just may as well not exist, because if you find yourself using your starting shotgun, the nailgun, or any other weapon you want to be close for, you're likely doing so in range of someone's Thunderbolt and that's not a race you're going to win.

It's a difficult point to make, so let me move back to UT and why I prefer it. UT is a small but noticeable bit slower than Quake in a way that I feel greatly benefits it. Overall, it comes down to bringing the action in a little closer, really making the fights seem more personal, and really giving players more of a chance to dance around each other rather than hopping around the level on their own accord until they find each other by chance. Projectiles are both slightly slower and much more visible than in Quake, so trying to slam a rocket into someone's face from three hundred meters isn't really going to happen. So, from further away, you'll want to use a hitscan weapon, but since your target will be smaller they'll be harder to hit. Unless you want to zoom in with the Sniper Rifle, but then you lose a bit of awareness of your immediate surroundings. Close up, the Flak Cannon is king, but its range is short enough to matter. The Pulse Gun’s alt fire is just the Thunderbolt, and it'll tear someone apart pretty handily, to say nothing of putting the Minigun into overdrive with its own alt fire. Even flipping your Enforcer sideways will get bullets into someone quickly, and with fancy enough footwork you can save yourself from a gruesome fate with the starting gun. Or, if you're trying to keep someone away, quickly laying down a gooey minefield with the Biorifle works just as well as filling a hallway with a dozen bouncing Ripper blades.

Every gun in UT99 can kill someone, and not just in theory. The game balances each of its weapons almost perfectly, and nothing ever feels totally useless or has an obvious better version (I am not counting the Impact Hammer or Enforcer in this statement). Jumping over or dodging away from rockets to close with the Pulse Gun’s alt fire is just as reasonable as forcing someone to switch away from their Flak Cannon by retreating backwards as your Biorifle makes it impossible for them to safely advance. Lobbing a Flak alt fire over that minefield is alway an option though, so be ready to get out of the way, and maybe pull out your Shock Rifle to push them backwards. A fully stocked Minigun can keep an approach locked off, but a quick sniper bullet right to the face will put an end to it.

Alright, admittedly the Biorifle is historically a bit ignored, and the Ripper didn't even show up in subsequent games, but both still had a purpose. I, personally, am a staunch defender of the Biorifle’s utility as an area denial tool, and the ability to charge its alt fire will instantly kill someone no matter their health and shield level, if you can hit them. It's certainly better in team gamemodes like Assault or CTF, though. But just shooting at people with the weapons does not an arena shooter make. For there to be the proper levels of frantic action, movement needs to have a strong focus.

As in Quake, you'll want to get familiar with your spacebar. Strafe jumping isn't a thing as far as constantly upping your own speed, but it sure does make you harder to hit, and getting decent at dodging rockets always helps. Double tap a movement key to do a quick dodge in that direction, useful not just for avoiding projectiles but for snaking down corridors. On an elevator? Jump just before it reaches the top to get a massive boost and go flying. The Impact Hammer isn't ideal as a weapon, but a quick blast downward makes a decent stand-in for a rocket jump, if at the cost of significantly more self-damage. Capping it all off is the Translocator, the aforementioned teleporting-disk-thrower. Primary fire to shoot a disk in a pretty generous arc, alt fire to teleport to it. Disks emit light and can be destroyed, if you teleport while carrying a flag you drop it, and yes, you do fall faster than the disk travels upward. Truth be told, I usually play with the Translocator turned off, but that's mainly because the bots, as good as they are at the rest of the game, are less than stellar at putting those disks where they want, often leading to a cluster of them bouncing their shot off a wall just inches under the ledge they want up to, and not taking any action until they get it. I think it has to do with the accuracy modifiers based on bot skill level, but I'm not sure.

