Stumbling together through Unreal Tournament 3 - Parts 3 and 4

[davidn]

Two new videos this time, as both of them are rather short. In them, we get our first taste of gameplay in the Capture the Flag and Warfare modes - I've chosen to showcase the fourth one because it's much funnier, directly due to some ill-advised person giving us access to hovercrafts.

Mission 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyR7qj2gFzA

Mission 4: http://youtu.be/x3EYkJKkynk

Comments

[kjorteo]

For someone who is vehemently opposed to playing shooters, even I have to admit that Warfare is an intriguing concept, especially compared to some of the more egregiously stupid modes I've seen in Halo and the like.

You two did very well this time! Did you remember to turn the difficulty back up after last time, or is it just Casual from here on in? ;)

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

We changed it back! It's just that in Mission 1 you're still finding your feet, and the difficulty of Mission 2 is disproportionate compared to some later levels. We actually worked out why - The teams in Mission 2 have AI-players of varying levels of competence, descending from someone who gets 15+ points to someone who gets about... two. The game replaces the best-scoring one on your team with you, expecting you to make up about that many kills (a big ask when you're new to the game) and sticking you an overall-worse AI team than the enemy has. And I think if you play co-op, player 2 replaces the second-most competent bot - and that was with me, someone with even less competence!

I'm surprised to have our performance characterised as "doing very well" after that, considering some of the mishaps we encountered, but I appreciate the vote of confidence. =D

In the latter two missions we had a bit of an advantage over the AI - I went back and played them solo afterwards, so I can confirm this - in that human players are just more competent at going after the objective. The AI is pretty decent at defense, and that's all I had them do in the capture the flag match, while it was very easy for me to just steal the flag three times.

[davidn]

Out of interest, by "vehemently opposed" do you mean morally opposed in some way or just not really interested in them? People tend to react with surprise when I mention I play Unreal/Quake (though neither of them very well), but I grew up with the genre as Doom was effectively the PC's flagship game for a very long time.

I'm actually beginning to see the appeal of team-based online games through this! Warfare seems to be a combination of two modes from earlier Unreal games - a very dull one called Domination where you had to capture and hold unrelated control points, and Assault where you had actual objectives both essential and optional across a map - and it really makes a difference to be able to talk to each other and form something approaching a plan. (How well this works out, we'll see when we continue...)

Thank you for saying we did well even though we spent a while attacking our own base :) We are definitely on Normal again! As Rakarr says, in the objective-based missions, just having humans on your team is a huge asset compared to the AI of the bots (even though the series is known for its comparatively good AI, it can't replace people who can communicate and plan ahead - no matter their ability at either).

[kjorteo]

Oh, no, nothing morally wrong or anything like that, I just mean they're not the type of game for me. I have relatively poor instincts and quick-thinking abilities, so the old-style ones like Quake and UT are just too fast and twitchy for me to be any good at them or to have any amount of fun trying. (This is the same reason I can't play fighting games for too long,e even though I get very attached to interesting character design in them, have a "this is who I would play if I actually played this game" list for basically everything, and honestly try until I just can't stand it anymore when certain ones come out.) The modern-style shooters are too frustrating just to watch, let alone play, due to a peculiar combination of being slower yet having a near-instant arbitrary "minding your own business and then DEAD" transition whenever anyone sees you trying to do anything, plus I am sick to death of everything being either World War II or a Tom Clancy novel. As for the newer less-real-setting ones (Halo, Gears,) the gameplay fails for the same reasons mentioned above, and the character design fails because of all the steroids. At least the we're-actually-a-shooter-too Mass Effect 3 multiplayer has some sexy interesting alien designs, but it's still not anything I would play.

No, my game of choice is slow, ponderous strategy. The game I am absolutely devouring, and have already placed rather highly on my "this is one of my absolute favorite games for any system of all time ever" list, is the PSP Tactics Ogre remake of all things. There's not a lot more to it than that!

Anyway, I think ... UT2K4, was it? Had an expanded version of Warfare, where instead of just the main node and the two bases, there was a small chain of them leading from one base to the other, so it's kind of like a pushing contest to drive the contested points back and forth. That one really seemed neat (to watch.)

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

" The modern-style shooters are too frustrating just to watch, let alone play, due to a peculiar combination of being slower yet having a near-instant arbitrary "minding your own business and then DEAD" transition whenever anyone sees you trying to do anything"

Yeah, this is something that I find frustrating. I really like stealth games, like Deus Ex. However, stealth has been incorporated into more and more shooters recently, and it's rarely intuitive. There's almost always a "dead zone" in the gaurd's total vision--like in Metal Gear Solid, where you can run 1 foot behind gaurds, and apparently they can't hear you, because their backs are turned--and then they are super sensitive to wherever they're programmed to "look." So rather than being about sneaking, it tends to be about learning where the game's deadzones are, and then just trouncing through. . which doesn't quite seem right. There should be more of a gradient, where gaurds become more and more suspicious before calling the alert of doom; instead of maybe one level of suspicion, and immediately entering alert if they see you for one frame [and how can they always immediately recognize you as an enemy?]

I don't know. . I really like stealth games, they're just really frustrating to play; trying to figure out "well, what is 'stealth.'"

[davidn]

What gets to me is how Gears of War became Epic's flagship product so quickly - when UT3 was announced it was advertised as being "from the makers of Gears of War". Surely it was also from the makers of Unreal, as evidenced by the four or five earlier games in the series!

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

It's nice of the game to give you floating, glowing white arrows, to show you how to get to. . .well, your doom, ultimately.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

"You capture the flag and then you take it... to where you take it."
"This should go well... *dies* ...that didn't go very well."
"Oh, hang on, I'm at the wrong base!"
"Protecting Jester... Jester seems to be a bit drunk."

"Here we goooo- oh, it won't fit through the door."
"...I've just realised this is *our* core."
"Somebody punted me halfway across the map with a Manta, was that you?" "...no."
"You go for the enemy core, I'll defend our node... yeah, I kind of failed at that duty, didn't I?"
"We win, and I actually feel like I contributed for once..."
"I did better than Jester!" "And that's all that matters..."

It's like watching Gears of War starring Team Rocket. :) :P

D.F.

[davidn]

That's sort of a relief - when I saw "That didn't go well" repeated back to me, I thought you were going to say Top Gear!