RE competition, Facing Worlds always was and still is the tournament and league final map in pro UT. I used to compete (mostly national, very rarely international, and I'll grant you that back then it was completely different to esports now) and _every_ set at _every_ event ended on Facing Worlds. A UT weekender where the last match wasn't decided on Facing Worlds was unheard of. To this day, I still haven't seen more than a handful of maps in any shooter that are more competitive. It's perfectly symmetrical, and as you said early in the video, when you're playing on LAN with classic 5v5 or modern 6v6 teams, it works perfectly. It was always standard practice to have two people on the team assigned to sniper & spotter/counter-sniper duty, in any map, and Facing Worlds is ideally designed for a spotter up top, sniper halfway down, and three (or four) people legging it across no man's land. In those smaller LAN games the ground team could actually get things done, while your guys in the towers took each other out. Is it less 'usual' than a flat arena deathmatch? Yes. But is it balanced? Yes, absolutely perfectly evenly, both horizontally and vertically. And that made it the most competitive map. CTF-Face and de_dust2 should be the standard by which all other competitive maps are judged. I don't think it's any surprise that the Overwatch team said on their forums some years back that they were inspired by Facing Worlds and Lava Giant for some of their CTF maps. (Though that could also just be because they love UT regardless of quality; just look at Sombra's translocator.) ... But yeah, it's a total garbage map for online and blowing away bots as they spawn in absolutely was the most fun thing to do with UT. EDIT: Oh yeah, and as far as the '99 Tournament-specific lore goes-this is not true for general Unreal lore or later Tournaments-the players can run around and breathe on the map because they're synthetic, and not actually breathing or affected by gravity (or the lack of). After a combatant dies or teleports for the first time, the respawner/teleporter replicates them as a cyborg in their last fully healthy state. (So, yes, you're not actually teleporting when you use the translocator; you're dying and being replicated.) The replicated person can only exist within the boundaries of the playing field (i.e. why they gib if they go past the map edges) but can live there indefinitely, with no need for water, food, sleep, or air, to fight as long as the Tournament needs them to. This is also why they don't float off into space, they can take a saw blade to the chest and not have their aim affected, etc. But like I said, that's just Unreal Tournament 99 specifically. How it also keeps happening in Unreal, who knows, and later UTs shifted the lore around a bit.
where is the synthetic lore thing from? ive played all the unreal games and dug through manuals and level descriptions for years, and ive never heard this.
Xanious IIRC-bear in mind we're talking about a 22-year-old memory-it was in an interview in issue of Power, a UK PlayStation magazine, when the game was ported to PS2. The whole article was them asking about the most irrelevant and silly things, which was their style. (Though given it was UT on PS2... maybe nobody wanted to dwell on the gameplay anyway.) If it wasn't Power then it would have been Max. Both magazines were a bit 'alternative' and frequently ran weird coverage. As I recall they also got into who the announcer is and what exactly the green goo in the bio rifle was made of, but the details of that escape me now. Edit: for some reason I'm also remembering a manual saying holograms rather than cyborg clones, but that might just be my brain getting mixed up in the nostalgia-frenzy at 1am.
The more specific lore itself (in a TLDR format) is that you're a fighter being placed into the Liandri Tournament. You're being cloned/stored per death and your goal is to make it to the finals and beat the final opponent (Sometimes Xan, Sometimes Malcom) - A side note being that there was a miner's strike before and that for some reason there was a demand for a sport of bloodshed and violence, which isn't really explained. The story's just there to get you into the arena like a guinea pig and blast some heads off. Other than that I'm not 100% sure, I'm also younger than UT1999 by 3 years, having grown up with it when I was 5 onwards.
@@aceflibble im just genuinely curious, especially because the unreal community is kinda mildly prone to lore misinformation, like how one wiki just casually made up shit alongside actual lore, or wikis not citing properly. Take it from someone that dug through old unreal website articles to check if "planet gryphon" was made up fan crap or not (it isnt, but the A-4 designation or whatever is)
As great as the music is, consider: 2fort is the most popular map in every version of Team Fortress and it has no music in any of them, but as the name imples, it's essencially the same idea - ctf, 2 bases, one way to go between them (well two, but one is less than ideal), snipers' galore. hell one could argue that Halo's Blood Gulch and Valhalla are largely the same. And in each of these cases music isn't a factor, so I can't say, that was the thing that brought people in, though it certainly helped them stay.
I'm partial toward the more acidy tones of Organic, myself, but I'll certainly give Foregone Destruction its due respect. It seems, for some reason, if you gave a mod tracker to a gamer in the 90s, something magical just happened.
@@prodigy84bg that’s fine jungle/atmospheric/ intelligent dnb are a lot closer than what kids these days would call it… like breakcore, artcore or some other made up genre..
@@spoolyanddanalixdnb yup, they are certainly related. It's just that I believe jungle was more of an early 90s thing, whereas drum and bass was more of a late 90s thing, which is obviously the era of the game and its soundtrack.
Instagib, shock-rifle only, low-grav, custom large bedroom style maps (where the player is the size of a fly) are some of my fav childhood gaming memories!
I didn't know I was getting an unreal tournament episode when I started the show. I was literally jumping out of my seat by the time I noticed the flak cannon. I almost ran out of the room at the facing worlds reveal
I'm glad that the video mentioned the endearing anti-lore of the videogame, where the makers would build anything that seemed cool to them, with no need to laboriously connect every dot or make everything fit. "Yes, we're in space now. No, we're not going to think of an explanation why. Go have fun."
I assumed that the various maps were just different locations in the game's universe handpicked by the corporation to hold matches and that they were wildly different in order to test competitor's skills in different environments, etc. But yea, I don't think many of us played UT because of some intriguing well-written story. The real story was the ones we made while playing. The map makers experimented and gave us wildly different layouts and themes.
Not much explanation needed anyway. They put a gravity generator in the rocks of the structure and maybe an oxygen generator with a shield around it. Done. Or, if you want a more "Unreal" explanation, the towers are magical. Either lost and forgotten magic or otherwise.
