gerry wrote on 2025-01-30, 16:58:

Unreal launched a few months before half life i think, at the time most FPS games were like doom, duke3d or quake and quake 2. […]
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Unreal launched a few months before half life i think, at the time most FPS games were like doom, duke3d or quake and quake 2.

I think it got such good reviews because a) it really looked good at the time and b) that first 30 mins is exceptional design - the escape from the ship, scripted events and the opening up of the outside world

Early reviewers were probably wowed by that and perhaps didn't put in hours and multiple playthroughs

I was also impressed, and i didn't play it at launch- but i carried on playing it and sure enough it started to become a bit of a slog and 'ok/good', not really living up to its first sequence.

Half Life, by comparison, not only had the wonderful opening 30 mins but stayed excellent (mostly) throughout

Unreal had its moment in the sun, the maps with bots were great though - and UT99 remains wonderful

I think that this is likely the case.
And if you were to judge Half Life and Unreal purely on looks alone it would be very easy to assume that there was an entire generation between the two.
To be clear I'm not saying that Unreal was the better game (though I do prefer it personally) but it genuinely looked like to came out a few years later. It was a big deal.

Two things that stood out to me about Unreal were:

1) Wide-open spaces. That first moment when you emerge from the ship and see the giant cliff and waterfall were one of those FPS defining moments. Similar moment when you are approaching the Sun Spire and realizing what a huge structure it was.

2) Pretty graphics and in-game architecture. There were some really cool looking structures and levels in the game. Use of colors was great and it was more vibrant than prior games. It definitely seemed graphically a step up from 1997's Quake 2 and Jedi Knight.

As an FPS overall, it was okay. I remember the AI being touted because the Skaarj enemies could dodge incoming fire. But Unreal quickly got eclipsed by Half-Life when it came to AI, cinematic story-telling and set pieces, seamless level design, and even multiplayer with mods like CS and DoD.

This is also where I think Epic was smart in shifting the focus to an arena shooter with Unreal Tournament.

mombarak wrote on 2025-01-30, 10:13:

Sound:
Good although I must say that the soundtrack sometimes sounds like a trance album and does not fit to some of the darker castle scenes. Also it could have used weapons with more boom effect. Like the MP from HL or the Shotgun from Quake 2. Something worth remembering. Even the Flak and RPG in Unreal are not really impressive.

The original weapon sound effects in Unreal were mediocre. They actually replaced them in a later patch which game the weapons a bit more oomph feeling.

Unreal has a very long campaign, and while there are a lot of good levels, the bad ones stick out.

The Sunspire level sticks in the memory as a boring maze-em up. To a lesser extent, the water temple. Terraniux is obnoxious with its hidden path to the sludge gun, and ISV-Kran can be a bit of a trudge. I also remember getting lost at The Darkening, but I think that was the point.

If you were to try to blast through it in a few sittings it would be overwhelming and you will just burn out.
I found it best to play in short bursts over a number of weeks.

Shponglefan wrote on 2025-01-30, 18:53:

The original weapon sound effects in Unreal were mediocre. They actually replaced them in a later patch which game the weapons a bit more oomph feeling.

This is one of the reasons why I prefer Unreal Gold to the original game. It uses the same sound effects for the weapons as Unreal Tournament 99, which is one of my favorite multiplayer shooters of all time.

While the weapons done't really behave as in UT99, having those familiar sounds made the gameplay much more enjoyable for me.

Jasin Natael wrote on 2025-01-30, 14:14:

It really started a love affair with PC gaming for me, and it was astonishingly beautiful for it's time, it can't be overstated.

Just to add to this, the marketing for Unreal placed a huge emphasis on in-game graphics. This was a time when most ads were still using traditional art and photography.

Whereas the Unreal ads were giant screenshots with the caption "actual gameplay screen shots". They took a similar approach with the box, displaying the CD case with an in-game screenshot front and centre.

While the graphics might look low-poly by today's standard, at the time they looked like things that needed to be prerendered just a couple years prior.

Unreal's pre-release marketing was slightly misleading post-patch though. They had regressed the engine's ability to subdivide models and smooth them out early on (no, 227 does not fix this). Then GlideDrv had multitexturing get all the lighting dark...

I remember playing Unreal when it first came out, with OpenGL or D3D mode, and I had a Pentium 120 with a Riva 128 that only had a D3D driver. I played it at absolutely slideshow framerates with cheats on, just to explore the environments and stumble through the game. Certain jumping puzzles were so frustrating due to my poor performance that I just used noclip to get through them.

Playing it more recently, I was struck by how annoying I found the enemies. Contemporary reviews gushed about how the enemy AI was programmed by the same guy who made these really famous Quake bots. I couldn't stand it. AI for deathmatch bots makes profoundly frustration environmental enemies. I enjoyed Quake 2's more predictable attack patterns far more in my single player games.

