Unreal Tournament 2007 Officially Announced

Midway has officially announced the next Unreal Tournament title, naming it UT 2007. Additionally, Gamespot reports on the Conquest mode expected to be a focus of the next title. From the article: "The idea behind conquest is to create huge, expansive levels that take advantage of the engine's new content-streaming technology and use onslaught-style instant transport to jump to hot spots on the map where the action is. Epic apparently feels that one of the greatest strengths of onslaught was the way it could accommodate large groups of players in vehicles but also drive them to congregate around specific areas with the control point system, rather than have them wandering around the map aimlessly."

Comments

More info...

[Anonymous Cumshot]

is available here.

EA of FPS?

[Seumas]

I heard that they were intending to be the EA of FPS games. They wanted to release a new version of Unreal every year. But 2004-2007 is three years, so . . . I guess they nixed that idea?

It sounds like it will be exciting, but as much as I'd like to see more enjoyable methods of gameplay, I'd also like to see more interesting weapons and vehicals. Every FPS has the same handful of weapons that every other FPS has. It would be neat to have something crazy and interesting that doesn't also screw up the gameplay.

And I'd love to see, say, a two person mech that you could control (less like a MechWarrior Mech and more like a slightly advanced/modified current military one). Not something big and bulky and enormous like a damn transformer, but something that would let you carry a second person with you, move faster and jump higher.

Re:EA of FPS?

[eyeye]

I'd love to see, say, a two person mech that you could control (less like a MechWarrior Mech and more like a slightly advanced/modified current military one). Not something big and bulky and enormous like a damn transformer, but something that would let you carry a second person with you, move faster and jump higher.

I just wanted to say, cool idea!

Re:EA of FPS?

[TheRealFreakish]

I'd also like to see more interesting weapons and vehicals. Every FPS has the same handful of weapons that every other FPS has. It would be neat to have something crazy and interesting that doesn't also screw up the gameplay.

I'm not sure I'd agree with that. Pretty much every new version of UT has brought us at least one or two interesting new weapons. Maybe some of the other FPS games (all the tactical shooters, world war 2 games, CS clones) have stale weapons, but they've done pretty well with UT*.

For instance...

• Unreal: the Ripper, the Bio Rifle, even the shock combo was a neat new thing (though it didn't really come into play until..
• UT99: The redeemer and THE TRANSLOCATOR (one of the best ideas for a FPS to date). And the shock combo came into major use.
• UT2k3: Should never be spoken of.
• UT2k4: Spider mines, sticky mines, a reason to use the new link gun.

As for vehicles? Well 2k4's the first to have them and there's a decent variety. I love the fact that you can bail out of one of the vehicles in 2k7 and have it keep going to detonate on impact...sweet.

I'm hoping Epic really means it when they say they're going for gameplay over graphics this time around..because I would love to have a game as great as UT99 come along again.

Re:EA of FPS?

[Khuffie]

I heard that they were intending to be the EA of FPS games. They wanted to release a new version of Unreal every year. But 2004-2007 is three years, so . . . I guess they nixed that idea? Let me be the first to say...Thank God! Im really glad they didnt up and release a new UT game this year. One year between a game isn't anywhere near enough for an online FPS to mature with new levels, mods and such. I love UT2k4 and I shuddered when I heard them say they were going to release one every year. Thishis game will be released in 2006, although my best guess is towards the christmas season, so that's a 2.5 year period between UT2k4, which is a decent period. It's one of the few games I actually bought for my pc, and really am looking forward to the next installment!

Re:EA of FPS?

[ArsonSmith]

The biggest thing I'd like to see is permenent evironmental damage to the maps. If I shoot a rocket launcher into a house I want to see some of the walls blown away. If I shoot enough of them I want the WHOLE DAMN THING TO COME DOWN!! I want to see doors riddled with holes. Things damaged beyond repair. Chunks of the rock walls blown out. Doors that get stuck due to grenades, and requireing more grenades to blow them open. Enough rocket fire to the bottom of a large structure brings the entire thing down killing all inside.

