{"id":6888,"date":"2022-05-20T13:33:51","date_gmt":"2022-05-20T20:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=6888"},"modified":"2022-05-21T15:49:13","modified_gmt":"2022-05-21T22:49:13","slug":"unreal-ii-influences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/6888","title":{"rendered":"Unreal II: Influences"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes Unreal II: The Awakening<\/em> feels like Quake<\/em> and sometimes it feels more like Half-Life<\/em>, but it never really feels like Unreal<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Admittedly, that’s a pretty mild criticism. Also, to be fair, it does have some things tying it to Unreal<\/em>. It’s still got Skaarj. It still has a weapon that ricochets chaotically, even if it fires energy blasts rather than discs. And, after a fairly mundane beginning setting a bad first impression, the environments may be getting weirder and more alien as it goes — the third mission takes place on a planet covered with a single organism that gives it the appearance of magnified skin, complete with hairs. We’ll see how it goes from there. There’s probably more Unrealisms to come.<\/p>\n

But at this point, I’m thinking that I’m enjoying it the most when it’s more Half-Life<\/em>-y. When there’s an emphasis on set-pieces, environmental obstacles, huge machinery, and sub-goals with more variety than just getting from point A to point B. There’s one set-piece that I thought was particularly effective, and it plays a lot like those defense sequences from Half-Life 2<\/em> (which was still in development when this was released, so maybe the influence goes the other way?): waiting for extraction for five minutes straight in the dark of night while fending off waves of baddies, with the help of three ultra-macho space marine NPCs. I’ve seen space marines in games criticized as cribbing their design heavily from the movie Aliens<\/em> while entirely missing the point of them there: that all their tough-guy swagger was useless when the xenomorphs came. Nonetheless, this scene, with its sense of tension enhanced by poor visibility, was an excellent portrayal of “Aliens<\/em> but the space marines win”.<\/p>\n

The more I think about this, the more I start to wonder if Half-Life<\/em> was the main design paradigm for the whole game, like if the project lead was a big Half-Life<\/em> fan and thought that obviously the best way to improve on Unreal<\/em> was not to build on its own strengths but to make it more like Half-Life<\/em>. Such things happen in the games industry. Or, if not the whole game, then at least the second mission is really extremely Half-Life<\/em>-inspired: it takes place in a weapons research facility where an experiment went wrong, you spend a certain amount of time crawling through air ducts, and the main enemies are small leaping arthropods. That’s enough similarity to elevate it from imitation to homage. If I try, I can convince myself that mission 1 is similarly based on Quake<\/em> or Doom<\/em>, in architectural style if nothing else. But how this pattern extends to the hair-covered hills of mission 3, I have no idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes Unreal II: The Awakening feels like Quake and sometimes it feels more like Half-Life, but it never really feels like Unreal. Admittedly, that’s a pretty mild criticism. Also, to be fair, it does have some things tying it to Unreal. It’s still got Skaarj. It still has a weapon that ricochets chaotically, even if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[204,714,715],"class_list":["post-6888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-half-life","tag-unreal","tag-unreal-ii-the-awakening"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6888"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6894,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6888\/revisions\/6894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}