Wirehead Studios

Well, I play a lot of UT. Both flavours, but I can't decide which I like to play the most.

UT99 has the ripper, and the warcow, and the necris.

UT2004 has the necris now, but the action seems to be 'slower' as the levels are more open, with larger rooms.

What do the wireheaders think?

(UT was really my world before this year, cos of the bot support)

UT2004 is far superior than UT99!

The controls are crisp like Quake3 instead of spongy!
The shock combo is balanced!
Loads of levels!
Dodging off walls!
Onslaught!
Alien Swarm!

Plus, they brought back Assault (which 2k3 was lacking)!!

I am MUCH happier with 2k4 than 99.

I've only played the original UT.  The Flak Cannon felt a little too strong, but otherwise most everything else felt fine.  I also severely disliked the dodging controls.  I turned dodging off as I'd invariably "dodge" off a ledge accidentally.  :shifty:

ut2k4. it pwns

Like Phoenix, I've only ever played the original. I got some enjoyment out of it, but never really had the opportunity to play it online.

Ive played both UTs alot. I enjoy UT2K4 but i also enjoy classic UT from time to time.

I'd have to say that UT2K4 is my favorite UT game.

My favorite part of UT99?

Voice taunt:  "You be DEAD."  <3

UT2k4 is my favorite.
There is so much do to so it is pretty hard to get bored.

Plus the bots are cool.

None, they all sucked.

They have a grainy mechanical feel with the controls. Graphics in UT2k4 were nice, and the new assault type gamemod with the power nodes was fun to play for about 10 minutes in the demo.

I think I prefer an Unyielding Tourniquet over Unreal Tournament.

Epic made UT2003, and it was good.
Epic added Invasion (Bonus Pack,) and it was very good.
Epic resurrected Assault and added Onslaught (UT2004,) and it was damn good.
Epic added three new vehicles and four awesome Onslaught maps (Editor's Choice Edition,) and it was simply the best.

Now I eagerly await Unreal Championship 2 to unmercifully rip me away from my beloved UT2004: Editor's Choice Edition.  ^_^

I was a huge fan of UT99 back in the day, but once I got into Quake it was hard to go back. With UT2004, there's deffinitely some things I miss from UT99, like the ripper and the enforcer, but especially after modding 2k4 to my tastes, UT99 feels very primitive.  I would say the greatest weakness in UT2004 right now is the movement physics. In quake, there is a whole science to movement which obviously I don't hav e to elaborate on. Even in UT99, there was some skill to running most of the time and only jumping or dodging on occasion. In UT2004, if you're not constantly dodge-jumping then you're going too slow, and it doesn't take any skill. At the same time, it dilutes combat because dodge-jumping doesn't require building momentum and you can do it instantaneously. It's too easy to just instantly pop in the other direction when there's a rocket coming at you. Even blind double jumping allows you to hang in the air avoiding much incoming fire with little effort. Furthermore, it totally changes map flow because anything that's not the size of Rankin is too small for constant dodge-jumping. Even after downloading remakes of classics from UT99 like Malevalence, Shrapnel, Turbine, Grinder, etc, I still mainly just play Asbestos, Rankin, and Antalus because the old maps just don't play right with UT2004 physics. Not to mention, Curse just isn't Curse without the Ripper.

UT2004 may have UT99 licked in terms of technology and even weapon balance, but there's something to the feel of UT99's close range combat that's missing in UT2004. I suppose removing double/dodge- jumping and speeding up running to match UT99 would help, but what would really be cool is if someone with more coding skills than me were to make a Quake-stlye-movement mutator for UT2004. Onslaught and the other new modes are actually pretty good. Classic Domination, my favorite non-dm gametype, has been brought back via community mod. Weapons and items are easy to fix (I've allready remade 90% of Quake's weapons into UT with little-to-no coding skills). But movement, that's the major missing peice in UT2004.

