Unfinished: Unreal Tournament Pre-Alpha 03/02/2015

Jeff's crazy high mouse sensitivity really irks me as somebody who plays FPS games competitively.

These menus are fucking extraordinary!

I haven't started watching this yet, but if it's a "pre-alpha", then surely all of the art is placeholder and there are almost no animations and everything is stock sound effects and there is a bunch of scratch dialogue in the game that is mostly the audio engineer reading lines, right?

Remember, you can also Make Some Unreal Engine Games For Free - https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free

@monkeystick: What? Don't act like you don't have the 10 hour version of Brodyquest at the ready. ;)

On a more serious note: Gonna sign up for UT asap. Been craving for a good modern arena shooter for some time now and this looks really neat.

To answer your question, yes it does change it that much. A good arena shooter requires the players to be balanced against each other, so that the better player wins through skill and map knowledge. This means no loadouts, killstreaks, perks, and etc. Everyone needs to have the exact same starting gun and stats, thereby encouraging players to run around the map in order to acquire both the weapons and powerups/health items on the map.

@tortoise said:

Weapon/health/armor placement, respawn timers on said pickups, map control/area denial, and simply knowing where the enemy is at all times location-wise by the tell-tale sounds they make when grabbing said items are hugely important factors in most arena shooters.

Whoever controls the map and where the most coveted pickups respawn dictates the flow of the entire match for the opponent. Watch any competitive match of Quake Live, for instance, and it should become immediately apparent why that is.

Halo, which is more relevant to most people today/a contemporary example (but is not typically considered an arena shooter) has both loadouts and weapon/vehicle spawns on the map, and so has a very similar dynamic as a result, with all the players rushing towards the power weapons/vehicles at the start of the match for map supremacy.

So yes, it changes a whole lot.

There aren't enough ANZ servers yet but the foundations for a great UT are there. Really liking UE4 too, seems like a well optimised engine.

UT guns suck though, Quake 3 will always have the better guns.

My favorite server mods were those wave based coop rpgs. You get to level up parameters like max health, damage, run speed, vampirism, and crazy things like ammo regen so, if high enough, you can shoot forever. As long as one person survives the wave, the server goes into the next level. So much fun especially in those real life maps where you're really tiny in a living room or kitchen.

If I had a dollar for every time the Giant Bomb crew used the words "rich tapestry"...

...but i like the bio rifle. sure it may not be the best, but charge it up all the way, stick it on someone and hes 100% dead.

I was looking a bit off during the tutorial part because the character was moving so slow, I was really worried that they altered the game to make it friendlier to modern FPS players. Good to see once Jeff got into the different maps though the movement speed was much closer to what I remember old UT games were like.

I am really excited to play this, I loved UT and Q3 back in the day

oh my god this looks like a blast.

Never got into Unreal back in the day, so might give this a go once it's fully released.

Already downloading

Do. Not. Want.

I think 2003 is my favourite Unreal. Graphics still hold up quite well, good variety of maps including lots of nice low grav ones like Tokara Forest, I think giant levels and vehicles ruined the game from 2004 onward.

UT has funner guns, more open to interesting interpretations. (i.e. now you can create walls using the bio + plasma rifle)

Quake has better 'standard' guns.

Also, UT was always geared slower than Quake on the whole.

So is there even a defacto engine nowadays? Seems like everyone's going proprietary nowadays, with maybe growing stock in unity and some stragglers with UE3 or modified versions of UE3.

UE4 looks pretty sharp so hopefully more devs adopt it.

Reflex has been on early access for a while now. Looks freakin' awesome.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/328070/

I'm sad to see the bio rifle is still a piece of shit, I always liked the idea of it at least.

The only setting I want on my mouse is 'Nauseating'.

