With the anticipation and buzz goin on bout Unreal 2 you should all
know the basic story line by now, but in case you don't, here's the
jist.
Your employer - the Earth-based Civil Government - is weak, 8 bit
player in a Terran political scene dominated by Corporate factions and
the infamous Terran Military. You are the 24th century equivalent of a
sheriff in the ol wild west, with better guns and a spiffier suit with
no need for a badge.
You are to explore the territories with the help of your ship, the
atlantis, and your first Officer, the breathtakingly beautiful Aida.
The main plot is the sectors have erupted in violence and it is your
job to find out why and what is goin on in your sectors, as it is your
job to uphold the peace.
Ok, so you know all this, now let's get to the good stuff bout that
100k polys. This engine is defintely what dreams are made of, Scott
Dalton, lead level designer at Legend, was showing off the sniper rifle
and zoomed in on one of them Big Dragon like things, their wings were
flapping, their heads moving and the clouds moving behind them in a
smooth sanguine motion, I almost cried. As if that weren't enough, my
soul howled out in bliss when I saw the delicious particle effects
which breathed life into the running water of a Water Fall. The whole
point is that the whole enviroment is totally 3-d. Scott played a nifty
lil trick and took away the textures and left the wire frame for us
ingame and boasted "Our Walls have more poly's than a regular game has
in it's whole map".
As far as the game play goes, we were shown mostly the single player
aspect as that's the way Legend is trying to go with this, but we did
get to check out one CTF map full of asteroids, and not like just one
asteroid, a field FULL of asteroids, and a prototype of a grapple, not
fully implemented yet but could make Low G maps a whole lot more fun.
Included in the release they will have DM, TDM, LMS, CTF and a new
gametype referred to once as XMP or Xtreme Multi Player.
What is this XMP? Well the way it was explained to us is it's basically
a Classbased Team DM type game. The objective is that you have a
replicator, this replicator supplies you with your tech, and weapons,
you have a technician class, that technician will be the one
programming the replicator the info needed to make bigger, and better
weapons, till the point that you can start putting up turrets and other
really big and mean stuff.
As for the Single Player aspect of U2, the dialog seems promising, no
more Deus Ex type cutscenes, but fully real time dialog with numerical
based options that you can press at any time, interrupting the current
converstation and illiciting suprise, shock or pure disgust, it's
almost kinda funny. The whole SP aspect is goin to follow the mission
based style that we all know and love, more of an Assault the base type
feel or hard core FPS action, with a more involved feel, or so
explained Mike Verdu at this conference. Also the worlds been expanded,
24 total species, all of which besides the Skaarj are new.
All in all, with the skelatal animation, facial expressions,
Interactive dialog's and hard core feel, this game will be the best
that comes out first quarter of '02, so hold your breath and take a
look at these screenies.