Semi-:offtopic:

I am really surprised that the original UT has faster movement than UT2003 and UT2004.  I always thought UT was the slowest of them all.  In fact, that is one of the main reasons why I prefer Q3 to UT, it seems faster to me.  Anyhow, I really do like what Epic tried to accomplish with the 2003/2004 dodging system, but it still has a long ways to go.  I generally don't dodge in combat all that often as I'm not very good at adjusting my aim while dodging.  However, I often use diagonal dodges, wall jumps, and slope dodges to get to hard to reach spots.  Even then, dodging feels somewhat clunky because of the sudden burst of momentum and then the immediate stop.  I would really enjoy some kind of hybrid between Q3's movement system and UT's dodging system.  I am hopeful that Unreal Championship 2 will deliver in that aspect, but if it doesn't, it still looks like it has a much more intuitive and intricate dodging system than the previous Unreal games.

I think this says exactly what I think too: I prefer UT99 over the newer sorts, but was not sure why exactly.

I play on truff.net (UT99) if anyone wants a game sometime.

Idon't really like mutators to turn one game into another. why not just play the original game?

I'm with Shambler here.  The exception, of course, being Gen where you can mix it up with ordinance from all your favorite games. ;)

because the graphics in that game suck .

A legitimate question. If you're trying so hard to make one game like another, why not just play the other game?  Why bother? For the new game modes, for the newer engine, for the bigger player base, to mix ideas from 2 different games, but most of all, because it plays better that way....

true, but I like the gameplay with the old game. It's a lot faster now I am aware of it while playing and I like the people that play it. the forums are better. (bit like wirehead!)

Hey, sometimes I like to play Zdaemon.  Sometimes I still go back and play Q2DM, or RA2.  A few months ago I used DOSBOX to play through the original Wing Commander.  I routinely play emulated 80's and 90's era arcade games.  Some favorites just never go out of style.  :thumb:

wow wing commander?

That game was awsome back in the day.

I didn't know that dosbox could run it.


I liked UT's dodge and double jump stuff, makes matches more intense if you play against people that can really utilize them.

Yeah, Dosbox can run Wing Commander pretty good, but it  does crash out randomly.  I'm hoping a later version will be stable.  I don't want to go playing Secret Missions 1 and 2 with the possibility of it bombing out halfway through one of the tougher battles.

I've just bought ' blake stone aliens of gold' from a boot fair for ?1. anyone know what this is? looks like wolf engine.

Yep.:D

Anyway, UT2004 for me. You can download the UT99 voices for 2k4 on the internet. "You be dead!" is included.

the kangroo aliens already say "you be dead"

yep... actually, i *think* it's pre-wolf engine tech... not sure though

I owned it once too... fun game ;)

I Like them all UT 99 is still cool for it's myriad of Mods

Ut 2003 is Cool for all Of it's weirdness

Ut 2004 is Very Cool as Onslaught Rules, Especially now with the MSU Bonus Pack as i Luv <3 the Cicada assualt Craft

But Quake 3 and Generations will always keep me coming back as i'm a true slippy  :smirk:

and will be ever since Quake world  

Which is why i love Generations the Most, as the Slipgate Class has truely brought back the coolness and accuracy of Quake

Long live Generations and it's possible sequels  :ownage:

Blake Stone came out after Wolf and before Doom.  I distinctly remember one PC magazine reviewing both Blake Stone and Doom at the same time.  I don't know if it was actually based on the wolf engine but it sure looked like it.  Id even had a term for such games back then.  They called them "Wolf-alikes".

thanks. as soon as i get the time on a non-XP comp I'll try it.

:offtopic:  Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold is based on the Wolf 3D tech with a great deal of enhancements,  also if you notice on the credits, is is an Apogee game release...and guess who Apogee Software also happen to be! 3D Realms! And you can get more information here: http://www.3drealms.com/blake/index.html (http://www.3drealms.com/blake/index.html).

On topic though, I prefer the original UT just for it's feel.  Especially CTF LAN play.  Ut2k3/4 just don't appeal to me in quite the same way.

Regards from your resident 3DR nut,

Yickle.

