Unreal Championship Preview

When several successful phenomena unite in a single project, that project simply cannot fail. And even though we still have almost a year to go before we will be able to witness the full glory of success of Unreal Championship (UC), we can still follow the progress of its development and thus temporarily settle our aggressive instincts.

It's safer to shoot in the head...

Don't look at the lovely trees!

You could have read a lot about the Unreal serial in the last couple of months. And even though Unreal Tournament still fills LAN shops all over the planet, the players started following the progress of a new game being developed for a new platform - the notorious Microsoft Xbox. It has finally been confirmed: Unreal Championship will exclusively be produced for this hi-tech console both for single-player, and on-line gaming.

One of the first intriguing announcements was that Unreal Championship wouldn't use the Epic's engine used in UT, and that it would rather use the new Unreal Warfare engine, with special modifications for the Xbox architecture, which should provide smooth action with some 60 fps. The new technology really seems impressive - it can render scenes with 150 to 200 times more polygons than the scenes in UT! The list of new features is endless, and I will only mention the ones that will probably be most used in the Championship: better management of large, especially indoor spaces, enhanced weapons and player models, supported texture size up to 2048*2048, more detailed graphics, better AI (ladder support, true crouching, improved AI sight and hearing, increased AI performance, improved navigation).

One of the greatest upsides of the engine is the way it will be able to use the terrains. The developers are keeping the details about this for themselves, but there is a lot of talk about what they are doing. All levels are huge and spacious, and grouped into several "worlds" in which the action takes place. The Jungle levels will give you a lot of places to hide and lurk and tactically advantageous hills to climb. The Temple levels are characteristic for their Indiana Jones-style traps, statues of Pharos and pools of water. The Arctic terrains are full of ice and snow and the Volcano world will give you a warm welcome with its pools of lava, erupting volcanoes and dangerous rocks falling all around. When the game development reaches its final stages sometimes in 2002, the atmosphere will further be improved with richly textured clouds, different weather effects, blizzards, rivers, etc... The hardware in Xbox will have a lot to do as the developers intend to make all scenery elements active and useful gameplay objects!

One of the main trumps of the first part was its weapons assortment. This is where UC takes a giant leap forward... All of you who get kicks out of using the Flak Cannon (now drastically improved), SMD Shock Rifle, Rocket Launcher or Biorifle, will still be able to fire your favorite weapons to your heart's desire, only now, you get more weapons to choose from. Some weapons have been discarded (Enforcer, Redeemer), but I have no doubt that the developers will compensate this more than enough. They already announced treats like FA-MAS machine gun and the updated, tri-barreled rocket launcher. Each of altogether eleven weapons in game has an alternate firing mode. Another novelty in console gaming is the vehicular combat feature. UC players will have ten vehicles at disposal from the manic scooter and different crafts to jeeps and vehicles that can carry more than one person (armored transporters, tanks?).

Characters? Well, some characters we had a chance to meet in UT will find their place in UC as well, but there will also be a bunch of new characters we will surely make... friends with... soon. In UC, each character will have unique capabilities further modified by the armor and outfitting they wear, which is a substantial improvement in comparison to UT. Logically, heavily armored characters will have no trouble in coping with light attackers, but they will compensate this by decreased mobility. Players will also be able to duck down and block attacks if they think that they can efficiently avoid damage that way.

Multiplayer support is an essential element of UC, and the developers intend to fully exploit one of the most important Xbox features - the broadband Internet gaming system. The 16 (or even 32) players per game, the developers announced is sufficiently impressive to stimulate new waves of multiplayer mass murders (bots are still only bots).

Now we can only wait till next spring...