Re:EA of FPS?

[Pyrosz]

As for vehicles? Well 2k4's the first to have them and there's a decent variety.

First for Unreal, not the first FPS. I don't know what was first, but the best done has to be Tribes/2.

Re:EA of FPS?

[imr]

you can bail out of one of the vehicles in 2k7 and have it keep going to detonate on impact you can do, it sort of, in ut2004. The scorpio is nice to attract spiders mine around a node and clear it up, as they continue to follow your vehicule after you bail out.
The manta can be thrown at people in front of you, especially if they missile you, since they lose your trail as soon as you bail out and most of the time the missile pass over the manta ... wich passes through the opponent.
But you already knew all that :)

Re:EA of FPS?

[TheRealFreakish]

Heh..yeah, I was thinking of something ala Strangelove - where you could ride the deemer and jump off to have it continue going and blow up normally. Doing that in a scorpion would be soooo cool... :D

Re:EA of FPS?

[imr]

I have seen one player dropping spiders on a scorpion before riding it. Don't know how it worked.
He then put some on mine, and it did explode. It exploded when I drove over one peon, killing me.

Re:EA of FPS?

[skiman1979]

Yes, I think this is something FPS games have been missing for quite some time. Actually, I have Vigilante8: 2nd Offence for the Sega Dreamcast. Although this isn't exactly an FPS like the UT series of games, this game actually does have environmental damage. Weapon fire does not appear to affect the ground or hills, but you can shoot at buildings, signs, and other man-made structures to do damage. Shoot enough, and the structure will explode and/or collapse. That's the only game I've found so far that does this.

If anyone has played this game, what's with the 20-story tall ant crawling around in Arizona?

Planetside/Tribes?

[darkmayo]

While I enjoyed the onslaught levels of UT2004 they definately seemed too small to make real use of the cool vehicles that had been introduced. with some of the flying vehicles being very fast it seemed a waste to have them in such a small area.

Sounds like they are taking the ideas of Tribes and Planetside with the larger levels with hot spots to make the onslaught game more enjoyable. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Re:Planetside/Tribes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what you're saying about larger levels is correct, but it's highly ironic given that the developers seem to be saying that they want to bring back the close-quarters gameplay of the original UT.

I was reading an article about it the other day, and in the interview the developers were saying that they felt the gameplay in UT2003/2004 got too fast and that there is too much distance activity. They were explaining that they believe that one desirable characteristic of the original UT is that gameplay required more strategy of long-range movement and more physically close combat. They want to bring back that aspect of gameplay in UT2007.

This, however, is very ironic, seeing as how they have created a trend toward larger and larger maps. Unless they change something in a way I don't anticipate, I can only imagine that a gametype such as Conquest will only require more distance in combat. The vehicles in UT2004 certainly did this, enabling one to fire at competitors from the sky at large distance with homing missles. This is very different from anything in the original UT.

So I'm not sure how they are going to reconcile the desire to bring back one-on-one close combat while still making larger and larger, vast maps and sprawling gametypes. I'm not saying I don't like the idea of a Conquest gametype, just that they seem to be saying one thing about gameplay feel and doing another.

It's interesting to think about the Domination gametype in this regard. The original UT Domination gametype offered tremendous close-quarters, fast-paced gameplay. Supposedly it inspired the Onslaught gametype at least partially. But Onslaught is very different from Domination in gameplay, with large maps--large relative to the original Domination--and long-term change. The original Domination was dropped, leaving Double Domination, which isn't nearly as interesting as either the original Domination or newer Onslaught gametypes.