P.S. Shambler, Blake Stone (and Wolf 3D) runs immediately but without sound and smoothly under Win2k.  Also, if DOSBox does not work for you - or your game - I strongly recommend VDMS (http://www.ece.mcgill.ca/~vromas/vdmsound/).  Basically, I can run Star Trek: TNG: A Final Unity and Bio Menace flawlessly - the former being finnicky anyway...even in MS DOS...and the latter not working at all under Win98.

I played ut for over 3 years when it first came out in a number of clans and some lan competitions.  It was a great game that was totally different to q3 relying more on tactics/movement than pure aim/ping. It was fresh and exciting and had a charm that still pulls people in now online with virtually the same number of people playing it online as ut2004.

To me ut2003 put a lot of people off the ut franchise for good and onto other games. The movement was heavier and clunky and the weapons redesigned to make them less "spammy" but  it ended up playing like a bad quake 3 mod with good graphics. ut2004 tried to get more players back with old ut style gameplay types/weapons/feel etc which shows how badly people wanted a game more akin to the original.

This is imo but I feel a number of people shared this view as illustrated by how badly ut2003 did online and how ut2004 is not taken as seriously  as a tournament game e.g. cpl/no of clan ladders etc. Here is a typical quote from ataris own forums where many people feel the same way:

"Yeah, funny that, when ever a thread comes up about UT99 it gets closed, what,, doesn't epic/atari like the fact that UT99 is still popular, or is it that they just can't reproduce the best game ever made"

I got to say I agree with this

I gotta say i agree as well

both UT2003 & UT2004

are games where the graphics, seem to have been more important than the gameplay

plus less and less decent mods are being made for ut2003 /4 as most prefer fast matched deathmatches and ctf

which can't be found anywhere but quake 3

and what the hell happened to the preposed weapons factory for ut2003 as i love weapons factory

but they canned it at the last minute

it's just not far i tell you

as for atari / epic they really don't like the fans of the original keep bringing up what a seriously better game ut99 was, as it's just like having to admit that graphics arn't everything

i still play ut99 and all the mods it has

and although weapons factory ut only made a beta 1.07 it was in many ways a better version than the quake 3 one

(ducks to avoid knives, bombs, grenades and whatever else can be thrown)

as q3wf has serious flaws

for defensive classes such as the gunner and engineer q3 is too fast an engine to go with the slowness need for such a class

all in all wf would suit ut2004, so come guys somebody must know somebody that wan't to start it again

 :ownage:

Well, being an old-school gamer and designer for Gen I've found that when you attempt to homogeonize and "nerf" weapons for balance it makes the game start sucking REAL fast.  Some earlier versions of Gen had incorrect damage and knockback calculations for a lot of the guns.  We decided that it was killing the gameplay, so instead we decided to try to make everything as close to old-school as possible first, THEN see if any tweaking is needed.  It worked out pretty good.  We still have some tweaks to do, and some nerfing did occur in some places, but by diversifying the weapons and keeping them strong the gameplay feels much more solid than it did in previous versions.

This is where I noticed a distinct difference in weapon balance in singleplayer games vs multiplayer games, since Gen is a multiplayer mod based on singleplayer games.  Most SP games start out with weaker weapons and graduate to stronger ones as you go, so there's some incrementalism involved.  In Doom, that pistol is good for a few zombies, the shotgun is good for all-around work, but once you get into some of Doom II's massive monster fests that plasma, rocket launcher, and BFG start to take center stage.  Why?  You need more firepower.  Same with Quake 1 and Quake 2.  Multiplayer deathmatch in games that were primarily single-player in focus tends to lean in the direction of certain weapons being dominant over others.  In Doom it's the rocket launcher and plasma rifle, Doom II it's the SSG, Quake it's the rocket launcher and Thunderbolt, Quake 2 it's the railgun and chaingun.