The bots are great in every other respect, though. Sure, they'll never actually replace a human player, but they're more than good enough for a few hundred hours of offline play. All the tricks the Skaarj demonstrated in Unreal are on display again, and tuned up to use every weapon. Bots jump and dodge, retreat if they're low on health, make decisions about what weapon to use based on their proximity to you as well as their own inventories, switch between firemodes when it makes sense, and plenty else. Upping the bot difficulty doesn't just make them do more damage or give them more health (it doesn't even do that in the first place), it makes them smarter. Or ‘smarter’ if you really care - it changes their reaction times and how accurate they are, how aggressively they'll act, and even how good they are at using the weapons beyond just aiming. A low-level bot might not get close enough to hit you with the Pulse Gun’s alt fire, or will use a Rocket Launcher in close quarters with all the risks of splash damage and self-death that entails. Higher difficulty bots will bank Flak shots off walls and bounce grenades around corners, lay fields of Biorifle goop, or be deadly-accurate with a sniper rifle from above.

The bots are what really put UT99 firmly on the ‘classic’ shelf, because its contemporaries just didn't offer the same thing. Again, Quake 2 had bots, but they served the purpose of being moving targets and not much else. Driving UT’s bots was a dead-simple, if tedious to implement, system. If you'll indulge me, I'm gonna pull back the hood and reveal the not-at-all-secret ways Unreal Tournament made all of its bots so good at playing each map.

All over a map, there are invisible waypoints hand-placed by the designer. The goal is to make a rough trail of waypoints to each part of the map. Bots see each waypoint and have the ability to travel in a wide radius around each. Weapons, ammo, health, armor, and special powerups all act as special waypoints that a bot will see and travel to if they don't already have what that pickup is. Players and other bots are considered waypoints as well, and when all that comes together, a bot will very intuitively move around the level. Placing a waypoint higher in the air will make a bot jump to reach it, so having them move over obstacles is simple. Like I said, it only requires a loose sort of web across the level, as the world geometry itself is also something a bot sees. Going around a corner or a box in the middle of a room is no issue provided the waypoints are good enough.

So now that you know how the sausage is made, what does that mean for the game? Well, quite a lot. Bot support is built into every single one of the maps UT99 shipped with, which is no small feat considering the base game came with 53 maps across four gamemodes (deathmatch and team deathmatch use the same maps), with a further 30 maps added for every gamemode but Assault over the course of four free downloadable bonus packs.

Every single one of those is playable, to this day, offline with a complement of bots just as ready to rock as they were almost twenty years ago. And that's not event counting the thousands of user-made maps still available for download, but we'll talk about modding in a bit. Because right now, it's time to talk about another excellent thing present on each map - the music.

Returning from Unreal are indisputable gods of music Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos, who trade the previous game's subdued alien score for a soundtrack full of some of the boppin’est, crunchiest, hypest EDM tracks of the late 90s. (Can you tell I don't know anything about music?)

Run, GoDown, and Organic provide the upbeat bleeps and bloops to murder by; Save Me, Razorback, and Superfist let you rock out with your shock (rifle) out; while Forgone Destruction, Skyward Fire, and The Course chill things out a bit so you can focus on getting sick headshots. The quality of the music in Unreal Tournament is impossible to overstate, just as it was in Unreal. Brandon and van den Bos are unrelentingly good at their jobs, and the mishmash of styles all grinds together across UT99’s broad palette of maps like butter full of shrapnel. It's good, is what I'm saying. The music's really good. Listen to it. Please.

Stage music is something I personally miss from shooters, if you'll indulge another tangent. I love hearing the gameworld as interpreted by the composers, it adds so much to the whole package, and we just don't really get it anymore. The rise of the modern military shooter in 2007 with the runaway success of Call of Duty 4 kind of slammed the door on stage music with a tactical-lite focus on identifying footsteps and directional fire, but even Halo’s deathmatches were filled with a blank silence. Or Halo 2, I suppose, since Halo 1 didn't have online play, except for the PC version, which did. No stage music though, that's the main takeaway.