I guess what I'm saying is that, while I think the larger, more strategic, long-term gameplay of Onslaught and Conquest are certainly welcome, I hope that they put more attention into close-quarters gameplay as well. I would amend what the developers are saying, to say that it's not just that the original UT had strategy of movement, and close-quarters combat, but strategy of movement over relatively short distances, and close-quarters combat. They seem to be saying they will focus more on short-range gameplay, but we have to wait and see.

I play mostly Invasion as it is, though, so maybe that's the only thing I should be really worried about.

Re:Planetside/Tribes?

[Pxtl]

Stop playing Torlan and Urban over and over again then. Lots of ONS maps are more than large enough for the aircraft. The popular ones don't, because it turns the game into being entirely aircraft-and-manta based.

IMHO, U2k4 was the first game to seamlessly mix deathmatch-style fast action combat with Tribes-scale epic warfare.

Re:Planetside/Tribes?

[AlexMax2742]

Actually, if you want to play a Tribes/UT like game right now, either pick up a copy of Unreal 2, download the XMP expansion for it, and use All Seeing Eye to connect to servers.

XMP. What a fantastic game. Too bad it didn't get more of an audience than people who bought Unreal 2....which isn't that many.

(There is an Unreal Tournament modification of it, but nobody is playing it right now...the most recent beta had a few problems and we're waiting on the devs to release a patch)

2007?

[HD Webdev]

It is supposed to be released next year according to the links listed. JSYK!

Re:2007?

[whitepony02027]

maybe they will be lucky and just beat out Longhorn

Showcase for Unreal Engine

[Neo-Rio-101]

Seems that Epic have turned Unreal Tournament into less of a game franchise, but more of a showcase for their latest "Unreal" engine technology which they want to licence off to other developers.

Not a bad thing at all. I hope you all like deathmatch enough to buy it again!

Re:Showcase for Unreal Engine

[Guspaz]

Well, Onslaught was far from deathmatch, and Conquest is supposed to be even better. So I'd buy it. Heck, the only thing I play in UT2004 is onslaught mode.

Re:Showcase for Unreal Engine

[Neo-Rio-101]

To be fair, Unreal Engine is actually amazing. The scope of games you can actually make with it can only get better all the time (e.g. the UnWheel mod). The huge scrolling Conquest map, if done properly, is really going to push things even further.

It's just that I can only see Unreal Tournament being pretty much the same in the forseeable future. Similar guns, similar kinds of vehicles, etc. But who knows, maybe I'll change my mind next year.

I'll be more interested in the third parties who do unexpected things with the technology.

Re:Showcase for Unreal Engine

[Guspaz]

A good example of such an unexpected thing is AlienSwarm, a top-down squad-control type game:

http://www.blackcatgames.com/swarm/

Keep in mind the first few screenshots on the site are from their new Source (HL2) port.

It's still a game, yes, and I suspect you mean unexpected as in non-gaming, but it is certainly one of the more original mods for UT2004 in that it breaks out of the type of game the engine was designed for.

Re:Showcase for Unreal Engine

[Neo-Rio-101]

I'll probably get UT2007 anyway. The "Make something Unreal" competition really gave the game heaps of life on top of what was already there. The fact that UT2K4 ran faster on Linux for me was also a big plus.

And if they put exo-skeleton robots in as vehicles we could be having "Gundam" battles before long. I'd pay to see that.

Re:Showcase for Unreal Engine

[ZephyrXero]

I just hope Midway doesn't call it "Konquest" ;)

Re:Showcase for Unreal Engine

[Anonymous Coward]

Streamed large maps will also hopefully make the UnrealEngine suitable as a decent RPG engine. That could draw my interest. I get bored with shooters.

Re:Showcase for Unreal Engine

[Pxtl]

You're missing out. Assault is wicked fun with a good map (look for servers running the s7 series). Nothing like pitting a line of tanks, mantas, and turrets against a few tanks and a Levi.

VCTF is also excellent - much more intense than ONS. I just wish there was a 1flag VCTF.

