Poll: Unreal is 20 years old

[BFG10K]

Back in the day, if you had the right hardware, you’d be greeted to this upon program launch:

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Shortly after playing a bit, you saw something like this:

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At the time this was jaw-dropping, especially if you had the big-kahuna setup of SLI Voodoo 2 @ 1024x768. The screenshots above were scaled down from 5120x2880 @ 144Hz on a GTX1070, gotta love progress.

The game shipped with many advanced features:

• Colored fog.
• Extremely realistic sky rendering.
• Detail, reflective and liquid textures.
• Head decapitations and ragdoll gibs.
• Amazingly complex and atmospheric level design.
• Enemies that would dodge, roll, and lay down covering fire while retreating.
• Highly original guns like the GES Biorifle and the combo attack ASMD shock rifle.

I also enjoyed Return to Na Pali but felt the last two levels were really rushed and they've could've done a lot more with them.

I never really got into the other games, especially Unreal 2 which I hated as a sequel with its extremely poor level design. I do however like the distinctive visuals that the Unreal 3 engine imparts on games that use it.

 

[sandorski]

20 years already? Time flies. 2K4 was my favourite, but Unreal was the biggest Wow I ever experienced in a videogame.

 

[BSim500]

I never really got into the other games, especially Unreal 2 which I hated as a sequel with its extremely poor level design. I do however like the distinctive visuals that the Unreal 3 engine imparts on games that use it.

I love these "anniversary" posts you do (where's the damn "thumbs up" Emoji gone)? I actually played Unreal Gold (GOG version includes Return To Na Pali) for the first time last year (another missed at launch, then forgotten about). Great game. Completely agree with the "feel of the Unreal Engine" thing. UE1 (DX1, Unreal) games have their own "character". As do UE2 (Bioshock 1-2) and UE3 (Bioshock Inf, Dishonored, etc). Within the first 5 minutes of Unreal Gold three things stood out:-

1. The soundtrack. "Damn this sounds really, REALLY Deus Ex 1-ish". ALT-tabbed out and Googled it and sure enough Alexander Brandon, Michiel van den Bos & Daniel Gardopée did both. Unreal vs Deus Ex.

2. The lighting. To me, Unreal along with a few other old school games like FEAR1, etc, were the last of the "old school dev who knew what they were doing outside of shader reliance" games where the developers had to get the "base lighting" right out of necessity and couldn't rely on modern "spammed glowing fog + over-exaggerated Bloom / Depth Of Field" post-processing effects filling every room as a cheap substitute. Unreal really did push coloured lighting in many areas, and levels as a whole really felt atmospheric due to this rather than the 20 year old textures / meshes.

3. Large (mostly single-piece) level design. It's almost an embarrassment as to how +15-20 year newer modern games / engines with 50x greater horsepower still often need tiny "hubs". Newer engine does not automatically mean better if level design goes down at the same time as visuals go up. Reminds me of similarly comparing Thief 1-2 vs Thief 3's "nerfed for XBox" (and even vs Thief 4). Another one of those old games that were linear but had levels designed in such a way they didn't feel anywhere near as claustrophobic as 'evolved' modern "6ft wide + cutscenes every 50ft cinematic experiences".

Also, there are HD texture packs available now. Like so many other old-school games I've had a splurge on replaying recently (Doom 1-2, Quake 1-2, RTCW, MoH:AA, NOLF1-2, Bioshock 1-2, Serious Sam FE/SE, etc), I've had 100x more fun re-blasting through this stuff again than engaging in the latest $60 $90-$120 pay2win grind-fest cr*p. Nice to see the game still being remembered.

 

[shortylickens]

I like UT 2004 cuz its overall superior except in one way.

That god awful Double Domination mode that sucks ass and never ends. Classic Domination was so much better. Especially with 4 teams.

OH yeah, 4 teams was cooler than 2. So thats another reason its not great.

PSA: The new Unreal Tournament is free during beta, but you have to download the stupid Epic Games program.

 

[Igo69]

I was replaying some of the old games recently because I haven't played them in a long time, Unreal and Return to Na Pali were one of them. I was blown away how awesome and fun this game is. Long and big levels, smart AI, you don't see this much today in games.
The game was ahead of its time.

 

[Zenoth]

I'll always love UT99, but Unreal Tournament 2004 will always be the best for me; nothing ever since ever got anywhere close to it. It's plain and simple the best arena shooter game ever made (of course, in my opinion).

 

[William Gaatjes]

Played a lot of multiplayer unreal tournament. The single player game unreal II , the awakening, i liked a lot as well.
I was in awe when looking at the graphics of that game.

 

[Gryz]

HL1, SiN and then Unreal. My first 3 games. (I had played a little doom on a PC in our lab). Unreal really grabbed me. I played those on an old laptop I got from work, to make ppt slides on. I played in software-mode, with 8-15 fps. When UT(99) was about about to come out, I built myself a real gaming PC. With a nVidia TNT2 ultra.

It was almost the end of my career. Games are so much more fun than work. In 2000 I spent many hours per week playing UT99 CTF. Many hours. And then when Morrowind (RPG, 2003) came out, my FPS days were over. Then when WoW came out (2005), everything was over. For 5 years I only played WoW (kinda). Only after 2010 games were slowly fading out of my life. HL1 and especially Unreal1 and UT99 started it.

 

[Thebobo]

mp

 

[rstrohkirch]

2k4 was by far my favorite and I think most other peoples as well. I remember dropping $180 on a new Nvidia card to play Unreal in all its glory on a P2 450mhz system. To be honest though, I didn't really care for the single player much in the game. Half Life came out a few months later and made Unreal single player look antiquated.

