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UT2004 Shows Upgrades, Spaceships, Onslaught
Thanks to GameSpy for their hands-on preview of Unreal Tournament 2004, checking out the PC FPS title that's due out this Xmas. This latest upgrade "...will ship with vehicles, new weapons, two new game modes, and more new maps than all the maps UT2003 shipped with", and a new space level has you "...piloting small Wing Commander-style space fighters [before] the action switches to more traditional-style combat." The novel 'onslaught' mode, in which competing teams use vehicles and special weapons to "...control a series of nodes connecting your base to theirs" was the "clear favorite of the day" for the author, and IGN PC has another hands-on report that suggests these new modes introduce a "surprisingly satisfying strategic layer" to the upgrade.
When UT2003 came out last year the bar for system hardware was raised ten fold. The graphics engine alone was/is awesome, then you throw in the whole Karma engine for real-time physics you have to upgrade your CPU AND vid card for this game...not to mention more RAM to support the HUGE maps and 64bit textures (textures require video ram, so a 64mb card is a good start)
Looking at UT2004, I'm still wondering why this requires a new release and not something like a "mission pack" or "expansion" for UT2003. It is the same engine, the vehicles are only new because they did not bother to make any for UT2003 (the code is there, just unused expect for the demo) the new game types are great, but they are just umods added into the already existent engine...the only cool thing is if you have been putting off getting UT2003, UT2004 is what you want to get now. For those of us that got UT2003 have a slight feeling of being ripped off...
But hey, it really doesn't matter much at all since both UT2003 and UT2004 ship with a Linux installer and support! Wahoo!!
Oh, and if any of my facts, thoughts or opinions are incorrect...please correct me!! =)
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
I seem to recall that the Epic said that they had improved their engine so that it would now take less horsepower--they even included a software renderer for those without the graphics card.
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The minimum specs for UT2003 were
CPU: Pentium III or AMD Athlon 733MHz processor (*Pentium(R) or AMD 1.0 GHz or greater RECOMMENDED)
Memory: 128 MB RAM (256 MB RAM or greater RECOMMENDED)
But I think the requirements are still the same, but with DirectX 9, according to this thread in the BeyondUnreal forums:
http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t
I assume you are joking. You have to be. I wouldn't even play the original Unreal Tournament with less than 128RAM, and ram is cheap as hell.
If a what, three year old processor and 64M of ram puts this out of your reach, then you are not one for current 3-D technology. Stick with tetris.
Personally, I think vehicles will be the next fad in FPS games. Meaning, all the latest releases will have them, but they won't improve gameplay significantly. They seem especially problematic in ground-based FPS games. Usually you can kill people by merely running over them or even just brushing them.
Several games have actually suffered from the inclusion of vehicles, such as Tribes 2. The vehicles ended up detracting from the gameplay and turning what could have been an exciting game into one where you often had to wait to get on a vehicle to get around. If I wanted to rely on other people to give me a ride somewhere I need to be I'd put myself back in high school.
Done right they can be fun, but they should be very careful that the vehicles add something unique to gameplay and don't become essential. The second they become decently powerful they become essential to survival, and then it becomes no fun when you have to board a vehicle to get somewhere.
I do agree that the current crop of FPS games is mostly very lacking in the gameplay area, but I don't see vehicles improving the picture much. Tribes 1 provides enough challenge for me to keep playing it to this day.