[HulkNukem]

I'd love to see the interest dropoff for Overwatch; it has such a limited number of maps and modes all I see is people saying how it needs more, and not that halfassed Lucioball mode either.

[Lunick]

I finished the MachineGames episode in Nightmare Co-op, still very enjoyable although the maps don't have any co-op spawns so I telefragged my friend at the start of each level.

[deuxsonic]

For the so-called "pro" player, graphics don't matter and are usually set to minimums along with screen resolution in exchange for maximum framerate, the brightness is set high so players can't hide in dark spots, they have highly specialized keybindings and mouse settings, the FOV is set high so more of the world can be seen in a single frame, and so on. What would motivate this kind of player to buy Quake Champions and not simply continue to use Quake Live? The only real upgrade seems to be graphics, especially when like half the trailer was Campgrounds? Put The Edge, The Longest Yard, and so on in and you're done.

[leilei]

SPOILER: The pro's desire for a high framerate is more for fucking with the physics netcode (exploits) to gain an advantage, than an improved human input response, hence the whole push for high picmips for blurry textures/vertexlight for no lighting around 2002 (well past their justified use) - which then became their "way to play" as "the definitve quake experience". Since Quake Champions is much obviously a modern looking game you can be prepared to face complaints of not achieving in this vein. The attributes and abilities are their current scapegoat right now

This very problem is something TF2 tried to nip in the bud with their cartoonish design and strict palette in 2007, but since the "medic conc jump pro trick's" weren't present, it was an immediate "worst game ever" (nevermind the crits or even the future updcrates)

The qommunity salt over Overwatch is hilarious though. It's like as if they have a tough time accepting how niche and elitist they really are AND it's like they've never seen a Blizzard game before. The way I see it, Overwatch has me optimistic for the personality-character direction i am currently going since a lot of that played into their marketing.

[deuxsonic]

Guess Tim Willits and co better get working on these settings or the pro twitch shooter players will be unhappy.

[Jblade]

leilei, on 07 August 2016 - 12:36 AM, said:

SPOILER: The pro's desire for a high framerate is more for fucking with the physics netcode (exploits) to gain an advantage, than an improved human input response, hence the whole push for high picmips for blurry textures/vertexlight for no lighting around 2002 (well past their justified use) - which then became their "way to play" as "the definitve quake experience". Since Quake Champions is much obviously a modern looking game you can be prepared to face complaints of not achieving in this vein. The attributes and abilities are their current scapegoat right now

I've seen videos of this kind of high level play and it's so abstract I don't even understand why they consider it Quake anymore. Surely somebody could just make a flatshaded circuit track with rectangles for player models with cylinder weapon models and that would essentially be the same thing.

[MusicallyInspired]

I just hope we're all proven as wrong about Quake as we were about Doom. Maybe they've got another ace up their sleeve here. Never know.

[PsychoGoatee]

I thought Doom looked good, I think this looks good. Just sayin'.

[MusicallyInspired]

I didn't think it didn't look good, but the expectations were just so low it was surprising when it turned out to be as amazing as it is. Even after watching the gameplay videos. Only difference now is we don't have any gameplay videos, so I suppose that's a legit cause for concern.

[deuxsonic]

They haven't decided how they plan to make money on the game yet. Will it be free to play? Will it be sold like a traditional game? Will it be both like Quake Live has been at different points in time?

[MetHy]

I replayed some Q3A recently, and all I gotta say is that it's a VERY satisfying game to play. Everything just feels right. They're going to have to be damn good to make Champions at least as good, and even then they'd still need a bit of magic.

[PikaCommando]

Everyone says Q3A has the best or most fluid controls/movements, but I disagree. I think UT feels much better. I don't know why, but Q3A always feel "off" to me; I find it difficult to coordinate movement and aim here even after trying all the sensitivities, but I can in all the Unreal games.