Re:Showcase for Unreal Engine

[Guspaz]

I do play other game modes, but I had found that UT2K4 assault just didn't have the same feel to it as UT99's assault did. It was amusing, but I felt it just didn't compare.

I've also played a lot of invasion-RPG, which is quite fun (I actually host a server for it, managed by someone else).

However I haven't really tried very many third party assault maps. I'll have to give the S7 series a try.

MODs

[McCarrum]

Its the potential of the MODs from it that I find hope in. With streaming maps, there is just so much more that can be done. Mind you, that also means being done wrong.

Fingers crossed it works and works well.

Hmm, wonder if I could start writing a NWN replacement ...

Blizzard made them do it

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Ironically, this is partially Blizzard's doing.

If you've played WOW, you know what I mean. There's something conspicuously missing from the WOW experience - loading screens.

Halo did this to a degree, as have other MMOs. But in WOW, you can go anywhere on the (huge) continent without loading.

I always laughed when you encountered the 1-minute loading screens in Half-Life 2. I'm glad that Epic is finally picking up the ball.

Unreal Engine rocks. Unreal Engine 3 will rock even more.

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[Anonymous Coward]

Halo did it just as well as WoW did - both of them still had loading times when jumping between certain areas, but usually had no loading.

This isn't anything new. Mother (Earthbound Zero), for the NES, had a large outdoor world with no loading or even transitions, unless you went inside a cave or building or something.

Still, it's great to see more people picking up on the joys of large, continuous areas. Personally, I hate waiting for anything to load when I'm playing a game, and it baffles me why so many developers just don't seem to care.

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[Dot.Com.CEO]

That's because you run Wow on a reasonably fast computer. I sometimes play WoW on my powerbook and let me tell you, transitions to places like Ironforge are brutal. Instead of taking 5 seconds to load assets, its an excrutiating minute of the game playing at 1 fps while trying to keep up with input. When everything loads, performance is acceptable.

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[Laurence0]

When I played Vice City on my PIII 800, if you drove fast enough down the main highway on the 'other island', the textures degraded as you went, and detail vanished from a lot of the scenery as the computer couldn't load the data for the new areas quite quickly enough. So, yeah, Vice City's another example of the content being loaded as needed, but sometimes not quite quickly enough!

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[EngineeringMarvel]

With continious loading, like WoW, people should start looking into better harddrives. In WoW, the 1 minute delay referenced to in parent post, is due to the delay in loading the characters' textures from off the harddrive. This is why once they load, it runs very smoothly. Some people think it's their processor or RAM, but the 1 minute delay has to do with the speed of the harddrive. I recommend getting two harddrives and running them in RAID 0, it did wonders for me. If UT2007 is going to be of this type, I'd recommend looking into a harddrive upgrade before purchasing UT2007.

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[Dot.Com.CEO]

That's hardly a solution for a Powerbook user, is it?

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[StonedRat]

This was done in dungeon siege too. You can play the entire game from start to finish with not a single loading screen appearing. Very nice indeed.

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[Masami Eiri]

San Andreas is really bad for that.. the PS2 can't keep up with the faster vehicles... and nitro on them... forget it. I ran into "invisible" walls a number of times.

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[Thing 1]

Sure it is! Just add USB/FireWire drives.

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[Dot.Com.CEO]

Is this the point where I say something and then you reply back "Whoosh!"?

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[McCarrum]

*cough*dungeonseige*cough*

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[Pxtl]

Good point. UT2k4 is hell for loading times, especially considering that the average map is 5 megs that all your fellow players are trying to grab at the same time, and alt-tabbing out of the game while DLing often brings the game down.

While the game is excellent, I think they need to keep a tighter structure on how modding and mod-serving is done. Many new maps are just old maps with new vehicle loadouts (or even just a new texture set), and you have to download the whole map all over again. Custom player models are never, ever used, and custom content often makes me wince from the download times.

