 By Brad Cook Mark Rein, vice-president at Epic Games, smiles and nods. “Sports for geeks,” he says. “Absolutely.” |
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 Digital Darwinism. Only the strong survive in UT2K3. |
The Reason for the NameOf course, the first UT had a sports feel of its own, with a single-player mode that required you to make your way through a tournament to become champion of a brutal futuristic sport. Unreal Tournament 2003 from MacSoft features a similar single-player option, albeit with beefier graphics, the ability to create a team, and little extra touches. The development team also included an announcer who comments on the action like a play-by-play commentator would on TV. His bombastic style rivals that of John Madden.
Boldly Frag. Explore strange new worlds.
Each event in the tournament takes place in an arena stocked with a variety of weapons, ammo, and special items. You and several opponents enter the arena and begin shooting each other. Every time you “frag,” or kill, one of them, you get a point; the first player to reach a predetermined point total wins the match and moves on to the next one.
“[The sports feel] is why we put the ‘2003’ in the name,” Rein explains, referring to the common practice of placing the year in the names of most sports games, which see new versions annually (such as NASCAR Racing Season 2003). “I don’t know if we’ll do a new game every year, but we love the idea of the game evolving every year, with new stadiums and new weapons.”
Light Years Beyond
UT2K3 also improves on the original UT with a more advanced graphics engine, or base technology that powers the game. Many games, such as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, use the original UT engine to drive graphics, and you can expect many future Mac games to take advantage of the UT2K3 engine.
“The graphics are light years beyond the original, as well as everything else out there right now,” says Ryan Gordon, a developer at Epic Games.
Rein backs up this statement with some hard data: “The characters in UT were (comprised of) maybe 800 polygons,” he explains, “and the characters in UT2K3 are 3,000 to 3,500 polygons. The world environments are 100 to 200 times more detailed in terms of polygons.”
Polygons are basic mathematical shapes that developers use to create video game graphics. The more polygons that developers can pack into an area, the more graphical detail you will see.
It’s All in the Details. Who are these unlucky souls?
New Physics and New Abilities
More realistic graphics call for more realistic action, and UT2K3 offers a physics system, called karma physics, that activates when a player gets fragged. If you’ve played many first-person shooters, you know that other players often, for example, hover in mid-air if they get nailed while standing on a ledge. In UT2K3, that player realistically falls to the ground and lies there in a mangled heap for a few seconds before vanishing and respawning.
“If you hit someone with a rocket, they’ll go flying,” Rein promises.
In addition, there are ways to push your abilities beyond the normal bounds as you run around the arena blasting opponents. For example, every map includes adrenaline pills that you can collect for points; when you reach 100 points, you can activate such special abilities as speed burst and regeneration. The abilities fade after several seconds, but you can continue to collect adrenaline and keep your superpowers going a little bit longer. You also gain adrenaline every time you frag an opponent.
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As if that wasn’t enough, UT2K3 also offers you the ability to perform high jumps and flips that are important to master. If another player chases you into a dead end, for example, you can jump, kick off the wall, perform a flip, and land behind him. Suddenly he’s the one getting fragged in the back.
“The guys in the CPL do nothing but wall-jump to navigate their way around some of the levels,” says Rein. “They do really smart wall-jumps and double-jumps and it’s almost like ballet. When you see really good players doing them, it’s astonishingly cool.”
Team Sports, UT2K3 Style
The CPL? The Cyberathlete Professional League. Angel Munoz says he founded the organization in 1997 “because we realized that the skill level of the top gamers in the world was far superior to those of the casual gamer.”
In Your Sights. It’s a frag-or-be-fragged world.
Rein thinks that Bombing Run, one of UT2K3’s new multiplayer modes, could help bridge the gap between sports games and first-person shooters. He says that players have even formed leagues around the game, which he describes as “football with guns.” Essentially, the players divide into two teams, each with a home base. A ball materializes in the center of the arena, and each team scores points by having a player either carry it into the other team’s home base (for 7 points) or shooting it into there (for 3 points). You can’t use weapons while carrying the ball, although you can pass it to another teammate if you’re about to get fragged.
“This is Bombing Run 1.0,” says Rein, “so there’s no question that, as we refine the rules, Bombing Run will become a big team sport game.”
Thunder and Lightning. Gotcha!
A New Expression
Munoz hasn’t seen Bombing Run attain the popularity that traditional multiplayer deathmatch modes have, although he thinks it could attract more players over time. He does take exception with the term “sports games for geeks,” however. “The top professional gamers come from different backgrounds,” he explains, “and a large number of them have a traditional sports background. Therefore, it would be unfair to categorize all the top gamers as ‘geeks,’ a term that is mostly associated with nerds that are somewhat disliked by society.
“I would rather state that electronic game sports are a new expression of the competitive nature of humans.”
That works for us. Watch out for our lightning gun the next time you’re online.
If you liked this game, check out:
Aliens vs. Predator 2 Quake III: Gold Return to Castle Wolfenstein Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast|
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