Unreal Tournament 2007

azif · #1 (**permalink**) 05-07-2006, 07:07 PM

Unreal Tournament 2007
New DM environment revealed. Details on overall design philosophy included.

Published by: Midway Games
Developed by: Epic Games
Genre: First-Person Shooter
Release Date:
US: Winter 2006
Also Available On: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3

August 19, 2005 - Epic's Unreal Tournament 2007 will demonstrate the capabilities of next-generation hardware in 2006 on PC and undisclosed consoles (a PS3 version is pretty much given, but still isn't officially official). UT 2007 is a game built on Unreal 3.0 technology and it sells that power well. Though like every UT before it, mistaking 2007 for an elaborate brochure that pitches the underlying engine would do the game and team at Epic a real disservice.

At this year's Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, we were provided a private demonstration of Unreal Tournament 2007 by Epic's own Lead Level Designer, James Brown. Epic is still busily laboring away on UT, but James was kind enough to show a previously unseen environment to us, address a few general next-generation concerns, and even elaborate on how UT 2007 will differ from its predecessors.
The first topic we jumped into was loading time. With resource intensive textures, demanding sounds, and generally high quality everything, won't loading this and other next-gen games take somewhere between ten minutes and a year? Nope. James can't speak for other developers and their engines, but Unreal 3.0 is made to stream.

"The only load is when you join a server in UT 2007. Once that match ends, the game will pop you right into the next one." James explained that the streaming technology would let the engine anticipate the next bout and prepare for it, which will cut back on a lot of gaming downtime. Expect this to apply to the singleplayer ladder matches and to online engagements. Of course, UT will still provide competitive players an opportunity to check their scores and stats before rocketing them all into another round.

Amazingly, even the first load wasn't long. Unoptimized and running on development hardware / software, UT 2007 still booted up in less time than the average Half-Life 2 or Far Cry game. Good stuff!

But James isn't a programmer, so we cut out of the technology talk and jumped into his specialty, design. He was the ideal man to tell us a bit about Unreal's new environments and how they're being modeled to be places with purpose, so that's what we focused on.

"They're environments, not levels." What James is getting at is how each distinct killing field is intended to be a believable place. The Carbon Fire deathmatch environment we were demonstrated, for instance, was a robot manufacturing facility. In different areas robots were being constructed, painted, shipped, and distributed. Each area also serves as a landmark. Of course, Epic is big on ensuring that all of UT 2007's environments are built to include similar landmarks.

James went on to explain how each environment will also tie into a larger whole. "It's subtle, and many people didn't notice it, but you could see the next level in a singleplayer ladder in old UT. You could see it off in the distance." For 2007, Epic hopes to noticeably bind each environment to another to create a believable world upon which all the action can take place. The "Liandri planet," as it's tentatively being referred to, will at least feature lower areas of rubble and ruin, middle environments with industrialized themes, upper realms of glitzy urban life, and encircling space / sky areas. Epic hopes that kind of structure will give UT 2007 a real cohesive feel.

To better understand this, let's take another look at Carbon Fire. In the environment's outdoor section players can look up and see a massive force field generating ring swooping over the complex and the entire polygonal city that sits off in the distance. The next fight might just be on the bottom of that same ring, and the view would be the city rolling away far below.

The gameplay, too, is being reworked. "With 2007 we're trying to take things back to UT 99. We're trying to get at that in-your-face, grounded gameplay." To do this Epic is reworking the dodges, wall dodges, and floaty leaps. "UT 2004 was a game about prediction. You saw a guy go up and you predicted where he'd land with a rocket. 2007 will be more than that. It'll be right there in front of you -- solid." James went on to explain that while the dodges will still be in place, they won't shoot you across a map. They're designed to help players skip out of harm's way, not fly.

To prove that UT 2007 is ready to play right now, James added a few bots to the mix and started slugging it out with 'em in Carbon Fire. We saw the standard fully automatic compact submachine gun, the redesigned link gun, the rocket launcher, the flak cannon and the shock rifle, though we did not get to see the advanced secondary attacks of these weapons, save for the shock rifle's energy ball.

Epic is hoping to finish up Unreal Tournament 2007 and release it alongside Gears of War. That makes the game a Q1 - Q2 2006 release, which might even make it a PS3 launch title, if that ever gets officially confirmed.

ShockWave · #2 (**permalink**) 10-29-2006, 11:48 PM

Unreal Tournament Is my favourite game. er ager shobgula over korechi. ami UT 2007 ar trailer dekhesi.game play and graphics looked great. this is one hell of a game coming.