@@AlphaCarinae lol your standards are shit if you enjoy the same game being remade with only new graphics Every year. wanna know why every sandbox/RPG aspect of AAA games feels the same? because the people behind it dont want to try.
"A bunch of aging gamers making hour-long impassioned video essays about old video game shit, so that other aging gamers can feel seen." Now THIS is a Big Mood.
It's not just that our lives were simpler back then, but yeah. I like that boomer shooters exist because they tap into some of the simplicity that was part of those 20-odd year old designs, but they give it a modern spin. TOXIKK was a good take on the UT-style arena shooter, though it's more reminiscent of UT2k4, which in turn is more like Halo. Maybe that's why it failed to grab people's attention for long, as Halo still has new entries, whereas the UT'99 style has not?
bro ive been able to watch reviews about most ps1 games i missed bc i wasnt groomed to be a super GAMER, its nice to know i really didnt miss anything.
@@KristofDE Its all fails these days because of nerf culture driven by bad sportmanship which is of course driven by the monetary system itself. Whenever you hear the words op, broke etc you know you are dealing with someone clueless who is cashing in on the nerf culture bandwagon.
You nailed one point: UT 99 was an amazing grab bag of brilliant and garbage ideas. The fact that you could download the official editor and create your own content for it was the cherry on top. I was just a year into my career in software development at the time and I spent about 6 weeks developing my own game mode mod. It was a blast, and so easy. So much content was produced over the next couple years for that game, it was mind-boggling.
@@iClamperson Slightly edited though. The one in the episode they had bridges connecting the towers. Facing worlds had elevators instead of teleporters. Guess its because all the maps are inside a stadium. Also because the episode takes place before UT99, so it could be that they didn't have the tech to simulate the worlds proper.
The music, the simplicity of the map, the exposure...running back with the flag, the vantage snipe points, the nuke, the space atmosphere. Facing Worlds is one of my most favourite maps ever.
14:10 "And players want that: Levels have to be detailed, beautiful, dense." Actually I never asked for that. For many years around then there was this unspoken rule that shooters would ship with a MINIMUM of 16 multiplayer arenas on board. I don't recall any of us being asked if we were OK with developers trading the variety of levels, weapons, replayability, player choice and freedom all for graphics and graphics alone. Facing Worlds may indeed be dumb fun- but it's held a following for over 20 years now. So has Facility, Wake Island, Dust2, Blood Gulch etc. If developers continue to sacrifice everything for the shiny trailer visuals, I don't see us getting multiplayer maps that stand that test of time ever again.
I call this "technical debt". As games get more detailed, content becomes more expensive... but we don't need all that detail. Look at Team Fortress 2. It's style is simple enough that the basic level geometry does most of the visual work. Detailing isn't hard. Hell even CS:GO has easy map work. The epitome of this is the "orange" maps: Maps made with developer textures. Pure gameplay. Maybe some level geometry to give areas some flair and identity. It could be textured and finally detailed, but frankly, who cares? Team Fortress 2's style is so minimalistic that it even fits!
Yea, the main reason everything went to shit in gaming is exactly that, graphics. People say they want graphics. Hell, they think it too sometimes. But no one really does, once they play something good, captivating, etc. they don't need the graphics at all. Here's a great example, mortal kombat alliance for the game boy advanced. I played that in 2022 with an emulator just because I like it so much.
I mean, there are a couple maps from more modern games that are pretty memorable. A standout for me is Eichenwalde from Overwatch. Everyone loves a good castle, and that choke point at the bridge and gate makes for some great chaos. Maybe a little less recent is that Halo Reach map set on an orbital station, with a low gravity environment in it, always remember that one as a fun time, but to be fair that game is like a decade old by now
@@BusinessWolf1 I'd go as far as noting that the death of demo's and the increased normalization of videogames in the modern age killed it. It's the main reason why most devs these days focus on visual, as visuals sell. Back in the day you'd buy a lot of games either because A. you thought the box was cool, which often wasn't representative of ingame visuals, B. played a demo or played it at a friends place or C. saw it in some monthly magazine where someone else which was also a gamer played it (and the monthly and gamer being important). All of which on some level related to gameplay or with an idea of gameplay. These days it's screenshots, trailers or seen some influencer playing it. All of which are visual and social to quite an extend and not so much gameplay based (with the obvious exception to an extend).
All those years later Unreal Tournament is still the most fun game I've ever played. It was a weird, nerdy guy to Quake's frat dude bro. The most satisfying rocket launcher ever.
The user-made maps were really what made this game great, especially UT2004. CTF-Bedrooms, a CTF map with Burger King and McDonald's stores, UT99 even had CTF-StormchaserV-3 with a tornado that would randomly drop and move across the map. Low gravity mod, double jump, wall dodging....God, those were the days.
I think a genius part of FW is the slope in the middle. It causes the ground to be split in two at the middle point, which causes ground troops to dance as they reach its peak: Do you push forward and meet the enemy team? Do you wait for them to come? I think one of the biggest parts is that if you try to play defensively, the enemy will already be halfway to your flag. And when they take it and run away, past that crest there's little you can do. It creates an element of surprise and tension, and what I like the most about it is how natural it is. It doesn't require any planning or tactics, just run forward and you'll be creating a situation for the enemy
"The reality here is that in the past twenty years, level designers have come to understand what makes a good multiplayer level." I guess generic, symmetrical three-lane maps are just the pinnacle of level design. /s
Although Facing Worlds is DAMN good, I actually consider Deck 16 to be the absolute best map of them all, hands down. The layout is fucking PERFECT. Well, maybe a little less than perfect, but only because Deck 17 in UT2004 made a nice little corridor linking the flak room with the shock alcove which actually works very nicely. Back when El Dewrito (Halo Online) was a thing, I made a full precision Deck 17 replica in Forge, and after a fair few games, I found it played perfectly, even in Halo, where the core gameplay is pretty different. I just had to reshuffle the weapon placements somewhat.