 

[moonbogg]

This thread; it tugs at my heart strings. This is the era where I got really into PC gaming. UT99 was legendary. Still is. I also remember playing the original Unreal with bots and my friend looked at the screen and said in a semi-condescending tone, "Yeah, that looks like its about 40fps or so, maybe less". I was like, "what the hell is that and who cares?" He was ahead of his time since we were about the same age. He then talked about Unreal Tournament and how it was even more awesome and taxing on the hardware and I couldn't wait to try that game. Once I did, it was my benchmark for testing GPU's for quite some time and remained my go to game of beauty for colorful impulse fragging. You young kids have no idea what you missed out on. You were born too late. Sorry.

 

[Rifter]

UT 99, Assault game mode, always my Fav.

 

[BSim500]

Just a heads up - Unreal Gold is free on GOG for the next 48 hours. (Plus 80% off of Unreal 2, Tournament GOTY and Tournament 2004 for the next 7 days).

 

[Schmide]

Still play Bombing Run 3-4 times a week. Come play 10:15 east. There are about 6-10 of us, 20-25 internationally.

Edit: Oh it's Tue Thur Fri Sun at Crazy Uncle Bobs

 

[EXCellR8]

UT2004 with the community map packs was fantastic.

Admittedly, I never played any unreal games prior to the original Unreal Tournament. I absolutely loved some of those deathmatch maps though, and their remakes. I might have to fire that up later for a bit of nostalgia.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I was never that good at it, but I had fun playing UT2004 with the mix of very different vehicles like the nimble hovercraft and the tank and mega-tank.

 

[Ken g6]

I like UT 2004 cuz its overall superior except in one way.

UT 2004 is great for one reason, IMHO: The vehicles.

UT99 is great for the mods. And there are many good ones. Such as:

• Chaos UT. UT 2K4 may have spider mines, which are similar to Proxy Mines, but I've never seen a turret there. AP CAS12 is my favorite, though.
• Rockets UT. Surround your enemies with a field of burning lava "napalm". Or launch a bunch of tiny rockets to seek them out. Also little ceiling turrets.
• Strangelove. Ride that redeemer! Almost as much fun as a 2K4 raptor, except you can't stop, can't take many hits, it has a limited range, and you have to find a place to dump the thing when you get off. But you can capture the flag while flying!
• Dark Magic. A totally different play mode. Getting people stuck in a stasis field behind you while running away with the flag is always fun. But watch out if someone decides to force choke "disintegrate" you!

 

[EXCellR8]

I liked the manta, raptor and scorpion were cool but the absolute best was the SPMA lol ultimate trolling vehicle.

 

[Zenoth]

This thread; it tugs at my heart strings. This is the era where I got really into PC gaming. UT99 was legendary. Still is. I also remember playing the original Unreal with bots and my friend looked at the screen and said in a semi-condescending tone, "Yeah, that looks like its about 40fps or so, maybe less". I was like, "what the hell is that and who cares?" He was ahead of his time since we were about the same age. He then talked about Unreal Tournament and how it was even more awesome and taxing on the hardware and I couldn't wait to try that game. Once I did, it was my benchmark for testing GPU's for quite some time and remained my go to game of beauty for colorful impulse fragging. You young kids have no idea what you missed out on. You were born too late. Sorry.

Similar case for me, specifically on the hardware part of it.

UT2004 is the #1 reason why I bought my first 'real' gaming video card: the almighty ATi Radeon 9800 Pro.

 

[AdamK47]

I have vivid memories running Unreal on a Voodoo 2. Doesn't make it feel like it was 20 years ago. I must have played through the initial prison ship level nearly a hundred times.

I should do a timedemo on the castle intro to see what I get. I use to loop it to test CPU and video card overclocks.

 

[AdamK47]

Timedemo results with a DX10 renderer at an unheard of monstrous resolution of 1920x1080 with... get this... 32-bit color! Don't let the folks at 3dfx tell you you don't need 32-bit color. It really does make a difference.

Software renderer:

 

[moonbogg]

100fps in software rendering. Crazy. I remember when software rendering was actually a viable option.

 

[ArchAngel777]

UT was definitely my favorite. I loved the custom maps. That brings back memories from nearly 20 years ago... CS Beta 7.1, UT, Q3... The fondest memories of those games (and the friends they involved).

 

[DigDog]

never was a big fan of unreal, for various reasons. first off, in those days i did not appreciate the idea of multiplayer; we all thought playing online was for losers and nerds, we liked to play single players campaigns only, and if there was more than one of us, we'd hotseat.

also, unreal needed hardware acceleration, and we didn't have a decent GPU.

and when i did have a chance to play unreal, i didn't understand it - i had no idea how to move, and when i did learn how to, i thought double-tapping was basically cheating. i basically thought it was too hard for what was essentially "a game".

i always did love the Redeemer, though.

later on in the years, i can say, i still prefer quake .. vastly. first off, quake 1 and quake 2 had proper single player campaigns that were far better than any arena-vs-bots thing that unreal had going on. i like the movement system of Q3 far more than the double-tap-to-do-anything that unreal has, i HATE the weapon switch system, don't like the mouse setup options, to the point where even today i can't set up my mouse sens in any decent way.

i sort-of like the weapons .. but i think they are unbalanced towards the shock rifle and sniper rifle being too strong compared to the rest; and the bio rifle is just random, sometimes dealing redonkolous damage and other times zilch.

the one i played most was the one on the PS2, i think it was UT99, not sure. Bots design was pretty cool, but otherwise, not a game i fancy.

 

[ericlp]

yeah... I figured someone would have posted the 80% off deals and freebies. Posted it up on hotdeals...