Soldato
http://www.beyondunreal.com/daedalus/singlepost.php?id=10690
http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=176029
Interview (Good)
The newest issue of OXM has a short video documentary on it's demo disc. While it's only a few minutes in length I think it possibly the most detailed look at UT3 to date. Within the video there are many maps shown. As far as one can tell, it showed mostly all CTF and DM maps. Some maps are shown with vehicles, but I saw no nodes to distinguish them as Warfare maps. One particular interesting map shown looks like the new Deck DM map. While I can't confirm it as Deck, it had the signature pool of toxic sludge at the bottom of the map. The other maps shown had a wide variety of different themes and they all looked fantastic.
Aside from the gameplay shown in the video, it offered a few details about the game. It was said that the original idea was to make gigantic maps utilizing UE3's streaming technology for up to 64 players at once. They decided that it didn't feel like a UT game and went back to improving the original formula. Each map starts out as a basic BSP layout and is play tested until they think it is fun and then it is handed over to have static meshes and the rest of the artistic assets created. There will be 3 to 4 dozen multiplayer maps in the retail version of the game. The single player portion will have even more maps than multiplayer.
Personal observation showed that lighting shouldn't be an issue any longer in UT. Players do indeed have lights attached to them and are easily seen in shadows. There was a point in the video where I couldn't make out a close up character's face or much of anything because he was in a large object's shadow, but I could easily see that he was running in a certain direction and what weapon he had thanks to the lighting on his armor and his weapon. One thing to note, and this could possibly be a bug or something else happened out of view, but the player killed an enemy with a shock combo and something really noticeable happened. The combo exploded and killed the enemy and as the explosion shrank down to nothing it seemed to set off some sort of invisible shockwave that sent the enemy's corpse really flying. I can't really determine if that is an accurate depiction of what actually happened though. I also got to witness the first documented primary flak death. Lets just say it's a huge explosion of blood. The secondary fire for the stinger was also shown, it's rate of fire and projectile speed seems to be comparable to a rocket launcher.
So if you have a 360, go buy the August issue. Sadly the disc only plays on 360s so everyone else will have to wait and see what we get during E3 next week.
http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=176029
Interview (Good)
Disappointing
UT always gets me.