No patch in the world can make unreal 2 not suck and not be a huge disappointment.

It's like these guys actually listen. I'm dumbfounded. But then again, Unreal and UT franchises have always seemed to have good intentions with the community. Unlike some other companies that couldn't give a shit once you buy their product... Can you hear me EA?

I didn't think so.

Maybe they hope sales will increase when people can actually find out how the game will run on their PCs?

Ahh,it's not that bad,maybe you expected to much.A new halflife it's not but it's ok.;)

How odd, I seem to recall someone saying there would be no Unreal II demo. That's what I get for beleiving such a random, far-fetched statment. Shouldn't have beleived any game of such high expectation, not to mentino moderate hype, will ever go without a demo. Heh. That whould be a poor choice of suicides.

Ah well, I've already "tried" the game... Sigh.

Saying that Unreal 2 sucks is a tad harsh. It's not original and the gameplay won't win any awards, but the game hardly sucks. It just doesn't break any new ground.

Right on the money Oblivion.

I agree with Oblivion. It's not a great game, it's just an OK game. But, in fairness to those that don't agree, I can see how some people don't like it.

I just hope that they fix the EAX crash! This is one of the few games that I can tell a VERY noticeable difference with EAX enabled.... when it works, that is.

nm

It has more innovations than I've seen in the Quake Genre for a while. I like some of the mini-missions where you have to set up a perimiter and fight with a team to keep some baddies out. It's not usually that hard but it's pretty interesting.

Anyway, I find this statement to be pretty funny:

As well, we're going to be releasing a demo, especially targeted at those of you who want to 'try before you buy'. It should be a great benchmark to see how the game runs on your particular system.

... you know, as opposed to releasing it for the people who already own the game and want to... er... I have no idea. Yay, redundancy!

I know a number of poeple who's demo was a ripped ISO, and I don't think any patch will convince them to shell out $50 for this game (which they commonly do for games that are sweet). That is unless you fix interactivity problems and the ocasional fall-through-the-map and walk-through-this-huge-cliff/rock (e.g. clipping) bugs... It's not a process I entirely agree with (the pirate then buy if it has any replayability method) but when Legend was touting, "It's so good it doesn't need a demo" just a couple of weeks ago, I can hardly blame 'em. As it turned out I can only guess Legend's real reason for no demo was they need some paying beta testers before they could scrape some more funds for the project, make a patch and show UII to the educated consumer.


NMG

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Strip mining prevents forest fires.s{
This comment was edited on Feb 13, 21:58.

Ya, I think the engine, the game is incredible, and they obviously worked really hard on it. With the small additions to the game over all, it's very "solid feeling".
I do get the EAX crashes, pain in the butt.

But I will still say sucked, not in a rude way, but in a complete disappointment way. It's not of the expectation mentioned so much, it's of the original Unreal, coming from Vaporware, really expanding on FPS possibilities, and creativeness. That Unreal changed the "same ole boring fps" into something more exploring, and fun etc. Unreal2 (kinda like a car)really had alot of engine power, but the model and design(story) engineering went way back dated, no progress forward with the effort put behind the engine.

I can understand that some people are disappointed with the game (I've yet to try it) but to hear people continuously go on that it (or any other new fps) doesn't offer anything new is a bit perplexing. It's a freakin' FPS. You walk around and you shoot things. Some things are smarter and some things are dumber but you still gotta shoot 'em. I know you got games like Deus Ex, Halflife and others but to me any FPS, no matter how innovative, comes down to feel and atmosphere.

I know you got games like Deus Ex, Halflife and others but to me any FPS, no matter how innovative, comes down to feel and atmosphere.

Atmosphere it does have especially on the mission where you pick up the final relic. The sound effect for overlords powering up is absolutely chilling.

Sorry.. went through three drives before one would work with SecuROM, then it kept crashing. After four hours I gave up and took it back the next day. I don't know what I bought, but it sure wasn't Unreal II.

Unreal II sucked.

5 crashes to the desktop on the first day of play. I have never had a game crash to the desktop in my life.

The basic technology is about 4 or 5 years old. It is similar to a game called uprising II. Slow movement, muddy, dark textures. Requires the gamma to be maxed out to even see what is happening.

Clipping bugs, 1 to 2 minute load times on a 1.6 gig amd, WD800JB ide drive. The grenade launcher is a joke. You can shoot a frag grenade at something 6 feet in front of you and not take damage. On top of being hard to judge where the grenade actually goes.