I used to play on a server that had friendly fire on but it did no damage so one of the strats was to grab the flag, take the teleporter to the top of the tower, and have one of your teammates load up three rockets and just blast you across the map back to your tower. 😆
This rules! Wish i'd tried that back in the day. Low gravity on this map was pretty common too, which made it easier to get across the map, and lsihgtly harder for snipers. That's how I remember playing it most often. So much fun.
On the design front, I have to agree that simply regurgitating this era of map and game design isn't going to stick. But you bring up a great point that I think has been a major loss in the time since: player created spaces in game. Joining a dedicated server with a recreation of Homers house that plays Mario sounds when you shoot a guy is all but impossible in the way many competitive games are built and operated. It helps explain why the modern equivalents do feel more staid and sterile despite the growth in design wisdom since.
you can see this in metaverse maps today with their built in soundtracks and surreal concepts. arena shooters really paved the way for multi user 3d environments and some things really havent changed that much
Agreed. Tip of the Spear: Task Force Elite is one of the only recent FPS games with a map editor reminiscent of those good old days. Small community, but they’re getting new funding and should become really incredible in the coming months/years
Basically the only games that really carried on that mindset is ironically Source titles like TF2. And even then, there hasn't really been something like that since, well, TF2.
@@gratuitouslurking8610 TF2 is an interesting one because it played a huge part in the shift. It was the laboratory where Valve began to tinker with character cosmetics, free to play, item crafting and trading, loot boxes and keys, etc. Call of Duty was locking up multiplayer on console and Valve was laying the groundwork on PC.
I think the big thing you listed is the loss of player servers which can act as digital communities. Ping forced people to play on servers near them so there were regular faces on each server you came to know. I know that in UT99 I had 1 real port of call, a server with slightly faster than normal movement speed, all snipers, and custom maps. Great time.
I had so much fun watching this. Probably mostly because of the same nostalgia. I'm the same age as you and to this day I remember when UT came out. Even with bots this game was so much fun.
I remember someone on my floor in college handed out the game to all of us. We were all on the building network playing nonstop. We eventually found other floors and the whole building got into a giant challenge for like 3 months were we just talked trash to each other and came up with elaborate tournaments. Great times.
I feel like a lot of these shooters have "that one" classic map, its big, symmetrical, but usually plays like a stalemate. Face, 2fort, Blood Gulch, they all are very similar in how they play.
Classic tournament maps. It's the same with RTS, there is always at least one map that is completely symmetrical, offering the same starting situation for every player.
I was about to suggest that Unreal's weirdest map is actually Pyramid, but I think we're on similar wavelengths after roughly 4:52 in the vid. That said, you said it has no secrets, which is false: there's a modestly hidden damage amplifier in the upper supports of each fort's lobby entrance which must be translocated to.
I loved the pyramid with the last man standing mod. I remember training on this map for hours against increasingly harder bots and loved all the cool buffs located on under the pyramid in small gravity well.
UT was a huge part of my teenage years. I spent many hours making maps for the community and my clan - so much fun. Thanks for sharing this video; blast from the past!
I'm 17, I've never played Unreal Tournament (im a quake 3 girl myself) but the ending made me cry. The modern games industry has one big issue and its professionalism. Games had personality, it was a craftsman's industry, people had to get creative. This was when any amount of guys could get together and make a game. And as someone that one day hopes to make games, that hits me emotionally to my core. I want fun again. I want stuff that isn't the best designed but has heart. I fucking hate modern games, I'd only read modern Halo and Overwatch lore if I reach a DEADLY level of boredom. Charm over polish. Fuck game critics. This made me want to pick up and play Unreal Tournament for myself, so, thank you. I think I'm gonna like it.
A young gamer girl who cares about quality and lore and appreciates old quality games like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament?! 😶 _HOPE... IS REKINDLED._ 😢 *_THERE IS STILL HOPE FOR THIS WORLD!!!_* ✊ PRAISE THE SUN, YOUNG SISTER! FOR THE EMPEROR!!!
It's truly a soul-crushing industry. I am a pragmatist so maybe don't take my word for it, but I too wanted to be a game designer when I was in college, and quickly pivoted to commercial software when I realized what working on games was like. Maybe if I could have actually found a group of people I liked to start our own studio together, things would be different. But applying to studios was not a great experience at all. They demand a lot out of you and wring you for all you're worth.
@@CrizzyEyes Yep, to be honest, the only way to enjoy game-creation now is to approach it as a form of "pet project", which is not bound to deadlines, metrics, inversors, company guidelines, and things like that (it also means one shouldn't expect to bank on it tho). Just you (and your friends) coding and making things looking for what thing is the most fun to add.
At least we still have indies, don't get me wrong some indies games have also take some of the bad habits of the AAA industry but you still can find passion projects among them.
@@DeathMessenger1988 Yes there is still hope in the new generations, even my 13 year old cousin fucking loves late 90s to late 2000s RTS and FPS games, even he has realized how fun old/the original games can be compared to the current ones. There's definitely a demand for fast paced shooter games most people just don't know they exist, the recent resurgence of singleplayer fast paced indie shooters have proven it, now we need to make Arena shooters popular again.
This game got me into gaming as a whole. Staying up late, watching over my dad's shoulder as he and his friends chatted on Roger Wilco, shredding people with sneaky translocator spots. Every so often when I still lived at home I'd boot it up, my dad would hear the iconic sounds of Foregone Destruction and ask if he could play. Thanks for the video Danny!
Let me give you something to look forward to. If you make it to the end of the world, you win! No matter what choices you make in your life, you couldn't possibly get farther than that point, so you did it! Yay, right...?
This was easily one of my favorite levels. 1. Cause I love capture the flag. 2. I love spacey Sci-Fi stuff. 3. THE REDEEMER. 4. The simplicity of its design. And last but not least that beautifully tranquil soundtrack. Foregone Destruction seriously had no reason to be that good and I STILL listen to it today. UT literally helped me have better teenage years than I might have otherwise.