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[Thing 1]

Um, no? I was being serious. You can't fit two drives in a laptop. We have external drives. It's not the best solution for gaming while on a plane, but ... ok, ok, I'm being trolled.

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[Dot.Com.CEO]

Are you delirious? You are seriously proposing an add-on that measures and weighs twice a Powerbook as a serious solution? And YOU are being trolled?

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[snuf23]

"Ironically, this is partially Blizzard's doing."

Not sure exactly where the irony is, but actually this doesn't have anything to do with Blizzard.
Blizzard didn't invent the technology that streams content in to game on the fly without loading screens.
Many other games have featured this (i.e. Dungeon Siege, GTA 3).
And to be fair in WoW you do get a loading screen when taking a boat trip. Although I'm sure this is because it would be pointless to show the big empty ocean where nothing happens.

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[Thing 1]

I'm not delirious. And I am seriously proposing this add-on. And, based on your response where you presumed I was going to say "Whoosh" to whatever you said, yes, I thought perhaps that might have been trolling.

You don't need to carry your "gaming rig" everywhere. You're probably not strolling around when you're gaming. So, I don't see that it's a huge issue, for when you want to LAN party with games on a laptop, that if you want the speed of RAID-0, to have an external drive or two. (With a large enough main hard drive, you could create a second partition and RAID-0 it together with the external drive, thus only requiring a single external. But I'm not sure how Powerbooks do RAID since I've got experience with Windows/Linux, not Mac.)

I'm sorry you were so offended that you made me a Freak. In response, I've made you a Friend.

Re:Blizzard made them do it

[danila]

Defragmenting might make sense as well.

voicecontrol

[FlashBuster3000]

What will be really cool, is the voicecontrolled AI-Bots, then :D
I think that a really cool feature.
Just because i have no friends, doesn't mean i can't talk to my bots, doesn't it?

Re:voicecontrol

[Robmonster]

You can ALREADY voice-control the bots in UT2004. If you install the Speech SDK you are able to address bots by codename (Alpha, Bravo) and issue then Defend or Attack orders. You cn even order them to dance...

Re:voicecontrol

[Masami Eiri]

And suicide, and jump, and a host of other things. There's definately something satisfying about saying "everyone, suicide" and having all the bots keel over at one time.

Re:voicecontrol

[Anonymous Coward]

And you could also tell the bots to get nekkid and dance around the board mesmerizing the opposing team so you could get easy headshots.
Just say: "Everyone get nekkid!"

Re:voicecontrol

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm.. thats WINDOWS ONLY!

Not everyone plays UT2k4 windows, you know. Tell me how to do this in Linux then.

Re:voicecontrol

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ, shut up already. Gaming on Linux is overrated.

Re:voicecontrol

[FlashBuster3000]

yay, i only have ut2003 so i didnt know this.
Probably the reason why i should buy ut2004?

Re:voicecontrol

[Robmonster]

I thought you linux nuts already knew how to do everything better than Windows.....?

Lame.

[Sebadude]

So we'll see you again in 2008 for the official anouncement of Unreal Tournament 2010. Or something.

I wonder, if development takes longer than planned, will they just call it Unreal Tournament 2008? Means nothing anyway, right? Why not just name them like magazines: Unreal Tournament, vol 6, iss 1. Or perhaps like the video cards they could be bundled with: Unreal X850, or Unreal FX 6800 maybe? Whatever.

The lack of originality in so many modern games is equalled only by the dullness of their title. So depressing.

Re:Lame.

[Luigi30]

IAll things due out in a nnn7 are delayed to nnn8.

Re:Lame.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't like to be a pedant, but the 6800 is not of the FX series of cards...

Re:Lame.

[CokoBWare]

I was reading up on the approach they were taking to development. They are going for gameplay first, using non-textured structures as placeholders in order to tweak the environments. Believe it or not, this saves them lots of back-and-forth development time.

The other interesting thing I read was that they have something like 16 deliverables to achieve the final version of UT 2007. They have only completed 3.