UT99 had a truly odd mix of contemporaries, from the last days of Quake 2 and the imminent release of Quake 3 a week after UT itself came out, to Half-Life creating a mod scene in its multiplayer, to Halo a year or so later. The turn of the century would bring with it the generally-accepted death of the arena shooter, but they all went out kicking, and the few hundred people still populating UT99 servers to this day are a testament to its tight, clean design and no-frills focus on gameplay.

Unless, of course, they're playing a mod.

Truth be told, I never actually played much UT99 online. I was very bad, you see, and when I got better my horrible social anxiety had progressed to the point where the idea of even playing a game with faceless strangers was terrifying. I was 8. But anyway, modding! You may have, in your travels as someone who presumably plays videogames - an assumption I'm making because you're reading this - heard of the Unreal Engine. In a hidden bit of Trivia, Unreal was the first game on the Unreal Engine, and Unreal Tournament also used it. Wild!

Along with the game itself, both releases also shipped with the Unreal Editor, or UnrealEd. UnrealEd is the exact development tool the fine folks at Epic Megagames used to make those games, and they just casually handed them to the players. The result echoes throughout the game industry to this day, and while Epic was hardly the only developer supporting mods, they were the first to do so on that kind of level. As a result, there are thousands if not tens of thousands of user-made maps scattered around the web, along with new gamemodes, fan-made expansions for Unreal, new character models, weapons, and mutators.

Ah, mutators.

Mutators can be thought of as ‘mini-mods,’ if you want. There's a list of them you can select before each game that all change, or mutate (see?), the gameplay a bit. Superjump, low gravity, replacing each weapon spawn on a map with another, big head mode, stuff like that. Mutators are a fun addition that can mix up a usual match, but don't bring with them the sweeping changes of a full mod or total conversion. They were a way to illustrate how flexible the development options were, and a nifty thing for players to have available to them.

So, Unreal Tournament had lots of ways to keep the game fresh, either built-in or crafted by other players. Turn a small map into Explosion Hell with the Rocket Arena mutator, or download a player-made weapon pack filled with weird goodies. Wondering how Quake’s iconic maps play in UT? Somebody's made them. Hell, someone's even made a bunch of UT2004 maps for UT99, complete with de-made character and weapon models. A lasting legacy of creativity is what UT99 brought above all else, and the fact that so much of what it did can remain as the primary example of how to do something right says more than I can about its impact on videogames as a whole.

Unreal Tournament is a fast, brutal game balancing all of its various systems on the edge of a spinning razor blade, and it does so with a mastery that I feel was not seen among its peers of the time. From the weapons, the movement, the maps, and the gamemodes, Unreal Tournament presents you the player with so many options, but it never feels like a generic crowd-pleasing paste has been slathered over everything. The game's core is simple and well defined, and everything else builds on that. It has a certain tightly-realized identity that I feel is missing from a lot of games that try to have the same sort of arcady arena vibe - Halo was probably its closest rival as far as small genre shifts go, and looking at Destiny 2 as the latest version of that is a weird mix of procedurally generated weapons, hero abilities, flat maps, and very few projectile weapons. Skill has been taken out of some areas and added to others, but the design feels looser, less actualized. Call of Duty is fast, but still has that small desire to be somewhat tactical, so there are recoil patterns and weapon attachments, the rich-get-richer killstreaks, and a progression system that murders any attempt at balancing their arsenal. Quake Live, from what I understand, has a healthy enough playerbase, but my preference has already been stated. Quake Champions tries to marry its classic gameplay with that of Overwatch, and the reactions have been mixed. Team Fortress 2 has been bogged down with more and more weapons that blur the lines between classes, and the official map rotation - already small on launch - has barely been added to in twelve years.

This isn't a “games are different now and that's bad” sort of thing, my point is just that UT99 had a much cleaner mission statement, if you will, than what we get now. The industry's gotten bigger, and budgets followed. Expectations of sales rose, leading developers to want to bring in as many players as they could. Games can't really be niche anymore.