This QL tricked me into thinking that the GB rotating background was, in fact, my own background. Tried to double click aka full screen that video at the point that the pizza background showed up. Sadly that was the most interesting part of this game. rip early online shooters, we hardly knew ye,

Invasion RPG on DM-Kegger. In fact, let me know when Kegger, AfterHours, or December24 is in there, and I'll be on board in no time.

What's with the Dota announcer

huehuehue

Also what is this Link gun, where's the pulse rifle!? And where's ripper inside a small corridor?

Surprise Dan out of fuckin' nowhere at 2:06:35. Not enough mics for everyone before?

@monkeystick said:

Well... I... ... ... WAT...

A while back there was a bit on their weekly livestream about adding some crazy tripmine style combo to it. IIRC you would fire a big blob then hit it with a little blob and they'd explode out sticking to walls while staying connected to each other by lime green lines. Touching a line would blow all of them up. No idea if that idea got dropped or not, it was presented as very experimental for making the biorifle worth using. (and area control would be great)

Knights of Cydonia was a big Guitar Hero 3 track. I'd wager that's the only reason most people know about that song.

Hysteria was the hot Rock Band Muse track and it was DLC. Has a fantastic bassline.

I'd say UT needs more of this kind of weapon development in general. I get that there's an old guard of UT players who are going to lose their shit over any changes but when the flak cannon is still the most interesting thing you've got going in 2015, and competitors in this space like TF2 have dozens of 'combo weapons', the weapons clearly need some work.

And for the love of christ, boost the movement speed and jump height.

The Bio Rifle gets a bad rap. If you're using it like a mine you're doing it wrong. Hold down alt-fire and release point-blank on someone. Pretty much an instant kill.

@gtcknight: @whiteforestparkrangr:

I know it makes a difference to start with a half-decent gun or not but I don't really agree it changes the whole genre of the game. Even if you spawn with 5 rail ammo, you still need to control the map, get other weapons and know when/where you're going to find a red armour or a quad damage. It's always important to know where enemy players are based on sounds and so on. If you're playing the rocket arena mod, start with 200h/200a and 50 rockets every time you spawn and therefore realistically need to pickup no other items does that mean the game is no longer an arena shooter?

fuck yeah

Come now, always sort by ping. And never even bother with servers that are above 100 ms.

Doesn't Unity already have this "problem" of too many half arsed early access games?

I dunno but more games is always good and lowering the barrier of entry to developing them, and opening up new markets (like selling assets), also seems like a pretty cool thing to do.

Without lowering the barrier of entry, we wouldn't have such a wide and varied gaming landscape like we have today, let alone "indie games". And Epic is actually pretty late to a party that has already been going on for a while. Crytek allowed free use of Cryengine at universities already years ago, Unity and Source also allow for free download of their SDK for years, Epic basically just played catch up with this move.

I still like the overall situation, great times for anybody who ever wanted to get into actually developing games!

This looked surprisingly boring until they loaded up that community map. Then it started to look like Unreal Tournament.

It's such a shame UT3 never caught on, that was a very under-appreciated game.

Bio Rifle is under only the Flak Cannon and Rocket Launcher for best gun IMO.

Man... I'm superhyped for another UT, I just hope the bots end up polished and onslaught (warfare in UT3... I think) makes a return.

so if i understand this if you make $3000 in in-game currency from playing the game you have to pay them %5 of that in real money to keep playing.

Well sounds novel not going to play it though

You don't understand it. If you develop a product using Unreal Engine and ship it, you pay Epic 5% royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. Unreal Tournament has nothing to do with this.

I don't know about this game, there's some stuff I don't like. Double-tapping to dodge is dumb, I turned it off but it still feels weird and kind of awkward and the wall jump mechanic is clumsy even with single tap dodging. The movement speed also feels way too slow to me especially compared to other games like this.

I like the concept and look of the weapons with everything having an alt fire but I just don't like using the majority of them, a lot of them don't feel worth the effort to use properly when I could just hold M1 on someone with the minigun. Maybe I need to spend more time with it.

I have always liked Unreal Tournament.