Unreal Tournament 2004 preview

Cliff Bleszinski, lead designer.

UT2004 was Epic’s “big” announcement at this year’s E3. I say “big” because in some people’s eyes the UT franchise is rapidly turning into a First Person Shooter variant of EA’s sports titles with a new release every year. But that might not be the truth. Actually UT2004 indicates that Epic have found the way back to the Unreal Tournament roots, and many people will without doubt be happy to learn that.

We met Cliff Bleszinski, lead designer, and Steve Polge, programmer, at Atari’s closed E3 booth and the message was clear, they knew UT2003 wasn’t what it was supposed to be. Many fans preferred to keep playing the original Unreal Tournament, and UT2004 tries to please both the old-school players and the UT2003 players.

Assault returns

In Onslaught you can control vehicles like in BF1942

First of all you can tweak 2004 totally, so you can get all details your way. If you don’t like the new way the translocater is fired, then use the old way. Secondly the heavily requested objective based team game mode, Assault, will return. But UT2004 is not about adjusting minor details, there’s also a major new game mode: Onslaught.

The main news in Onslaught is the possibility to enter and use vehicles just like in Battlefield 1942. Actually the mode seemed pretty influenced by Battlefield 1942, although Steve Polge naturally denied that… There’s one major difference though, and that’s the management of bases. If one team takes a base from the other team, the base’s defenses (turrets) slowly rebuild. Thus you won’t get a fully operational base right away, which we think is a very promising idea. Apart from that you can jump into all kinds of vehicles – fighters, spacecrafts, tanks, jeeps and so on, while other teammates join you firing the onboard weapons. The Epic guys promise that it will be very easy to create models on your own as well as customizing the existing ones.

Improvements on the client/server side

One of the new playable characters is the Skaarj, making a welcome return to the Unreal universe.

Much of the development effort went into decreasing the necessary band-with to play UT as well as decreasing the server load. According to Steve Polge, modem players will now get up to 60 frames per second where the limit was 41 frames per second in UT 2003. ADSL users should also be pleased:

- We were surprised after the release of UT2003. Apparently we had very good internet connections ourselves, since many ADSL connections had much lower upload performance than we expected. In UT2004 we have decreased the necessary band-with by 40%.

Talk while you shoot

The blue team have a nice looking speeder in their possession... at least at the moment.

Another major new addition in UT2004 is Voice Over IP, so you’ll be able to talk to your friends and foes. Naturally you also get new weapons like cool spider mines. You can place them on the ground, and if people get close, the mines will jump up into their faces or onto oncoming tanks. The second new weapon demonstrated was the sticky bomb launcher that pretty much does exactly what it says on the can.

Since the game will have been released so shortly after the last UT game, it was only natural for us to ask whether consumers that own the 2003 version, could get a rebate. And although it’s not final, the Epic guys said that this was a possibility they are aiming for, if it doesn’t get too difficult logistically. Finally Cliff Bleszinski clarified the situation of the franchise regarding yearly updates:

- While there are no plans regarding Unreal Tournament 2005 at the moment, I reckon we'll only do it if the game evolves enough to justify the release.