Or maybe that was true five years ago, but now the indie scene’s getting huge, and you can find a revival of your favorite genre just about anywhere. Most aren't super well polished, but isn't that what made games like Unreal, Quake, and Half-Life into what we remember? They all had more ambition than was perhaps warranted, and each made their huge impacts despite a healthy amount of blemishes. Endless polish makes for a good player experience, but maybe not as much of a memorable one.

Unreal Tournament all but made me into an FPS fan, and I think it's great that we all have so many types to choose from now. Public tastes have shifted and evolutions of the genre happened. I've enjoyed my fair share of Calls of Duty and Battlefields, I plugged hundreds of hours into TF2 throughout highschool, I've ridden the Overwatch hype train, and I love poking holes in walls and getting sneaky kills in Rainbow Six: Siege. But Unreal Tournament is my oldest bastion, and one I return to every now and then when the whim takes me. It occupies my top slot, though admittedly in an endless 1v1 with Unreal Tournament 2004.

But there was another Unreal Tournament between the two, one that came and went with mild fanfare while paving the way for what I feel is, hands down, the best game ever crafted by human hands. Check back at the end of the month for a short look at the odd little Unreal Tournament 2003.

#unreal tournament #ut99 #words about games #videogame #review #essay #fortnite #unreal retrospective

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Game 362: OrbQuest (1981)

I’m playing the second edition of the game. The first is not available anywhere.

OrbQuest

United States Alternate World Simulations

Released in 1981 for CP/M

Date Started: 10 March 2020

Date Finished: 15 March 2020

Total Hours: 25

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

Digital Research’s CP/M operating system only boasted two original RPGs, and it turns out that both of them were adapted directly from games on the PLATO mainframe. A year ago, I covered how Nemesis (1981) was just a microcomputer version of Oubliette (1977), and now it’s clear that OrbQuest is nothing more than a microcomputer version of The Game of Dungeons (1975), more popularly known by its file name, “DND.” Specifically, it is a direct adaption of the game’s fifth edition.

Finding a treasure chest in the OrbQuest dungeon offers the same options as The Game of Dungeons.

We’ve discussed at length how Daniel Lawrence based his own DND (c. 1976) on The Game of Dungeons, but OrbQuest is a far more literal porting of the code than Lawrence’s. Indeed, if I’d known about it when I won The Game of Dungeons, I might have been content to discuss OrbQuest in an addendum rather than playing it as a separate game. Among the things it shares in common:

A goal to recover an Orb, held by a powerful guardian (a dragon in Game, a “dragon wizard” here)

Twenty 9 x 9 levels with the same system of movement (e.g., SHIFT to go through a door), secret doors, and one-way doors

No staircases, just “teleporters” that take you to the next and previous levels, and the teleporters are oddly spaced between squares rather than in them

The same attributes, with “piety” substituted for “wisdom”

Experience based on monsters killed and gold retrieved

Most of the same spells, divided into cleric and mage, with slots given to the character upon leveling

The same combat options, including minimized importance of “fighting” and each enemy having a particular weakness to a particular spell

The same commands and results for opening chests, drinking potions, and reading books

Most of the same items of magical equipment to find

Most of the same monsters

On dungeon Level 1, monsters are never higher than Level 1

Options to toggle on or off automatic collection of gold and automatic fighting of enemies below a certain level

I’m assuming that Dirk Pellet and the other Game authors didn’t know about this attempt to monetize their work, or certainly they would have objected as strongly as they did to Lawrence’s. Relative obscurity must have helped: OrbQuest appeared only for a dying platform, and the creator notes on a message board that he only ever sold about 100 copies.

The Game of Dungeons’ cleric spells were, in contrast, “Light Candle,” “Holy Water, “Exorcise,” “Pray,” “Hold,” “Dispell,” and “Datspell.”

