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[kupoartist]

And I thought Epic would have been busy enough with Unreal Tournament 2004... PlanetUnreal has just revealed that Unreal Championship 2 is in the works at Epic Megagames and due to be released in December 2004.

What may comes as a surprise is that, whereas Unreal Championship was UT2003 at it's core, UC2 is not a port of Unreal Tournament 2004. It is instead described as a combination of the FPS and Fighting Genres, with melee as well as Gun fights throughout. Naturally, it will utilise XBox Live for Multiplay (up to 8 players - big matches were decided against for a melee game) and extra content (i don't know about UC, but every PC Unreal game has recieved a generous ammount of "Bonus" content, well after release)

For more information, check the planetunreal report: https://planetunreal.com/features/uc2/index.shtml

[Uchiha Sasuke]

Dammit, only 8 players. That BS, they should find a way to increase it.

[kupoartist]

smaller matches seem to be the way some companies are going... Doom III will ship only with 4 Player Deathmatch (and a confirmed 2 Player co-op mode on the XBox). 8 players does have it's benefits though... they can churn out more maps if they're smaller, the melee system will have a chance of working (big maps wouldn't work - you need small spaces I guess...) and they'll be numerous netcode/RAM benefits, with less data to shuffle around...

I'm not sure what this means for Teamplay though... I wouldn't imagine all the UC gametypes are still in. Onslaught and Assault are almost certainly not in (their focus is on large maps and/or vehicles - no vehicles for UC). I guess they're pretty sure that they don't want to take on Halo 2 and it's ilk, so something fairly different is what they want to do...

[Uchiha Sasuke]

Yeah, but the thing is most of the fun is in the larger matches. Most games like UT2004 and BF1942 provide lots and lots to do with more players, and in my eyes add a more enjoyable expirence.

You also spoke of most companys going in this direction, and it completely blows my mind. I do not get it at all. History shows the most popular FPS games support 10 or more players. Look at the 3 best live games (Wolfenstien, Rainbow Six, and CS) they all support 16. I know this game is spose to be more about the whole close quarter combat thing, but why in the hell not try to get more out of the game. It looks like Epic is just starting to half-ass it, atleast thats what I noticed they are doing with the xbox. I mean there latest release Unreal 2 just sucked in my opinion. Hopefully though they will make this a very good 8 player expirence.

[kupoartist]

Originally posted by Il Palazzo It looks like Epic is just starting to half-ass it, atleast thats what I noticed they are doing with the xbox. I mean there latest release Unreal 2 just sucked in my opinion. Hopefully though they will make this a very good 8 player expirence.

Unreal 2 was created (and later ported) by Legend Entertainment, so Epic only had a hand in the development of the engine it ran on... regardless, Unreal 2 sucks on whatever system you play it on (XMP is passable, single player is totally dire)

I suppose the justification of not offering Big and Small game options, is that if you concentrate on just the one thing at a time, you'll get one good option, rather than having two crappy options. Epic have usually put together big products which end up being weak in certain areas: in the first UT, Domination and Assault were lacking whilst CTF and DM ruled. In 2003, Bombing Run and DM were fairly good but CTF and DDOM were pretty bad. They may have got round it for UT2004, but they cheated a little by employing community mappers and commisioning other developers to make maps... Hopefully, a focused game would work better for them...

Hope they do something a bit more interesting than usual for the single player game though... the menu-based "tournament" idea of the UT games is getting old...