Not continuity. They started out to make a system shock II clone. Then they decided to make it tribes with the gun turrets and marines that help you. Then they added jar jar binks from star wars for comedy relief. OMG I cannot believe they did that.

The main enemies are a joke. The drakk are superbeings. So super that they cannot follow you around an obstruction. When you see one, all you do is stand behind an object and the stoopid enemy will stay on the other side while you kill it.

For those thinking about buying it, I finished it in 2 days on serious difficulty. That was only because of the load times. If the load times were shorter I would have finished it in one day. Not much for $50.

Remember, when a company won't release a demo, it is because the game sucks and they don't want people to find out before they make the initial sales.

Now that initial sales for Unreal II have dried up, one week after release, and the word is out on how bad it sux, Legend says "oh yeah, we are gonna make a demo". Only to see if they can suck a few more bux out of the ignorant.

Unreal II was released because Legend has financial trouble. They looked at sales of Unreal Tournament 2003, looked at how much work needed to be done to make Unreal II something worthwhile. The decision was made to kick Unreal II out the door as is because it would cost too much to fix. They would never get the money back if Unreal II sold like Unreal Tournament 2003

agreed, Brick

Environments 7
Character design/modeling 4/6
Sound/Music 5/3
Gameplay 6
Cinematics 2

Unreal II has crashed to desktop around four times, and my system is a dev system that is pretty much bullet proof. So I fear to run this game on the duel AMD at home.

Overall dam waste of a good engine, and intellectual property. I would have lowered the gameplay number, but I did like the force field placement levels, it was up'd two points for that "innovation."

The background/environments looked good, they have pretty much ripped off aliens property about as much as you possibly can without getting sued, but if your going to rip someone off, not a bad choice.

Nothing in Unreal II really jumps out as excellent, they are missing the kind of spectacular moments that you usually see in products of this expected caliber.

For example during the first or second force field levels where the drop ships are dropping guys off, and attacking the base. Why does the ship need to be 100 miles away from the player? Wasn't there anything that could have been done to make this more dramatic?

Have the drop ships attack the player.

Allow the player to shoot a drop ship down.

Have a drop ship be the final boss for that level.

Have the Merc's jump off the moving drop ship in front of the player while firing.

So many ideas, and these suck, but come on you guys had years to make this game. What really gets me is that you had all the elements sitting the editor in front of you, and none of this came to mind? Or was it so hard to execute in that engine that there wasn't the time? Seems like a huge waste of potential game play. This is just small example so many more I won't bother to list here. It just made me sad in the end to see all those environments wasted.

Finally, if I would have paid for UT23k, and Unreal II as one game for 50 bucks I would have been happy, but paying over a $100 for both makes me feel like I was ripped off. These games should have never been separated. Whoever is running this show needs figure out a better strategy, or these products will lose their luster for good.


-Vex

This comment was edited on Feb 13, 23:02.

5 crashes to the desktop on the first day of play. I have never had a game crash to the desktop in my life.

You must not have played many games before.. or you havn't been playing games for a long time.


Unreal II was released because Legend has financial trouble. They looked at sales of Unreal Tournament 2003, looked at how much work needed to be done to make Unreal II something worthwhile. The decision was made to kick Unreal II out the door as is because it would cost too much to fix. They would never get the money back if Unreal II sold like Unreal Tournament 2003

Where did you get this info from? How much did you make up?

I have to agree on the atmosphere part, a few of the levels in U2 were able to give that suspension of disbelief and evoke that foreboding feeling that makes you want to stop playing otherwise you'll freak out.

Unfortunately, when taken as a whole it's still pretty stale (And the lack of good gameplay doesn't help.)

I wasn't expecting anything new either (I also believe the innovative argument is flawed). IMO a sequel doesn't have to innovate or break new ground, but it should expand on the successful concepts presented in the first iteration. Unlike many of the great FPSs sequels we've played recently, Unreal 2 doesn't do this and instead tries to cash in on current FPS trends towards linearity.

As for the technical aspects, I hope they do fix that sound problem. On my system it isn't just limited to EAX usage (The "UseEAX" parameter), but 3D Sound in general ("Use3DSound=True/False".) I ended up playing most of the game through headphones since I couldn't use my 4-speaker setup without risking a crash.

The requirements for this game, compared to the gameplay, make me want to run to Mom and play MAME. On the other hand Good Vs. Bad 2's ratio of requirements to gameplay swings the exact opposite. By the way, has anyone posted more scans from this article about the game?:

http://rain.prohosting.com/phole8/article.jpg

Please let me know.