As to that creator, his name was Walter E. Donovan, and his company–existing only for this game, it seems–has an address in Milpitas, California. So far, I have not been able to tie Donovan directly to a PLATO campus (unlike Lawrence and the author of Nemesis), so I’m not sure how he was exposed to it, but it’s clear that somehow he got the source code or otherwise thorough documentation of its elements and mechanics.

A nice cover leads the game manual, which is otherwise typewritten and photocopied.

As usual, this is not to say that Donovan added nothing to the game. In fact, he smoothed away some of Game‘s most egregious imbalances and made the game less random. Gold is less plentiful, particularly on earlier levels, chests (and thus magic items) rarer, and traps less deadly. A player can no longer spend half the game just wandering the same corridors of Level 1 and picking up nearly every magic item along the way. Chests have only about 10 times the gold as random loot on their levels, not 1000 times. Chests aren’t trapped as often, and when they are, they rarely kill you unless you’ve delved too far too fast. Magic items are never trapped. Books and potions help more than they hurt, so it’s worth taking the chance on them.

Potions and books are less deadly here than in the source game.

The result is a game that is, even with permadeath, far more survivable than The Game of Dungeons but also less “gameable.” There aren’t any tricks to help you get rich quick (unlike in Game, you can’t cache gold, either) or otherwise bypass the long and tedious process of grinding yourself senseless for a several dozen hours. I’ve been doing it while clearing out my Netflix queue, but I can’t imagine that even back in the day, when it was the only game for my platform, I would have had a lot of fun with it.

Collecting gold to raise my level. I have a pretty good set of equipment here.

The game begins with random rolls of 3-18 for strength, dexterity, intelligence, and piety. After that, you begin on Level 1 of the dungeon. The 9 x 9 levels have a fixed layout but a random distribution of gold, chests, and other items, re-randomized every time you change levels or exit the dungeon. Encounters are completely random and also extremely variable. Sometimes, I walked 20 steps or more with no encounters; other times, I had three or four in the same square.

The limited character creation process.

For the most part, you meet the same monsters on all levels, but the monsters themselves have levels. The monster’s level is far more important in determining his danger than the monster type; that is, a Level 3 ghoul is deadlier than a Level 1 dragon. On dungeon Level 1, monsters are never higher than Level 1 themselves. On other dungeon levels, their levels are randomized to a maximum of roughly 5 times the dungeon level for levels 1-10–unless you’re carrying gold, in which case their maximum level is something like 4 times the dungeon level plus 1 for every 5,000-10,000 gold pieces you carry.

My maps of the first nine levels.

OrbQuest lacks the “excelsior transport” from Game, but several of the levels have pits that take you directly to lower levels. The levels have varied layouts with secret doors, one-way doors, and such, but no special encounters until Level 10. Playing the game is a process of exploring downward, picking up gold until you start to encounter monsters you can’t handle, then hauling it back up to Level 1 and the exit in order to level up. The next time, you can go a little further and collect a little more gold.

There are 13 monsters in the game: balrogs, deaths, demons, dragons, evil curates, ghouls, green slimes, hirebrands, huge spiders, mindworms, specters, wizards, and zombies. A few of them have special attacks. If mindworms do any damage to you at all in combat, they’ll sap intelligence permanently. Same goes for specters and strength. Green slimes eat inventory items.

Despite my victory, the specter manages to eat a point of strength.

As with Game, fighting here is a last resort except for enemies significantly below your level (you can set the game to auto-fight such enemies so you don’t even need to press “F”). Instead, you need to learn, through trial and error, each enemy’s weaknesses to various spells. For instance, balrogs are susceptible to the “Fatal Charm” mage spell. The cleric spell “Holy Water” deals with demons, evil curates, and zombies. As in Game, the cleric’s “Hold” and the mage’s “Sleep” work reliably against enemies below Level 5 and hardly at all after that. As long as the enemy isn’t more than three times your level, he should die immediately from the spell that works best against him. At higher levels, the spell might partly work (depending on the spell), leaving you to finish him off (or vice versa) in melee combat. Again, you can control the level of enemy you face by controlling the amount of gold you carry and the dungeon level you’re visiting.

