Details On Unreal II Emerge

The Web was abuzz today over the latest edition of PC Gamer, which features the forthcoming Unreal II by Legend Entertainment. This first person shooter (FPS) title is the successor to the wildly popular Unreal and Unreal Tournament. Currently there have been no official announcements, but The Mac Observer is in contact with Macsoft, the company that produced the earlier Unreal titles for the Mac. We will report on the status of a Mac port as soon as we get word.

Meanwhile, Voodoo Extreme managed to extract some interesting details from the PC Gamer feature. Several details caught our eye, namely the news that the game will be optimized for the soon-to-come-to market GeForce3 graphics card, that it has 12 months left of development, and that it will feature "a rich story line." Specifics from Voodoo Extremeis article follow:

  • Unreal II will take the best parts of Unreal and Unreal Tournament," says Legendis studio head Mike Verdu. "Weire creating a single-player game with a rich story that surrounds 13 combat missions [25 levels]."
  • Itis an all-new world, and all-new character to play, and an all-new style. While set in the same universe as the first game, Unreal II will introduce five alien races in a story thatis designed to be tight-knit.
  • In a nutshell youire a "Terran Colonial Authority Frontier Marshall" who patrols the ass-end of space in an old scout ship named the Atlantis.
  • Within the 25 levels youill be conducting infiltration, search-and-rescue and other missions. "We want to capture the magic of Assault in UT," says Verdu.
  • AI bots/marines will be used in tactical situations to help out.
  • 12 months left in its development.
  • Multi-player -- Deathmatch, team DM, Last man standing and CTF, plus a character driven (ala Team Fortress) new mode of play.
  • New weapons - Grenade launcher, flamethrower, leech gun (fires leeches that attach to enemies and drain their lifeforce/energy) and Takkra (think hive gun from Half-Life).
  • GeForce III optimized with 10 times the number of polygons for particles and characters compared to UT, with typical enemies sporting 3,000-5,000 polys and your crew having 7,000-10,000 polys. The improved terrain and level geometry will push 100 times the polycount of UT. Thereis also an improved meshing system that combined with the new skeletal animation allows for awesome character movement.
  • From Tim Sweeney - "Up to now all 3D games have looked similar because of the hardware. Now theyill start to look more unique - though you can give only 12 instructions to the pixel shaders, so itis still a bit limited," explains Sweeney
Voodoo Extremeis article also recommends buying the April edition of PC Gamer just to read their "massive article" on Unreal II.