# unreal tournament n a strictly static fps playground once again by only treating player space as a mere static backdrop to fill with needless detail - instead of anything dynamic which emerges directly from play - classic franchise iteration procedure unreal tournamentn feels positively necro-threaded with ideas from previous generations long since obsolete // video here let's take a look at the picture i think we have it queued up (..) right off the bat there's a misunderstanding / disagreement over whether whatever's on screen is 'active' or 'static' playable or not. says something interesting about the lack of interest the whole product holds if the people working on it don't even recognize it's automatic greatness right now i'm in unreal edit (n.0..) how's it possible to tell them apart when your garme's so generic in its very base ideas? (some typical sci fi tosh no doubt) (..) a working concept art a working art of conception sounds great - if only player-developers could do it themselves i took some theories of visual clarity (..) what might those be? perhaps what's needed are clear theories of emergent / procedural garme design rather than simply clear visuals - theories about how to best challenge standard deathly boring pre-existing industry wide design methodologies i started to mesh this out with some of the things we had laying around (..) the things you have laying around only seem to be informing you that your next garme has to look like exactly like the old garme - 'only better'. hence awful dev talk such as 'returning to the roots of the franchise' 'raising the bar' and 'taking it to the next level'. the next level is only ever one about the last old equally boring one! the overall look is clean (..) the overall look has a steep interest ÷ time falloff curve (..) where the lighting places nice with the material what if teh garme played nicely / intelligently with the players? this in my mind represents the sci fi industrial look? 'sci fi industrial?' heavens to murgatroyd we've never seen that before? tell us more! we could grimier with this (..) go grimier. make your grime grimy! go so grimy you go all the way and come out the other side back into.. 'clean overall' this kind of defines a certain look (..) this kind of look definitely defines your garme as 'more of the same old same old' alien one / outland kind of mining base type of look instead of trying to emulate other tried and tested / done and dusted / flogged to death ip's once could instead ask how garmeplay might directly affect *all* the visuals dirty (..) chalky and white (..) metallic and reflective how obvious it all is. adjective heavy unreal engine and the garmes produced with it could instead be alien other-worldly hyperreal pulsing shimmering - and impossible medium frequency details (..) medium indeed. what about some ultra-high frequency garming? anything other than 'press left mouse key to pretend your somehow remotely interacting with something remotely intelligent in a remotely interesting manner' the overall impression is pretty cool (..) the overall impression of what modern garme devs laughably consider 'cool' is distinctly lukewarm to me unreal and the entire franchise(tm) has always been - and i used to use this term a lot - a tim burton "batman" type of caricature (caption id="attachment_30867" align="aligncenter" width="400") the future of garming? metallic - always chalky: batman (hopefully not) forever(/caption) what an unfortunate comparison. so it's a meta-caricature? but then since batman is a fascistic caricature without an original that simply makes unreal tournament n a metan caricature of itself where i want to go is more of a chis nolan batman begins (..) (caption id="attachment_30868" align="aligncenter" width="656") more of the same - only polished: the dark knight rinses(/caption) something a little more polished a little more realism(tm) - but without going over the top (..) how utterly vacuous and bland it all seems. as for over the top? hardly. it feels as hollow and conceptually inert as a seemingly abandoned space station in space have your cake and eat it too basically the cake is a lie / tastes chalky "viz-dev" those art guys certainly feel the need to justify whatever it is they think they're doing by naming it something important sounding / specific. visual prototyping is what player-developers ("#fakedevs"?) could be doing themselves keita takahasi director of katamari damacy said i've never played saints row but it seems that the type of humour is very different than that in katamari. i want to make people laugh through the garmeplay itself similarly it would be nice to make people think through interactivity for a change rather than simply lol @ cheap nutshotz // republic of bob