[----]

PikaCommando, on 11 August 2016 - 10:21 AM, said:

Everyone says Q3A has the best or most fluid controls/movements, but I disagree. I think UT feels much better. I don't know why, but Q3A always feel "off" to me; I find it difficult to coordinate movement and aim here even after trying all the sensitivities, but I can in all the Unreal games.

I think the games aim at something different, IMHO.

To me Q3A was always about getting as fast as you can to the next quick firefight, while UT (especially 2kX) was more about longer firefights and using movement during the duels.

[HulkNukem]

Quake 3 felt better to me, Unreal Tournament felt like it moved a tad too fast, coupled with the fact the character models are a lot thinner and trying to hit someone with a projectile weapon moving that fast and skinny sometimes turns into a chaotic mess; with Quake 3, its a lot more manageable because movement is based more on physics, as opposed to in UT where characters can do that dodge move at anytime.
Keep in mind I am not talking about high level Quake 3 play; I fully understand them fuckers zip around the maps like the Flash on speed.

[MusicallyInspired]

Definitely preferred UT.

[deuxsonic]

I liked both. They feel very different because they're very different games. UT is a continuation of how Unreal played (being that it was originally an add-on called the Botpack and practially all the Unreal I data came with it as a result when they made it standalone) where Quake 3 was designed from the beginning to be a very fast twitch shooter bouncing all over the place prickling your enemies. Classic UT was slower, with much more powerful weapons that at times were brutal (Eightball -> Rocket Launcher for up to 6 rockets at a time and ASMD tertiary fire for starters, the Redeemer before it was given a glass jaw) and dodging as part of the gameplay and a lot more game modes. The one thing I never understood was how id figured DM and CTF were all that was needed when UT was in development at the same time and had so many other modes (Assault!) It wasn't until Team Arena, a paid add-on, that more game types were introduced. With UT2003 a lot of people weren't happy with the changes which brought the game closer to Quake 3, with floatier physics, faster movement, and less powerful weapons. By the time the sniper rifle came back it was nerfed in a rather irritating way. UT3 brought it closer to the classic gameplay, with more heft and stronger weapons again, but with a lot of gametypes once again missing. Now with the 4th game it's floatier again like Super Mario 64 with the walljumping, climbing up narrow vertical areas through bouncing off walls.

[Moggimus]

Yeah, you can put me in the UT > Q3 camp. UT was just the better game for me, I definitely preferred UT's aesthetic, theme and sound over Q3 (and Alexander Brandon's amazing soundtrack). I'm not impressed by what I've seen/heard of Quake Champions. Here's hoping for a surprise like Doom 4 was.

[HulkNukem]

UT2004 > UT99, UT3, Quake 3

[deuxsonic]

Unreal Tournament (99) had a total of I think 7 musicians:

Alexander Brandon (Sandman/Siren)
Michiel van den Bos (MCA)
Andrew Sega (Necros)
Dan Gardopée (Basehead)
Tero Kostermaa (Teque)
Kaj-Eerik Komppa (Nitro)
Peter Hajba (Skaven)

Some of these had done music for Epic before, Alexander Brandon in particular, and most of them also did the music for Unreal and Deus Ex.

The soundtracks for all 3 games are probably the best game soundtracks IMHO. They got me interested in all the music that each one of them did, such as The Alpha Conspiracy and Iris and all the MOD music that they all did, older Epic games like Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and Tyrian and alternate versions of some of the songs used in "the big 3", such as remixes that Alexander Brandon has participated in since, the Acheron music and Drakk boss music from Unreal II which were his work, some of the best music in the game. Invisible War he scored as well but I wasn't as fond of it as it was much more ambient, where I had fallen in love with the electronica style of what was done for the previous games. Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos created a soundscape that really few other games have interested me so and they're all the reason I have a long playlist of as much MOD music I could find from them.