Remember that they've been developing the new engine and toolset for the Unreal 3 Engine, and Epic knows that their engine and tools are paramount to their company strategy. Let's cool it on the rehtoric, and really look at what's happening, and why. This is a very interesting thing to watch.

Wowow, what? Already?!

[HeliumHigh]

I just barely got UT working on linux through wine! (Yes, I know there is a linux version. Or, alteast I do NOW -_- )

Unreal 3.0 engine tech demo

[dmaduram]

Just fyi, the beyondunreal site linked in the parent 's post also has an *extremely* interesting tech demo of the Unreal 3.0 engine.

The demo video is a bit on the heavy site (161 MB zipped Quicktime .mov) and is around 7 minutes long, but it goes into a lot of the details that will differentiate Unreal 2007 from Unreal 2k4 -- n-chain bump mapping, immissive channels for textures, exponentially increased polycounts for high-resolution character meshes, etc. etc.

Well worth a look for the technically inclined.

FF

[Given M. Sur]

Hopefully when this comes out more servers will turn friendly fire on. I doubt it though, unless they made that the default, as I can never find any UT2004 servers with FF.

FF forces better tactics than simply aiming towards groups of people and spraying.

I'll still probably get it and play it a little either way, but I would be extremely happy if FF was turned on by default.

As others mentioned mech-type vehicles would be pretty cool too.

Re:FF

[Pxtl]

Better approach I've seen than FF is that team-damage is 50% and 50% self-damage from shooting teammates. It means that the right people are punished - either he shouldn't have gotten in your line of fire, or you shouldn't have shot him. Assault is obscene for the amount of just firing into the carnage, and that kind of tweaking would help a lot.

Re:FF

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the real reason for the lack of friendly fire is the vehicles. With FF off you can ride on friendly tanks and mantas, with it on you tend to get crushed too death. You can also jump into moving hellbenders by throwing yourself at the front and pushing "use", instead of requiring the driver to spot you and drive right next to you.

Also the SPMA, airstrike, leviathan main gun, etc become next-to-useless. Hellbender turret gunners kill the pilot more often than the enemy. UT's overpowered weapons just don't play well with FF.

Playing with FF would make for an interesting challenge, but it would require the kind of teamwork and skilled play that public servers and AI just can't provide. Try Torlan with 31 novice bots and FF on, watch the hilarious carnage as they all spawn in the base and run each other down... imagine if every online game started like that.

Good News

[DeanMeister]

2007? This is good, by the time this game comes out I'll have my new gaming computer. This one is a piece of monkey turd wrapped in a breakfast burrito from mcdonalds.

UT MMORPG

[slot32]

They're basically turning this into a MMORPG...

Apart from the twich-skills and ping-dependancy, this *sounds* like a MMORPG to me and suspiciously like World of Warcraft...

Talk about 'jump on the bandwaggon'

Re:UT MMORPG

[FinchWorld]

More of a MMOFPS.

Re:UT MMORPG

[snuf23]

"Talk about 'jump on the bandwaggon'"

Way, way, way back in the last millenia around 1997, Epic Megagames announced a game called "Prey". Prey was to be the greatest next generation FPS game and engine. One of the features that Prey had was known as "Portal Technology". The portals where supposed to be a mechanism for creating a network of Prey servers running different maps, where you could run from one map to the another throughout your gaming session. So battles would be able to take place across a range of different maps and terrain all interconnected via the portal technology.
Eventually Prey was cancelled as Epic focused on the Unreal brand. I imagine that at the time the technology (in particular broadband penetration) wasn't good enough to handle the portal concept. This announcement sounds more like they are finally rolling and expanding on concepts they first revealed 8 years ago. Hardly jumping on the bandwagon.

Re:UT MMORPG

[Dehumanizer]

Uh, Prey was a 3D Realms game, it had nothing to do with Epic.