I was the weirdo that used the camera mode and explored every facet of this map while vibing with the song in the background. I would spend literally HOURS doing this when I was bored with enough time on my hands. 😂 The fact that it was a floating rock rotating in space with an earthlike planet in the background was INSANE to me, and so peaceful. It’s my favorite map and very special to me, but I never knew or realized just how popular it was.
I remember I was in high school and was showing UT '99 to one of my friends on my G4 Mac. I played half a match, let him play the other half, and we immediately figured out when CompUSA closed. After 10 minutes of him demonstrating flagrant disregard for the speed limit we had a PC copy as well for his computer. Once we turned off AppleTalk, the game ran cross-platform on LAN flawlessly, and we did not sleep that night. Infinite nostalgia.
Love reading stories such as these for these vintage games of the 90's. Kids these days will never understand the privilege we had back in the 90's to experience games such as Unreal Tournament when it first was released. I remember that I bought a local games magazine which had the UT99 demo. My friend and I were keen to check it out and after school we went to his house. His brother bought him a Riva TNT graphics card for his birthday and man, did the demo look amazing on that hardware coupled with a PII 350Mhz that he had at the time. Sadly for me, I had to play with software mode as I wasn't as fortunate to have a graphics card, but hey, I still had a blast even if it didn't look so good. What a time it was to be alive back then :)
I think you missed one important factor: the stalemate nature of the map meant that you could literally spend hours playing one game here. Those battles stick in your memory forever. Look at Halo: Combat Evolved. If you ask most casual players of that game what level they remember the most, you're gonna get "Blood Gulch" 9 times out of 10. The other 1 out of 10 might be "Hang Em High." Why? Because it was a huge, empty sniper fest that heavily favored defense, and led to hours-long matches. Chill Out is a way better level, but outside of the competitive community, most people completely forget it exists until you show it to them.
One TFC 2fort battle, they got the jump on us. Flood attacked. We spent the whole 20 mins fighting in our ramp room and outside of spawn. Utter fucking chaos, sound card locking up from explosions, they got our flag a few times, super intense battles on the long spiral ramp. Just madness. Ended in a zero to zero tie. Fantastic battle and I still remember it and it was 25 yrs ago.
I mean, the fact that Blood Gulch was one of only two maps to allow vehicles (and Sidewinder was both oversized and visually boring) might have something to do with it as well.
I sent my server up to play with sniper rifles only zark 2004 rifles I sent the flag capture limit like 900 or something. The game went on for a week the bots would play I would play friends and pop in and out. It was awesome
jesus christ that's sad. imagine having a life so empty that you'll willingly throw away hours of it staring at the same fucking map in a computer game
I strongly disagree with the idea that modern MP games have better level and map design, or even that modern games in general have better map and level design. Why do I say that? Because Doom Eternal and its DLCs and Elden Ring follow the OLD mapping formulas more than modern ones and are PRAISED for their level design in the modern day.
There's a balance to be had. I remember watching nostalgic people making videos on how the complex maps of Doom 2 were so good, with all the hidden nooks and crannies, how you needed to explore to progress, and so on. Sure, sounds great on paper. In practice, when I played them way back, I HATED them. Over and over I had to stop the action, and then look at the vector map to see if I miss something. And even if I saw, say, "oh, that fake wall can be opened up", there was no damn indication how. Sometimes pressing some random shit half a map away. I never actually finished the game, I was bored by these hung-ups, especially since dying meant I had to start the level over, and often I could not remember anymore what's where. Complexity is not necessary a good thing on its own. Half-Life was a hell of a lot more fun for me, and it had a level design that was much more like modern military shooters that people seem to dislike: completely railroaded maps where you could go pretty much in one direction only, with some hidden side corridors and rooms with loot here and there. It meant that I could focus on the action, instead of tearing my hair out looking at the cryptic map.
Even the thing about gamers wanting more detailed level design. The big reason (besides performance) to play on lowest settings is to have less clutter on screen. On that competitive level, less is more. There is a reason games like Overwatch, TF2 or Valorant go for simple graphics. Instead of throwing all the effects and hyper-detailed models at the player, they take it simpler and put the focus on gameplay on well build layouts.
All you need is two players - one sniping from somewhere low down, beside/behind your own tower to keep the enemy snipers away from the top and middle positions, meanwhile the other player is rushing over the bridge to grab the flag.
I refuse to accept that everyone has moved on. In part because I'm a stubborn git and love the adrenaline rush of playing these games, the speed and accuracy needed, the high skill ceilings... But also because it's always felt like sometime around ~2008 or so, we lost a lot of what made Multiplayer PC Games great, no longer did we HAVE those mod tools, with sandboxes to play around with, along side the community hosted servers that made the custom content accessible. While the industry has undoubtedly moved on, I'm unsure if it's truly for the better. Games have a set lifespan now, maps are, while generally technically impressive, lack creativity, and there just AREN'T communities to be built around the games. It used to be that you could create custom content, host it on your own server, and build a community around it, and every night, you could essentially have a party in a game full up with friends shooting the shit, having fun, and killing each other mercilessly. Now we're locked into games where you can generally have no more than 4 friends, custom content is essentially non-existent, and the games themselves wear out their welcome far faster because everything ties into either monetization or customization that we used to take for granted when it was free. I think we lost a lot in that transition, and it saddens me to this day. The amount of time I was able to spend in UT99, UT2004, Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, Counter-Strike Source, and TF2 was immense, and few games ever matched those because of the sheer breadth of content we had available. I will forever mourn the loss of that experience in today's hyper-monetized world.
Or alternatively: you can buy Titanfall 2 and install it with the Northstar client, which switches the game to using a community server browser with all kinds of user-developed game modes, mods and maps, with all game features unlocked. Titanfall 2 is one of the fastest-moving modern multiplayer shooters to begin with anyway, with a very high skill ceiling and player mobility - far closer to old-school shooters than most modern games.