[HulkNukem]

I really liked the Unreal Championship 2 music.
Also the UT2003 theme really gets me pumped up to play it

[MusicallyInspired]

Andrew Sega and Alexander Brandon are in my top 5 favourite game composers of all time. I first discovered MODs with the game Crusader: No Remorse which Andrew Sega (Necros) scored, with a couple others (of which I think Alexander Brandon was among them) and he did a fantastic job on it. 2 of Necros' tracks were used in Unreal and UT99 as an honourary inclusion. It was after that that I started writing my own MODs which became my introduction to composing before I moved on to MIDI and performance. My MODs weren't very good, though. Such a cool and versatile format with possibilities not available in MIDI. Or at least possibilities for techniques you wouldn't necessarily think of in MIDI. Such a different angle to view music from.

Anyway, Andrew Sega and Alexander Brandon are legends.

[deuxsonic]

UT2 (2003/2004) music was more orchestral in nature, lots of fanfare that went with the whole sports thing they were pushing (one of many things that drove me up the wall along with that infernal announcer voice and having the character selections voiced when they could have just as easily used the earlier female announcer that Unreal Championship shipped with.) Kevin Riepl, Starsky Partridge (ehhh), and Will Nevins (2004 Onslaught tracks) did a pretty good soundtrack but of all the UT games, UT2 was the weakest in this regard. The original hit the mark perfectly and with UT3 Romolo Di Prisco, Jesper Kyd, and Kevin Riepl returned the music to electronica and created another awesome soundtrack with awesome remixes of Foregone Destruction, Skyward Fire, and Mechanism Eight. I picture what another soundtrack would be like with Andrew Sega, Alexander Brandon, and Michiel van den Bos and I can't see it being anything other than amazing.

I understand why Alexander Brandon clipped Isotoxin's intro off for the Outpost 3J level on Na Pali, but songwise it winds the whole thing up and gives it energy. There are so many songs done by those 3 that I've probably listened to hundreds of times over the years, like Nightvision (there's an interesting version that the game's beta used that actually had some additional instrumentation), Isotoxin, Mechanism Eight, the UNATCO theme, Synapse, the Unreal theme, Neve's Crossing, Shared Dig, Skyward Fire, Surfacing, and I don't feel like listing everything.

It's interesting because MOD music really is still around, and to date Andrew Sega's amazing songs he's written since then still make use of this way of doing things. I remember him talking specifically about using Jeskola Buzz and all the VSTs and plug-ins and modular synth-type things you can do on top of what more traditional tracker software had.

[MusicallyInspired]

I heard that Alexander Brandon and one of the others from UT99 talked with Epic about the new UT game and there was a bit of a conversation happening there...I wonder what came of it?

[deuxsonic]

Alexander Brandon, Michiel van den Bos, and Kevin Riepl have all mentioned doing music for the new UT. Steve Polge invited the classic musicians to return, so I'm quite optimistic about the soundtrack. With UT3 I think they realized that that particular style of music suits UT best, so it should be good.

[deuxsonic]

https://soundcloud.c.../flightcastle-2

[leilei]

Necros' music wasn't originally for Unreal/UT. They're just recycled from his catalogue (Mechanism Eight and Isotoxin had a 95/96 release already). Brandon's music is more inspired by Necros since his "dragon" beginnings


though on the topic of UT and Q3 and sound designers....... Sonic Mayhem was on both

Spoiler

Half of Q3's music, and pretty much all of UT's weapon sounds

and recreating UT's thematic aesthetic is something i'm trying to do myself though i suck at the musics and I don't legally have the option to sample off techno/house artists for loops like they have. At least I'm getting more of the engine part down. Getting Id Tech3 to "catch up" to UnrealEngine1 is an interesting task. I think i'm just missing local texture palettes, model point lighting, dynamic light craziness, model smoothing, volumetric light(a fake fog sphere of some sort) and a fractal/procedural/fire texture system now

Q3A definitely had an unpolished feel to it much like Quake was to Doom 2/Duke3D no doubt about that, but there's also the matter of engine maturity and the overall development time to consider. Q3's engine technically started in May 1997 while Unreal was 1994 on. UT had a base game to build off of with a mature renderer/subsystems and an established workflow, while Q3 is pretty much ground up with minimal carryover of Q2 code. UT was already at beta status with initial projections for spring release dates while Q3 didn't have working bots until bringing in Mr. Elusive around September (And before then, id was projecting for a 2000 release had they gave up and did inhouse bots).