Combat options.

The occasional potion or tome offers a chance to increase your attributes, and unlike the ones in Game, they don’t have an equal chance of decreasing attributes, although they do have an occasional negative effect like poison or a trap. “Clerical detection” reliably determines if the item is safe.

Chests occasionally deliver magic items. Swords, shields, helms (“haumes”), hauberks, Cloaks of Defense, and Belts of Healing are all initially found at +1, and as you find more, you gain additional pluses. Amulets of Revival will save the character from one death. Small Idols of Luck increase the amount of treasure that you find. Necklaces of Eyes allow you to see secret doors. I was never sure what Rings of Power or Glory did. ��

The Belt of Healing is a useful tool that regenerates hit points.

Level 9 has a bunch of one-way doors that funnel the player to one of the teleporters to Level 10. Immediately on arrival to Level 10, the character is attacked by Demogorgon. This is a test encounter to see if you’re strong enough for the lower levels, and you need to be around Level 100 to beat him. Once he’s dead, he never appears again.

Killing Level 10’s Demogorgon is a key milestone.

Levels 10-20 are a lot harder. Not only are the monsters much higher level, but there are more navigation obstacles. There are invisible walls, wrapping levels, lots more one-way walls and doors, and other difficult terrain. Downward teleporters sometimes skip two levels. Level 15, with a bunch of concentric squares, is a copy of Game of Dungeons‘ Level 11. Level 16, featuring a spiral of corridors, is a copy of Game‘s Level 15. And Level 17, with a bunch of featureless north/south corridors connected by secret doors, is a copy of Game‘s Level 20.

The Dragon Wizard is found somewhere on Level 20. The level has a couple of squares that halve your available spells and another one that blinds you. If you defeat the Dragon Wizard, you get the Orb and millions of gold pieces–which it would be sensible to immediately drop, as the Orb itself is going to attract enough high-level monsters. You then have to make your way back up 20 levels, apparently somewhere encountering The Grim Reaper, who’s even harder than the Dragon Wizard.

Here is where I run into problems. Although I’ve explored them both multiple times, I cannot find the up teleporters from Levels 19 or 13. A “Teleport” spell that’s supposed to move you upward for one cleric and one mage spell slot absolutely never works. Thus, although I have managed to obtain the Orb, I can’t find my way out of the dungeon.

I had the Orb at one point; I just couldn’t get it out.

I haven’t been adhering to permadeath, of course. The game makes it easy to cheat. It saves your character with every level transition and doesn’t record his “death” until you acknowledge the death message. This is an opportunity for players to quickly remove the disk from the drive, or in my case kill the emulator. Reloading is a pain, though, so death still has consequences. Since I’m emulating the CP/M from within DOSBox, I have to restart two emulators with their associated commands and sit through a timer in the unregistered CP/M emulator. It was probably easier for a 1981 player to restart his game than it is for me.

Thus, having wasted an absurd number of hours on the game, I can’t show you a winning screen. But if I know my readers, one of them will eventually grow curious enough to poke around in the game’s code and let me know what I missed, and I’ll be able to come back with an addendum. For now, the game ties with Game for an 18, although the individual stories aren’t exactly the same. Game of Dungeons at least tried to make up a story about the dungeon, which OrbQuest doesn’t, but OrbQuest has a slightly better variety of equipment.

OrbQuest gets some credit for slightly more gruesome combat language than its source.

We’ll take our second look at Planet’s Edge next while I gear up to plan fan (and Addict) favorite Ultima VII. Replacing it on the “upcoming” list is Catacombs (1982) for the ZX81, for which I haven’t even found an emulator yet, so we’ll see.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-362-orbquest-1981/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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