There's a lot of things he got wrong in the video. The newest unreal tournament game shows that there are people who still wants to play those types of games, tho at the same time it is a hybrid between arena shooter and hero shooter, since they want both old and new audiences. He also can't make up his mind if unreal tournament is a great map or not which annoyed me. When he said "we" I was shaking my head in disapproval. I installed UT2004 not too long time ago to play it just to see how it felt today again and I enjoyed it quite a lot. Thanks to bot support, I can play it a lot even if not many players are on at the time that I play. He also got the developer risk wrong. He said consumers had higher expectations of developers and therefore they took less creative risk, but that's not the case. It's because it is not as profittable because they already make a lot by copying trends. I blame the fact that the gaming industry is so mainstream now that the quality in games creatively is dying.
Still playing UT2004 with friends at mini LANs to this day. Though LAN partys is where those game make the most fun cause we don't take it totally serious so there are no real sweaters and even noobs can join and have fun without feeling totally left out (as it often happens in today online competive games)
This starts to touch on why I don't play Counter Strike anymore: I don't want everything revolving around competitive matchmaking. No one played CS 5v5 matches at the lan cafe, or over 56k, we all played de_rats_2000 with 16v16, with the UT announcer modded in, and some weird Warcraft 3 based RPG mod.
Don't forget the servers where the admin would change the gravity in the map, or the players that would rally the team by playing songs like "we're not gonna take it" through their microphone when the team was behind.
Man, if I had a nickel for every time gamers fell in love with a mostly symmetrical pair of forts, one red and one blue, connected by a bridge and dominated by sniper sightlines that acted as a CTF map, I'd have 2 nickels, that's not a lot but it's weird that it's happened twice.
Atleast from what i saw in the server browsers back then, the 2 fort symetrical (that with its 3 "lanes" looked alot like Moba game maps) Map design was also very popular in Tribes 2.
Slap the low gravity mutator on and BOOM. You’ve got your “realism”. I was an UT Assault player, but when we wanted to play something different, we always headed to CTF and usually this map for some balls out, turbo charged, fat boy, low grav, instagib hilarity. You can’t beat it.
Facing Worlds: Set up your translocator Fire a Redeemer at the opposite tower where you will be teleporting to Teleport to said tower Shoot down mini nuke warhead in the middle of it's route, taking out anyone in the middle. What a laugh that level was!
@@Eternal_23 Movements were too simple, UT 2K4 tried to pull new moves but the dodge mechanic was badly implemented on all UT games. If you want to see how to make it good look at how Clutch champion was made in QC. Besides the UT dodge is still an inferior dash compared to Warsow and the likes, Diabotilac etc.
I like this kind of content. If it were possible to track down devs of popular old mods to pick their brains on how they built those mods would be awesome. The Half-Life 1 mod scene is where I started and have so many good memories of the weird things that came out of it.
This reminds me of a pretty interesting level design video from GDC14; "The Importance of Nothing: Using negative space in level design", which uses this map as a reference. (available on the GDC RUclips channel)
I spent hundreds of hours playing on sniper-only servers with every player popping off non-stop no-scope headshots. That was the golden era of online FPS.
Unreal Tournament 2004 has got to be my favorite rendition of this map coupled with gameplay. With the Translocator and low gravity it really added a new element of play that otherwise wasn't available in other games. Was perhaps the closest we'd get to playing something like Slipgate in the early 2000's, especially when it came to the eventual portal gun mods that'd make their way into the game.
I remember the first time I got Gibbeted using the translocator. I was chasing some guy back and forth thru the translocator, until somehow we both used it from the same end at the same time, teleporting both of us to the same location at the same time, and thus exploding into bloody chunks. That was when I knew that game was truely wild.
Gibbing with the translocator, the ultimate domination of another player. I miss it so much. team fortress 1 had the very similar and deadly engineer grenade that was awesome as well.
Players have spent the last two decades recreating this map, as well as various other classic maps, within every FPS that supported player-made maps. While there is a lot of nostalgia involved, players haven't moved on. As for modern attempts at arena shooters failing, there are plenty of reasons other than "old school map design."
Doom 2016 was probably the best I've played for the modern era, with Splitgate right behind it. No fancy perks, everyone gets the same weapons, go play and git gud.
@@shadowmancy9183 Doom is the ultimate evolution of the classic shooter. There's a plot, sure, but is it really relevant? And the multiplayer is there to blast people, and that's about it. There's nothing complicated about it beyond the weapon mechanics and preferences.
@@PaulGuy Absolutely agreed, which is why Eternal's multiplayer was such a letdown. Battlemode is nice and unique, and credit to the devs for trying something different, but at least give some classic deathmatch/CTF on top of it.
Yea there is a version of this map in Cube 2: Sauerbraten, which is where I first played it since I wasn't even born when UT99 came out. I now play UT99 all the time and can say it is one of the best/most fun games of all time, even without nostalgia goggles.
Main reason is the majority of gamers are 13-21 ish, and if you grew up on UT99 youre at a minimum of 28-30 (I started playing it when I was 4). So of course arena shooters dont do well nowadays, the people who want them are too old to play all day everyday, and the people who do have the time for that want something else.
This was fantastic. Perfectly mirrors my own memories from those times. Slight rant, but the introduction of matchmaking over server browsers and community hosted servers is one of my least favorite aspects of modern gaming, because you just don't get those naturally born communities from servers anymore. Now you're floating in the void with thousands of other players based on some algorithm that guarantees you don't actually notice getting better at the game. I miss being able to join a familiar community server full of players I've played with countless of times, and to see my practice pay off because I can easily compare my progress to these people. That direct sense of accomplishment was far more rewarding than any of the modern day rankings or cosmetic carrots on a stick ever will be. Nostalgia is definitely strong towards those golden years of Q3, UT, CS and the countless excellent mods of the time.
I was in University when this game was released and everyone in my house was in a clan together and we played online. This map is pretty epic because the odds are exactly identical on each side and the only difference in outcome was the skill of the team. oddly, in really competitive games, not many people use sniper rifle. Usually only to counter snipe a noob who does use sniper. There is a risky way of traversing the map without getting shot at. Go to the top of the tower, put a teleport disk right at the top of the ramp, and charge up your impact hammer and walk towards the disc. it will hit it so hard that it will land mid way up the opposite tower (if you do it right) and you can drop down and swipe the flag. getting back across is the trickier part.