I think it was the Sunspire, previously mentioned, that was my least favorite level. Dark, confusing, long, with many ways to fall to you death or just get set very far back.

I consider Quake 2 to be probably the pinnacle of the style of FPS characterized by Doom through Quake 2, and then a lot of boomer shooters today. Less emphasis on story, or "realistic" levels, and more focus on just having fantastic flow through visually interesting levels, with great gunplay and enemies that keep you on your toes, but which have AI patterns that can be predicted. It was a style of FPS largely put to bed after Half-Life came out and focused so much on environmental story telling. Unreal is a weird sort of in between. Broadly speaking the levels all connect, with the end of one being the beginning of another. Time passes as you progress through the levels and over the dozen or so hours it may take you beat the game it will pass from day to night reasonably. And there were plenty of attempts at environmental story telling and scripted events. But it was so outclassed by Half-Life in that regard that I doubt anyone remembers it today for it's story.

Unlike the Dooms, Quakes or Half-Lifes, I feel zero compulsion to ever play Unreal again. For whatever reason it just doesn't exist in my nostalgic happy place, despite playing it alongside all those other games. Go figure.

leileilol wrote on 2025-01-30, 20:44:

Unreal's pre-release marketing was slightly misleading post-patch though. They had regressed the engine's ability to subdivide models and smooth them out early on (no, 227 does not fix this). Then GlideDrv had multitexturing get all the lighting dark...

Though I was playing a leaked beta the "SmoothMeshes" thing seemed really, really buggy and I have to guess poor Tim couldn't get it fixed and couldn't bother to fix it. I have to assume nobody on the "227 team" even has access to the original code if it's not just simply commented out of the source code.

The lightmap blending with regards to Multitexturing is another can of worms. Some custom maps have mirrors that show up as pitch black because of blending going wrong with the older method, where as Dark Arena has a skybox that looks completely unlit if you're not playing with the old blending method in use.

The initial release had "CurvedSurfaces". Here's a pcem debug shot showing the wire, probably explains a lot of the early first impression slowness.

Jasin Natael wrote on 2025-01-30, 18:08:

Different discussion of course......but Quake 3 was Pepsi to Unreal's Coke. Coke has always, and will always be the original. […]
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myne wrote on 2025-01-30, 15:02:

Unreal, imo took a leaf from id's book, and made a playable tech demo the story was pretty half assed compared to half life. Id […]
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ChrisK wrote on 2025-01-30, 13:35:

Unreal's main "feature" was the graphics in combination with the high time of Glide. Besides that I don't remember very much from my first play through which wasn't even on 3dfx hardware.
Half Life on the other hand was the complete opposite. While not beeing as sophisticated as Unreal technically there's so much more to remember, funny moments, ahh moments, omg moments...
This may sound a bit odd but I often regretted buying Unreal instead of Half Life when it came out back then. I'd really like to have an original paper box of Half Life.

Unreal, imo took a leaf from id's book, and made a playable tech demo the story was pretty half assed compared to half life.
Id did well off engine licencing with quake and quake 2.
So much so, that it's not hard to argue quake 3 was purely a tech demo. There was f all story, but that didn't matter because it was a great arena shooter.
Unreal is now entirely an engine for sale.

Different discussion of course......but Quake 3 was Pepsi to Unreal's Coke.
Coke has always, and will always be the original.
Anything else is a pale imitation.

Quake came first...
By your logic quake/doom is coke

leileilol wrote on 2025-01-31, 01:12:

The initial release had "CurvedSurfaces".

I must have completely missed that, do all the initial releases have that though? Because I have a US release and a EU release of Unreal 1.

Now I wish my old PC was still in working condition for me to try it on actual hardware.

Spark wrote on 2025-01-30, 19:04:

Unreal has a very long campaign, and while there are a lot of good levels, the bad ones stick out. […]
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Unreal has a very long campaign, and while there are a lot of good levels, the bad ones stick out.

The Sunspire level sticks in the memory as a boring maze-em up. To a lesser extent, the water temple. Terraniux is obnoxious with its hidden path to the sludge gun, and ISV-Kran can be a bit of a trudge. I also remember getting lost at The Darkening, but I think that was the point.

If you were to try to blast through it in a few sittings it would be overwhelming and you will just burn out.
I found it best to play in short bursts over a number of weeks.

I am using exactly Sparks approach to play it. I feel there is zero risk to forget parts of the story. But I want finish it because I want to have played it fully at least once. I did the same with Blood 2 which has a much better atmosphere but was really a challenge. I usually play the next difficulty level above medium because I want a challenge but not frustration. As it turned out, that is a big failure in Blood 2 because the difficulty levels are "too easy","suicide" and "suicide".

I have progressed some more after my post and I really have to say the enemy design is not for me. The titans look unexciting and now there are flying soccer balls with arms throwing fireballs at me.

