Sign me the f up!
I just wish these groups making fan-made builds would share at least patches, so they don't become gatekeepers and others could build on their work.
There were silly ones like the one making your characters head larger for each kill, and those which made it just different like low gravity, and so on.
It was also relatively easy to make your own, thanks to UnrealScript.
Really wish more multiplayer games embraced this concept, it really increased replayability by changing things up.
Earliest memory I have in the multiplayer FPS context was probably the 'cheat' menu unlocks for Goldeneye on the N64 in 1997.
Also allowing players to change the configuration of their game through the dev console was cool. My favorite visual change was to configure the railgun trails to persist for multiple seconds.
That used to be my jam in Q3A, Instaunlagged. Nothing is quite like railgun jumping with no splash damage. Dusk's crossbow jumping comes close, but isn't hitscan..
Some games come close now, but I'm not aware of any multiplayer games that afford that level of control to their playerbase.
Multi Theft Auto (another GTA multiplayer mod, still alive today) allowed for similar things. And so did the source games (Counter Strike, HL2: DM, Day of Defeat, etc.).
There were a ton of servers with wacky mods. I spent a ton of time on the low-grav servers. There were also some that made the top-scoring player huge. Those odd game modes were a blast.
EDIT: Also looks like people are still playing!
https://www.gog.com/dreamlist/game/tactical-ops-assault-on-t...
I seem to remember there was some behind-the-scenes political / financial shenanigans with Counter Strike and the Game of the Year edition bundle that kind of killed it.
Another HL mod I remember fondly in similar veins is "The Specialists". If I remember correctly, it came out around the same time as The Matrix, and had all the fun moves like running on walls in slowmo, jumping forward/sideways and shooting in slowmo, and lots of other stuff. I think I recall it being possible to play both in 1st and 3rd person too, something that was kind of new at that point, unless I misremember.
I think at that I point I probably spent as much time with The Specialists as with Counter-Strike itself (and a cracked copy of 3DS Max 8 for making my own models of course).
Also had a strange RPG community entirely separate from the main game… funny how these random subcultures evolve in unexpected places.
Such a shame the way the post-Dynamix/T2 development studios completely failed to understand what made 1 & 2 great.
I have always hated esports conceptually, from jump.
There's another game called Hypercharge:Unboxed that is definitely giving me the feeling of those old UT maps, but I haven't actually played it.
Obscuring server browser and/or not allowing self-hosting dedicated servers killed modding in modern games. A real shame.
I have such rose coloured glasses of that time.
Looking back, most of the dedicated server software felt like it was just tossed over the wall. Some of the stuff we used to have to do to get things running happily on headless linux servers was very hacky. Others simply HAD to run on windows hosts.
I feel like the entire industry died as games became "live" services.
Nearly 2 decades later when my kids got into Minecraft, I stumbled into the hosted MC server world and was just amazed by the size of the industry around it.
It was a real "arrrh this is where that same spirit ended up" moment.
And now of course there's huge servers funded by getting kids into gambling and pay to win.... Gross.
If you have fun instagib servers that might detract from how many lootcrates people buy since they might just get curb stomped in it + it's just harder to track and measure the impact of changes when you are minmaxxing for monetary extraction when you have high variety of mods/servers. If you want to track and evaluate player behavior to manipulate it you need to control for as many variables as possible. These game companies are straight up evil.
I lived both eras.
Independent servers and self-modding were hands-down superior in terms of creativity and fun.
The current locked-box 'as the developers intended' version sucks in comparison.
And as referenced, its primary purpose is absolutely to enforce scarcity so that can be monetized.
Goatse in exchange for true ownership? Any day of the fucking week. My eyelids work, and I can close them myself.
For a few years Sauerbraten scratched that itch.
(Never played Assault Cube, always meant to but Sauerbraten was just so good)
So many sounds that will forever live in my head.
I think I actually beat UT99 on a laptop trackpad a couple years later. (School device)
No wonder the mutator scene in UT was crazy. My favorite mod for the original UT99 was Dr Strangelove, which modded the Redeemer gun (the one that shoots huge nuclear missiles) to allow you to ride them.
It's dead because if you can play on a server that lets you equip a skin you didn't pay for, that's bad for Epic's quarterly statements.
Your fun is not profitable enough. Sorry.
You can write "experiences" in TypeScript then host your own server that people can join without having to download/install a mod themselves.
I've been missing a lot the frenetic gameplay of those, used to play a lot of UT at a decent level but nowadays I only see tactical FPSs or the likes of Counter-Strike/Battlefield with a high player count.
This one is the last one I heard of but I also haven't followed the scene much lately: https://store.steampowered.com/app/324810/TOXIKK/
I think the closest I got was The Finals but still class-based, so reminds me more of Team Fortress.
I loved playing 1v1 on Quake 2/3 and UT, also team deathmatch, from the list you commented it feels like each game got one of those aspects but none that makes the genre of UT what it is: knowing where weapons/ammo/armor spawn, map knowledge to navigate around, emergent movement mechanics (rocket jumps, strafe-jumping, etc.).
Interesting to see this genre mostly died out, and remnants of it have been scattered across other genres.
Separately it's a shame most modern games have removed LAN gaming.
It was allowed to wither and then murdered in 2022. You can't even buy it now, not even on GOG (you could buy it on GOG previously, but it was removed).