I can tell who ever edited this had a blast, which lead me to have a blast watching. Incredible job, love the smaller focused videos. Great new channel cant wait for what’s next!
I would 100% accept FW types maps in the 2022 AAA space and less visual noise in mp maps. I don't think any of the arguements here actually hold teue. Rather its just no real AAA game is willing to try. Halo infi ite suffers grwatly due to how it respects the lessons of modern fps map design. Great video.
Which is why a lot of people are excited for Forge. I hope it launches with a "Forgeworld" type map so that people have a great canvas to build off of.
@@matthewjoy475 i hope they dont waste ti.e on forge world. It ultimately only limits and a canvas generator option set wkuld be greatly preffered by me. I have fond memories of forge world but its both unrequired and hindering in the currwnt space. Forge sadly does not really solve the issue as forge maps arent ever going to be as clean as dev maps. Cant wait for forge but it doesnt chamge my point of view. And im scared of how 343i will bung that like every other part of infinite.
Hey it's me from the future. Secret Level came out today and the short film specifically singled-out Facing Worlds in its epic finale. I just love that.
I grew up with UT99 in my veins. It really sculpted my views on games, music, culture, and hobbies back then. Which is saying a lot, because I'm grateful to have experienced this when I was young, and it's all thanks to the designers and creators of this wonderful game! Interestingly I think 2fort from TF2 has the same but different effect as Facing Worlds, for those that played or still play TF2 I think you understand. Also the part about the "science" of Facing Worlds? It's a video game man, where human bodies explode, cyborgs exist, teleportation portals exist, plasma rifles shoot energy balls, the physics of human movement make zero sense, and you can fall 10 stories and still survive. I mean the whole game is absurd, I think criticizing it's realism is like asking why a character in Looney Tunes hangs in the air for a few seconds.
This. The guy literally just shot five people's heads off with a sniper rifle, and they magically returned to life within seconds, and he's then questioning how realistic it is to be on a small asteroid in earth orbit with buildings on it... I completely agree it was absurd to wonder about the realism of the level as though everything else was beyond question
The catering to the "competitive" player base is the biggest death to creativity since the death of modding in modern gaming. Watching games change their balancing to cater to the people who are racing to see who can break the game the hardest and fastest while I'm just over here trying to have a good time with what few friends can still get together has created a deep sense of anti-fomo in me. I don't have 48 hours a day to devote to a game. If I have to treat it like a second job just to reach the baseline of fun, I'm moving on to something else. That said, I'm really happy that the indi scene has catered to people like me. There are so many games built just around having fun. It's also the sort of space where you see the modding community welcomed in. Facing worlds is just that: having fun. That's why it went on to be reborn in later games in different versions. Just look at 2-Fort.
The original Team Fortress actually came out before Unreal Tournament by about six months, so 2 Fortress, the predecessor to TF2's 2-Fort, wouldn't have been influenced by Facing Worlds. Otherwise, I very much agree with you. There is a place for competitive games, but it feels like they've pushed casual multiplayer pretty much completely out of the industry. I think a lot of this can be boiled down to games moving away from server browsers and relying completely on matchmaking. They both have their strengths, but it really feels like developers are treating a side grade like an upgrade.
Also breaking a game is fun. The hours I sunk into finding and exploiting bugs, flaws and bad AI on a casual level is wild. Taking that away from the experience really makes me sad.
lol such a dumb comment. wrong on bunch of stuff, but ill just say something about the main thing. people not valuing creativity - creativity not making enough money in comparison to bullshit people actually want to buy - is what killed creativity in gaming (industry). it has nothing to do with competitiveness
Unreal and the UT series define my entire existence for a period of about 5-6 years during my twenties. I started playing online in November '99 on the old Wireplay 2 client playing the original Unreal and got completely hooked. (social anxiety and depression meant I found the online gaming community very emotionally compelling and helpful, I felt I 'belonged') I co-founded a clan [DOA] and when UT hit, my life was consumed with competing on Wireplay, Barrysworld, Jolt and Clanbase. I still have nearly all of [DOA]'s match result screenshots from the end of UT matches. UT2003 came along I took over as Wireplays UT Community Liaison and Server Admin (I was also an official mIRC channel admin on Epic official UT channel) and introduced the concept of a map pool and players being able to choose their map for any given round (each player would chose a map fromthe map pool and there was a fixed 'decider' map for a tie). This was to mix up the map choices and introduce an ability for competitors to use map choice intelligently and strategically depending on their opponent. I also ran a VERY popular and busy Unreal 2 XMP server community with voice chat that was insanely good, it was such a shame the serve code was really poor. Unreal, UT and [DOA] hold a very, very important, special place in my heart and psyche. The nostalgia is incredibly strong with this game series. Hello to all the old skool Unreal/UT UK players from Wireplay, Barrysworld, Jolt and Clanbase from [DOA]Guyver1.
This map was my introduction to PC FPS gaming. My cousin put me at the top of the tower with the sniper and I just practiced the mouse movement until I got comfortable enough to start running around. This map holds a special place for me. On a side note the map design might be out dated but the sound track of UT99 certainly isn’t and you just don’t hear music in FPS shooter anymore..
Awesome video! I don't like the implication that people liked Facing Worlds largely because they primarily played against bots. Not sure if that's just your experience or what, but I grew up playing on this map online constantly in UT2004. Other things worth mentioning might be that the 18-second death walk could be shortened significantly using the translocator, and you could also avoid fire by repeatedly jumping off the sides or into the center pit, then translocating back onto solid ground. Rinse and repeat.
Fair point - I'd be interested to hear what others think too. I'd say that I played a lot more 2004 online than UT99. But also those 5 years were like eons apart in terms of internet connectivity. - Danny
@@NoclipCrew That's a good point! You were playing before I was, so I didn't have that bot-heavy experience outside of the single player. I also find it interesting that this map stands out so much to me despite not really being part of a community or playing it with my friends. I think its simplicity is probably a big part of why it stands out. As you list other map names, I remember them but can't picture them (aside from Deck), but Facing Worlds is so simple it's unforgettable. Like the Nike Swoosh of map design.