On the positive side, I have the Razor now which I love in UT. Seeing the first version of this weapon (I am playing the old Unreal version with the latest patch) gave me a smile. It looks much more organic, kind of like the alien arm from HalfLife.

Here is one thing I found out too. The BioWeapon must be the worst weapon in gaming history. Its so strong but looks soooo boring. I am trying to avoid using it because I do not like the design.

mombarak wrote on 2025-01-31, 10:45:

Here is one thing I found out too. The BioWeapon must be the worst weapon in gaming history. Its so strong but looks soooo boring. I am trying to avoid using it because I do not like the design.

The GES BioRifle becomes the most safest weapon to use in the game if you manage to keep a Toxin Suit intact. You become immune to it's projectiles as long as you have a Toxin Suit part of your armour.

The fully charged up shot can be used to boost yourself into certain places providing you're also protected with a Toxin Suit.

How do you keep it intact? I thought there is a timer on it like for the flashlight. But the items are a good point, I do not understand some of them. Not sure if its a bug but also the jump boots seem to disappear from my inventory randomly or when I use them one short time. Is that expected behavior?

mombarak wrote on 2025-02-01, 07:11:

How do you keep it intact?

You need to either avoid damage all the time; or make sure you have atleast a Assault Vest as that takes priority for damage absorption away from the Toxin Suit. A Shield Belt would also avoid damaging both your Assault Vest and Toxin Suit because it absorbs 100% damage and takes the highest priority of doing so and will not "bleed" damage out to other items.

Do not try to pickup a Kevlar Suit or a Asbestos Suit if you want to keep your Toxin Suit. Suits are mutually exclusive pieces of armour; they replace one another.

mombarak wrote on 2025-02-01, 07:11:

Not sure if its a bug but also the jump boots seem to disappear from my inventory randomly or when I use them one short time. Is that expected behavior?

Not a bug, it's intentional to prevent them from being abused.

1var int TimeCharge;
2
3function PickupFunction(Pawn Other)
4{
5        TimeCharge = 0;
6        SetTimer(1.0, True);
7}
8
9function OwnerJumped()
10{
11        TimeCharge=0;
12        if ( Charge <= 0 )
13        {
14                if ( Owner != None )
15                {
16                        Owner.PlaySound(DeActivateSound);
17                        Pawn(Owner).JumpZ = Pawn(Owner).Default.JumpZ * Level.Game.PlayerJumpZScaling();
18                }
19                UsedUp();
20        }
21        else
22                Owner.PlaySound(sound'BootJmp');
23        Charge -= 1;
24}
25
26function Timer()
27{
28        if ( !Pawn(Owner).bAutoActivate )
29        {
30                TimeCharge++;
31                if (TimeCharge>20) OwnerJumped();
32        }
33}

Wow. That is the most detailed and efficient answer. Makes full sense. Thanks.

Namrok wrote on 2025-01-30, 21:32:

Unreal is a weird sort of in between.

i went and played the first 25 or so mins again and find the above to be a great summary - it really is a mix of newer environmental story telling and older "go here, push this, jump" FPS action

also, i had clearly forgotten a few things - escaping the ship was a more extensive 'level' than i remember. walking out into the open was still impressive though. the subsequent levels were more typical of quake though and the enemy models were very simple looking graphically, we forget just how far things moved in just a few years back in the late 90's to early 2000's

A good game, still not one i have a particular desire to complete - but the botmatch is fun though!

I love unreal. I played it back then on my p2-300 in software mode with a virge gx2 and awe64.

The sheer vastness of the game was mind blowing at the time.

These days I have the luxury of playing it in glide on a v2 on a p3-550. The brilliant colours, dynamic lighting and multitexturing is beautiful.

On the first level, where prisoner 849 escapes the vortex rikers, you can hear an ST-225 running in the room with the computers when you step close to them.

The nali water god level is a pain, but it is a beautiful pain at least.

The mines, terraniux, isvkran, the sunspire, na pali haven, the cellars levels all have their own charm. Some said they find some of them irritating, I like to take the time to explore them.

The game being long, drawn out and vast is exactly the point. I am glad I cannot complete it in an afternoon.

The low poly graphics is best played in 640x480, the grittiness of the pixels matches the poly resolution of the worlds. I have played through it on 1920x1200 on a moderner system with the high resolution texture packs, but that looks funny to me overall.

The tracker music that reacts to what is going on and the ambience is epic.

The only part I do not like is the last few levels in the mothership, that part creeps me out and looks as if they were done in a hurry.

The na pali expansion is interesting to play just for the sake of the storyline, but the yabbering of the character after every level gets old after the first half second of it. I prefer silence like in half life.

I wish the PS1 and N64 versions of Unreal had been completed so there would be more Unreal 1 to play. Like Daikatana and Quake 2 on N64 which are rebuilt from the ground up and almost entirely different games.