[MusicallyInspired]

I did this a few years back. Never ended up finishing it. Always meant to. I love this song.

Shared Dig WIP

Ok, last Unreal post in the Quake thread...

[deuxsonic]

Yes Necros didn't technically do any music for either game and the weapon SFX were the work of Sonic Mayhem. This is actually something that irritated me because when UT came out, starting with Unreal build 220, they were using his UT SFX for the sounds instead of the original sounds that the game had and the way the Unreal engine's filesystem works, you can't simply swap data files out or overwrite them, so the OldUnreal patches adding the classic sounds mutator and mutators to single player was a really nice thing.

Quake 3 had 3 musicians:

Front Line Assembly (got hooked on them from this; their last couple albums have been some of the best stuff they've ever done)
Sonic Mayhem (did a good job with Quake II's soundtrack as well, but with Q3 it felt like there was a little more creativity with the songs)
Bill Brown (cinematics, notably the final one in single player, who had also done the cinematic music for Quake II)

I liked Quake 3's soundtrack but not as much. The Straylight music was uncommonly good video game music I think.

[deuxsonic]

MusicallyInspired, on 15 August 2016 - 06:17 PM, said:

I did this a few years back. Never ended up finishing it. Always meant to. I love this song.

Shared Dig WIP

Ok, last Unreal post in the Quake thread...

Very nice. I've hunted down remixes for a lot of the music but I haven't heard it done so well on guitar. Do you have any others?

That was another awesome bit of magic with MOD music that Unreal and Deus Ex took advantage of were multiple tracks per MOD, which allowed for more dynamic music that changed based on where you were and what was going on. By Deus Ex, they were putting as many as 7 tracks in for default/fighting/death/intro/outro/ambient for a particular mission's MOD. Shared Dig has 3 tracks and starts with the 3rd, which is I guess the ambient track, changes to track 2 when the fight with first Skaarj occurs, and then changes to track 1 (which you've done here) later in the map. I'm actually not sure how many tracks the game has total as I've never counted but all 3 parts of Shared Dig were awesome.

Really you can look at the music folder and say the game has X songs but it's actually more complex than that so the games just had so much music. Unreal and Deus Ex were not short games and it was glorious. Unreal had 38 single player maps, and that is cut down from what all they did make (much of the rest being Return to Na Pali) and a lot of them were HUGE compared to what came before, like that feeling the first time you walk out of the crashed ship on NyLeve's Falls and the music starts and you have this huge environment and a huge ship and the cliffside with the waterfall. Unlike Duke Nukem Forever, all that work and all that content that was made including music was not wasted and I really wish that DNF had really stuck to the same philosophy. Epic and DE put everything they had into it, spent every last cent they had and had maxed out a line of credit so everything was at stake but it was incredible even with all the initial bugs and it catapulted both developers into the stratosphere. A huge single player campaign, a bunch of multiplayer maps, and bots, something that very few games included out of the box. If you load galaxy.unr you can see just how ambitious they were, with the idea of having hubs not just in single player (which you can see from the naming of many of the MODs) but connecting multiplayer maps together as well with a lobby map.

Should probably split most of this page off and make it a new thread dealing with Unreal.

[Tea Monster]

I loved UT back in the day. I played the new one recently and although the graphics are nice and shiny, the gameplay is exactly like it was in the old game. Normally this would be great, but I found that I got bored easily. I've done that and wanted something else. What else I have no idea, as, apart from the new Doom and the Wolfenstein games, I don't like modern shooters at all. It's like watching a very skilled remake of an earlier episode, rather than the next chapter in a series.