@@NoclipCrew Playing CTF-Face against bots is a lot like playing Moorhun. It's fun, but it gets old. Taking up the challenge agains real opponents is just so much more satisfying. Or play it in a clan and actually train some mad strats. :-)
I never played against bots on CTF-Face. Only humans provided enough competition to keep me engaged. I made a bunch of good friends on a local server (lpb's) and we would play CTF-Face and loads of custom maps for hours at a time. Bots couldn't swear back at you or give any real competition. I do remember launching my translocator disk to the other base with the piston and if low-grav was turned on I think you could piston jump all the way back to the base and the double jump would get you pretty far. On normal grav there was a dirty trick where you could piston jump and somehow get the flag back to your base but your actor would die. Timing it right though, your teammates would be ready & waiting to grab it where it landed. The map/mod community of UT99 was incredible. We had a huge inventory of awesome community generated maps to prevent monotony. You can still find a lot of them out there but the repositories are scattered. It is unfortunate that gamespy/fileplanet died.
@@clayhicks2766 In fairness, UT99's bots are still to this day the best in the industry. UT2004's bots come DAMN close though. Maybe UT3's bots as well.
holy shit this has got to be one of the funniest, most cleverly put together and entertaining videos you've ever made. Seriously, everything is *on point*. P.S.: "murder battle" is probably the weirdest way to say Deathmatch I've ever heard
One aspect that you overlooked is scale. Prior to unreal (which had close to zero multiplayer following) there were no "large" outdoor areas in FPS. Quake could not handle it, quake3 semi tried with things like dm17 - but r_speeds were decimated if things became much more complicated. UT99 was Epics first entry to multiplayer and the first FPS that had large scale outdoor areas - at least compared to what came before. So we had face and lava giant. Much larger and much more outdoorsy than older titles. These maps shipped with ut99 and were two of the more popular ones early days - its not surprising that face won out as the simpler of the two. Like fortnite a lot of it was right place at the right time.
I wouldn't say Unreal was particularly amazing in this regard. Look at Delta Force 1. Look at Terminator: Future Shock. Look at various non FPS games, for example Ocarina of Time. Look at Daggerfall. Also, look at a Let's Play of Unreal and notice how little of the game is in large outdoor areas. It's really just down to the Quake engine getting licensed all over place and not being good with large maps.
@@BaddeJimme yes it was in large part because of quake being the goto engine. Sorry this wasn't intended as a "no games every did this previously" (I can see how it reads that way) and more as "no games that were played by large numbers of people in a multiplayer environment". Note that face was possible in original unreal - the engine could handle it fine. So this was the first mainstream title where large numbers of people played an openworldish map compared to atriums in quake. It was also many peoples introduction to online FPS and the "newer" players often picked UT99 over Q3 - further ingraining this map in their memories. Many people at the time picked UT over Q3 because of the expanded gametypes - shipping with DM/TDM/CTF/Assault etc. Q3 did not ship with CTF and people wanted it - and they also wanted a map like this even if they did not realise they liked chunky pasta sauce at the time. I don't need to look at lets play - I played those titles at release. My LAN group played terminator skynet (the follow up to future shock) quite a bit - but it did not have the same "large" level feel or visuals that UT99 offered. UT was the first and it makes sense why face would be the iconic map. The other titles are older and online play was more challenging for them at the time, so no uptake - similar to why unreal1 multiplayer aspect failed.
One of the reason Facing Worlds was so sniper heavy was that Headshots were ridiculously easy in UT99. More like: hitting the upper half of the torso was enough to get one, which almost always was an instant kill.
Mindlessly slaying to a stellar 90's DnB track on a simple to play map that captured the inner dream of walking in space. There. Thats why.. I'll always say this is my favorite map ever created.
I remember my dad presenting me with this game on his work laptop when I was at the healthy age of 4 years old, telling me "hey, come take a look at this!" My online alias and avatar do a decent job of broadcasting how much it's stuck with me. Thanks for the video, my guy! The trip down memory lane is much appreciated!
@@paddington1670 It was a laptop provided by his employer, and he worked as an engineer for Xilinx at the time. Speaking from experience myself, tech companies with plenty of money do NOT skimp when it comes to giving their engineers tech to do their job.
Size wise FW is a rather small map (that feels way bigger trying to run home with the flag). Ultimately its an endurance test of the teams. Teamwork, communication, fps skill, and as said endurance.
Our school was one of the first highschools in the state to require laptops, and hadn't quite worked out that they needed more than just "Ted the IT guy" to prevent kids from hosting LAN games mid-class. We played UT *CONSTANTLY* and ONLY played Facing Worlds
15:17 I love how it says: " Getting in the game is *EASY* " And just next to it - you can see a screenshot with opened 13-tab windows with Terminals and shit.
This made me sad, good coincidence I was installing all my old favourite games, MDK, beyond good and evil, as well as UT... and then this video... makes me feel incredibly sad. like you I had a great 13 year old memories. 1998 and 1999 were the best years, with starcraft, and learning how to connect the LAN in old win95 at the school stations, making friends with the teacher to get us a few hours of play per week, learning to have fun. I learnt bus lan, central lan... can't remember the looping one... but all mattered when it came to playing. they were good memories.
Damn you can feel the creative energy flowing out of this one, that was incredibly enjoyable to watch. Bringing on the scientist for an interview was both hilarious and actually insightful, I loved it. Don't get me wrong, the documentaries and whatnot are great as well but this more eccentric opinion piece really worked for me. And in a world where OpEd shows like this are a dime a dozen, this still manages to stand out as original and fresh.
the reason this was so popular at the time was that it was just constant action non stop and getting a multikill while running up to the other tower with a flag in hand was just epic.
the action for a new player could be you die in less than 5 seconds in that map so they went behing the tower trying to get a sniperrifle and camp or trying to get to the top from outside and usually not making it. The usual lenght for a somewhat experinced player was 30 seconds of gameplay until respawn unless you were one of the untouchbles - 50 frags no deaths and 3-0 flagscore and win
A friend of mine did voiceover work for this game. It was one of my favorite games. It made it more thrilling when he told me about the work and did some of the lines for me. I recognized him in the game. What fun!
