1up.com has a preview of Epic's next Unreal Tournament game on their site. The preview is nice, but the best thing about the article is the pictures. Here's some: Some more pics here: http://www.1up.com/do/media?cId=3140086 Here's the 4-page preview if you want to read more about it: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3140119
Jade empire has kinda sucked. I'm not that interested in finishing it. The chracters seem so stiff, and The battles seem like more the same thing over and over again. Morrowind Has got to better. If Morrowind has nice graphics that will go a long way since the game itself it so open ended and expansive.
Oh man, I think my graphics card just shivered after seeing this post. I'm with Rocket G, there is no way the in-game graphics look like that...no way.
According to the preview, they barely started this game, and I think it will take another year to complete IIRC. So, chances are that it will be for PC's for sure in 2006, and most likely the Xbox 360. I wouldn't be surprised to see a PS3 version as well. There is a game called Gears of War that uses this same engine that will either launch with the Xbox 360 or come out near launch. From the rumors I've heard, out of all the games being developed for the Xbox 360, Gears of War was the most impressive looking so far (that was about a month or 2 ago though, and probably doesn't include every game, but that's what was said). Unreal Engine 3.0 is probably one of the better, if not the, best engines out there right now, and it is pretty popular. It has powerful streaming technology (less load times, sort of like GTA:SA probably), and I believe it isn't as taxing on PC hardware as you may think. Of course, buying a top-of-the-line video card for these games will get you the best results, but I believe the developers said they were getting decent framerates on current video cards (can't remember if they mentioned 6600's or 6800's). The only thing that it does demand is RAM, which may mean the console versions of games using the engine may lack some of the quality of the PC versions, although I'm guessing developers could use the bandwidth of the consoles to their advantages in a case like that. IMO, not true. Here's some pics from that game (TES IV: Oblivion): More here: http://www.elderscrolls.com/art/obliv_screenshots_01.htm Unlike most games making use the UE 3.0, Oblivion will be like Morrowind, which if you think about it, really makes these graphics even more impressive than Unreal Tournament. Bethesda is doing a pretty good job IMO of making their game look gorgeous while keep that Morrowind-style gameplay. Their environments are great (close to UE 3.0 IMO), but they are not quite as good when it comes to humans or other creature designs. They're good enough for me, but the characters from the Unreal Engine make me drool. Unlike the whole Madden thing, Epic has actually shown demos of their engine that show "gameplay," and it looks pretty good. IIRC, the demos shown may have been slightly less impressive than these pics, but the demos were shown at 2004's GDC IIRC, and they used current gen hardware (a 6800 IIRC). Movies from other engines, such as the Reality Engine, also seem to show that gameplay could look like this. I tend to trust Epic since the screens of some of the characters looks exactly the same in the demos. Here's some clips from UE 3.0 and the Reality Engine for reference: http://www.1up.com/do/download?cId=3138759 http://www.artificialstudios.com/videos.php
On a semi-related note... Unreal Engine 3.0 uses this Middleware called SpeedTreeRT, which helps make realistic (and unique) trees. Besides being a good option in any game used by UE 3.0 (which, IIRC, is being used by several 1st party developers at Microsoft), it is also being used by Bethesda for Oblivion, IIRC. Here's a clip that came out recently that reminded me of SpeedTreeRT: http://movies.teamxbox.com/speedtree_pangaea.wmv That was just a demo from SpeedTree themselves and not a developer like Epic though. IIRC, Epic has shown their trees in some pics, but no video clips yet. I just know it will be great to have the amount of detail in models such as those from the new Unreal Tournament PLUS nicely detailed trees that have realistic physics.
They're not cutscenes. Those are actual gameplay graphics on the new engine. I downloaded some videos from the Unreal 3.0 Gameplay videos and they were insane. Wish I still had them or else I'd upload them to you.