When you have a multiplayer-specific game like Quake 3 then weapon balance starts being thought of more often as opposed to the "get bigger gun, do more hurt" predominant in single-player.  All the weapons in Q3 are fairly balanced (except the BFG) and have some drawbacks and advantages.  Weapons that kick out a lot of damage with one blast have a long refire, automatic weapons tend to do less damage per shot.  Q3's weapons are a bit of a homogeonization of the old Id weapons - shotguns, lightning guns, plasma guns, railguns, rocket launchers, etc - but are balance-tweaked.  This is why Q3 to me feels a bit more "mushy" out of the box than the old games do.

Someone will probably bring up Doom 3 as a counter-example to this, but Doom 3 has been described to me by more than one person as "Q3 weapons with higher gravity and shadows".  It is a post-multiplayer era single-player game, so the balance-tweak mindset is already in effect for the designers.  Other than that I've never played D3 DM, it so I don't know.  I can see the same trend in the UT games though, to "balance" the weapons.  The original UT had a few star weapons.  That six-barreled rocket launcher was one of those "wow" factors, along with the shock rifle's combo attack and the flak cannon's close-range blender action.  Every gun was capable of killing pretty quick, and all took some skill to handle.  But again, UT was a multi-player adaptation of the original Unreal, with a few weapon changes.  The Stinger was out, replaced with the Ripper, you start out with an Enforcer pistol (Unreal Automag) and the dispersion pistol was scrapped in favor of the piston (Q3 gauntlet for all intents).  Pretty much everything else had some near-identical weapon in the original game.  This is why I think Unreal 99 is standing out to so many people.  It's not been "nerfed".  I think nerfing weapons for balance should be treated VERY carefully.  Once games start taking "competition" seriously the whiners (and I'm sorry but pro-gamers whine like babies) start having their way and the result is no one weapon stronger than another, and the "ooh, ahh" factor gets lost along the way.  I play FPS  games for two reasons:  To kill things, and blow things up.  As such, I want the big guns to pack a punch.  Weak or strong, weapons should stand out and be diverse, otherwise where's the fun?

(For those who don't know the context of the term, everyone knows what "Nerf" is, that soft foamrubber stuff that it's impossible to hurt someone with, unless they swallow it an asphixiate.  "Nerfing" a weapon is a term we use for scaling back damage and knockback or any other action taken to make a weapon less powerful.)

I think the biggest difference in between UT2004 and UT99 in terms of damage is that UT99 had a "game style" setting that tweaked the damage and movement scales. At base value, most of the weapons were pretty weak, rockets only did 70 damage, but in the "hardcore" setting, which almost everyone played on, rocket damage was upped all the way to 120. Then you go to UT2004, and rockets only do 90 damage, with no "style" setting to up the damage.

The frustrating thing is if you mention rockets doing 100 damage on a UT2004 forum, most people are like "what? that would make it too easy to get cheap kills". If you ask me, leaving a  player with 10 health left is just annoying. In heated FFA games, I find often I make a nice direct hit shot with the RL, only to have the guy survive by a thread and get finished off by some n00b spaming assault rifle fire while I'm loading the next round. Why should the spamming n00b get the kill when I did all the work?

Certainly preventing things from getting too friendly to 1-shot-kills is a valid concern, but I think nerfing the weapons is a bad way to do that. I think that instead, providing more armor or health vials works better, that way players have to work for their protection, and it contributes to the overall system of rescource control. Also, spawning players with extra health that counted down in Q3 wasn't too bad because it was only temporary, even though having to rail people twice when they spawn in your way was annoying.

The other nice thing about using '100 damage' as the base value for all single-shot weapons is it provides a guidline for damage. In UT2004, even among the single shot weapons, damage values are very arbitrary. Grenades and lightning (rail equivalent) only do 70 damage, then rockets do 90, then for some reason flak does about 110, and the biorifle, if you charge it up all the way, does 200 . Generally, I think it's best to unify things by making damage values consistent from weapon to weapon and then adjusting things like reload time, etc instead to make up the difference. Otherwise, things have a tendency to feel inconsistent and random.