They started working on a new title, but it was meandering for a long time; it seemed that they would do some of the ground work but relied on the community a lot to design and build maps and weapons. Then the Fortnite team released a Battle Royale mode and made it free to play and it completely dominated the market. The UT team was transitioned to Fortnite in 2017, and Fortnite became their money printer earning them hundreds of millions per month.
While I love Unreal Tournament and would love for them or some other party to fill the gap of a no-nonsense arena shooter, the reality is that it wouldn't be as popular or lucrative as Fortnite. It'd be competing with FPS games like CoD and Battlefield, which have more going for them - including an uneven playing field, depending on players' progression and paid-for unlocks.
In the mystique female voice!
I bought it in steam before they removed it. So I can still install and play this game from time to time. Capture the flag is something else in this game!
In retrospect, I have a much greater appreciation for Windows 2000. User experience was really front and center in a way that we seem to have gotten away from since Web 2.0. It basically never blue screened. Games ran well. Personal computing seems to have taken some steps backwards since then.
IIRC, I bought the metal case for UT3, but the linux binaries never appeared ...
UT4 would have been pretty nice. I remember building the alpha from source when they put it GitHub.... .... Which is now closer to the release of UT 2004 than today. sigh
The topic of "middleware" often comes up, as an excuse for them not being able to open the source. Well, just remove any third-party libraries and middleware, even EA did it with their C&C open-source releases. The C&C release did not even compile, but that did not stop the community from porting to Linux and other platforms, as well as modernizing the source and creating replacement libraries.
Still sounds like something someone would change their mind about if enough money was involved, if only Epic had enough profits.
... except fun.
But guess what metric matters most?
There was no wasting time figuring out what style of play you wanted to go for. You just picked a game mode and went for it.
And as you said, maps were changing very quickly depending on how the game mode was set up.
Plus, so many exploding bodies
Enjoy the memories.
Fuck, CTF-Face was a vibe.
People all over the house shouting and laughing.
I have a distinct memory of someone attempting what you just described, but my friend just happened to be ready and he sniped the redeemer right as it was shot. Big explosion and nothing left of the player but a scorch mark on the building. I laughed myself to tears. Good times.
I only really played ut2k4 not 99, but in the 2k4 Face map there was a "ledge" (I don't know the term, like a stray polygon edge or something) out of sight on one side where you could fake like you had fallen off, land on the ledge, wait a couple seconds and then crouch or do whatever it was that made you drop the flag.
The game would show the message "so and so dropped the flag" which IIRC was the same message it shows when you die while holding the flag, and to most people it seems like you fell into the void and died, but you're actually just hanging out on the ledge.
There wasn't a way back up from the ledge, so you can't do this to shake people chasing you and then go score, but if you do this while you're ahead, the other team can't score until they get their flag back...
okay that's not really "strategy", it's super cheap.
I remember modding the homing missile gun (forgot its name) to be more agile around corners and building obstacles courses in Unreal Editor for DM-Morpheus to shoot the missiles through. Modding Unreal games was always a great time considering the technology back then.
This part is one of the features that doesn't seem to get mentioned enough. Unreal Tournament was one of the first franchises to have bot behavior that was well thought out, relatively realistic and challenging, and most importantly worked for every single one of the game types included (including multi-player team objectives).
In addition to just being able to play single player in what would have normally required a functioning online environment and WWW connection for other franchises, you could also fill out large teams with bot players if you could not find enough actual humans to log in and join your game.
Gametypes like Team Deathmatch and Assault were then viable for single or small groups even when you didn't have a great (or completed lacked) WWW connection.
And wine made it playable on FreeBSD which was quite something to behold.
Especially when my friend launched it on the 256 color, literal X term I had at home. Solid 0.2 FPS over the network.
A random post on Reddit "with epics blessing" looked pretty much throw away to me. But hey, I'm wrong :)
It's basically a modernized anthology of the three Timesplitters games that were quite popular on consoles of the PS2 era.
Many moons ago I worked with an individual whose wife was employed in marketing by a large well known video game company involved around UT. One day he came into the office and brought a load of leftover UT swag and it was a feeding frenzy. I still have and wear my long sleeve black UT embroidered tee and as a point of fact I just wore it again last week. Looking forward to the progress on this effort as an old head UT fan still.
https://www.radgametools.com/pixo/PixoWithUnreal2004.txt
Further discussion about it here:
https://forums.beyondunreal.com/threads/software-rendering-i...
For those looking for silliness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVO2VDPnI0Y
… oh wait I have a 60 hour a week job
… oh wait I have a wife with PPD and 2 young kids and I have to hire a babysitter just to put up Christmas lights
… oh wait I have RSIs in my dominant hand
I think I’ll just make do with my memories of this game. I imagine much of my opinion was colored by being a teenager when it was released.
It's focused on movement-based challenges and is extremely fun and unique.
I host a few BT servers myself. Please feel free to join and check it out. See: https://www.bunnytrack.net/about
I'm not sure if this release is a good thing or bad thing for me haha
I had a heavily modded version of the game that I ran with bunch of other most, including ChaosUT (Loved the explosive cross bow), some Infiltration weapons and other random bits. Genuinely some of the funnest gaming I remember having as a kid.
The one glaring problem the game has is double-tapping movement keys to dodge. Kills your fingers and you can’t ignore it because dodging seems to be the primary mode of skill expression beside weapon choice and aim.
ghaering•2mo ago