At first I was put off by the obnoxious edgy humor and jokey audio cut-ins, but then I realized that the production on this video was basically recreating the era of 90s media that targeted the same audience of this game - heaps of ironic, derisive snark, and an overabundance of rapid-fire MTV-style editing. Which is actually quite clever!
UT'99 was the first game I dumped thousands of hours into. Between the game and UnrealEd I can singlehandedly credit it for starting or solidifying my interests in PC gaming, electronic music, and creative computer hobbies (level design, 3D modeling, music production, programming, etc.). The fact that people are still making videos about it to this day makes me unbelievably happy. And yeah, long live Facing Worlds!!
I remember the first few times I played this map. I got vertigo, dizziness and it felt like the ultimate immersion. I've always imagined what it would be like in space spinning uncontrollably, everything around you fizzing into a blur. Pure insanity manifesting in physical form. Space still scares and astounds me.
I played instagib low gravity facing worlds and I played 85% just that and enjoyed every second of it, and I did it online. It had its own strats like hitting your own players with the shock rifle to send them flying into the other teams tower. It was so crazy and good fun nothing in all my fps gaming history has even scratched it.
I played UT to death (anyone remember the little stat app it came with originally?) and while I did like Facing Worlds, my favourite was far and away DM-Morpheus. Drifing through the air raining down rockets/flak shells just took on a whole different feel to other FPS games. Also, the easiest way to get across the FW map was translocator spam which was hella annoying.
As much as I loved FW, I also loved Deck 16 and Hyperblast. I loved downloading variations of them, even more in other games. Heck, I muss UT in general. Ashame the cringe crap Fortnite is what Epic did well with and then crapped on UTs future.
Even if you hate it, Fortnite still carries some of Unreal's blood in it. Some of the custom gamemode people do derive from TDM modes and are endlessly fun.
@@jamisunne Don't care. Epic absolutely spit on UT's grave, and at this point, they don't deserve the Unreal IP anymore. If anything the small callbacks in Fortnite are even more insulting rather than just ignoring it. "Hey check out the parts we cut out of a much better game to put into our microtransaction daycare simulator and then kicked into a corner because it's currently not making us all the money in the world."
Was a really fun map to play with Instagib. People one shotting each other across the entire map. Would always be one guy who clearly had an aimbot but wasn't good enough to time their shots properly.
I'm just gonna say it now, this map was the biggest part of my childhood. And I just found out that they're pulling the plug on the servers to a few Unreal games in January. So let's start a string of favorite maps from the series, I can't really remember much of any other game besides UT99, my favorites were....I honestly can't choose.
The part of this video which really made me feel seen was when you mentioned loading it up against middling skill level bots just to mindlessly farm headshots. I have been doing that for damn near TWENTY YEARS
I love how they’re like “we’d need a reason to spend the money to do this” And the answer is that… sometime in the future we will need space battle tournaments. And they will be unreal. Unreal Tournaments.
Like Danny said, this game is still actually a lot of fun to pick up and play. It has such dumb and blunt design in the best way. So many games are so complicated visually and gameplay-wise these days and almost "overtuned." That along with the variety of mutators, mods, maps, weapons results in such a sweet combination of it being exactly as much game as you want but also lots of it.
Good point. I always had the feeling UT just looked (and played) so 'clean'. Never managed to figure out what it was exactly. Half-life also had it a bit. Quake3 looked more fancy but missed this clarity, as did basically everything after it, including its own successor UT2004. Additionally, its still something I can just do for 15 minutes and have a blast with even against bots.
I loved this map. I was quite mediocre at quake III and counter strike, but at Unreal Tournament, specially in this map, I used to be the leader both in kills and in captured flags. My strategy was to go to capture the flag using a sniper rifle as an assault one. Nobody expected this because of the low fire rate, but a headshot meant instakill, and the slope between the two towers used to give many easy headshot oportunities. To avoid snippers from the other tower, jumping constantly was a good strategy.
RE competition, Facing Worlds always was and still is the tournament and league final map in pro UT. I used to compete (mostly national, very rarely international, and I'll grant you that back then it was completely different to esports now) and _every_ set at _every_ event ended on Facing Worlds. A UT weekender where the last match wasn't decided on Facing Worlds was unheard of. To this day, I still haven't seen more than a handful of maps in any shooter that are more competitive. It's perfectly symmetrical, and as you said early in the video, when you're playing on LAN with classic 5v5 or modern 6v6 teams, it works perfectly. It was always standard practice to have two people on the team assigned to sniper & spotter/counter-sniper duty, in any map, and Facing Worlds is ideally designed for a spotter up top, sniper halfway down, and three (or four) people legging it across no man's land. In those smaller LAN games the ground team could actually get things done, while your guys in the towers took each other out. Is it less 'usual' than a flat arena deathmatch? Yes. But is it balanced? Yes, absolutely perfectly evenly, both horizontally and vertically. And that made it the most competitive map.
CTF-Face and de_dust2 should be the standard by which all other competitive maps are judged. I don't think it's any surprise that the Overwatch team said on their forums some years back that they were inspired by Facing Worlds and Lava Giant for some of their CTF maps. (Though that could also just be because they love UT regardless of quality; just look at Sombra's translocator.)
... But yeah, it's a total garbage map for online and blowing away bots as they spawn in absolutely was the most fun thing to do with UT.
EDIT: Oh yeah, and as far as the '99 Tournament-specific lore goes-this is not true for general Unreal lore or later Tournaments-the players can run around and breathe on the map because they're synthetic, and not actually breathing or affected by gravity (or the lack of). After a combatant dies or teleports for the first time, the respawner/teleporter replicates them as a cyborg in their last fully healthy state. (So, yes, you're not actually teleporting when you use the translocator; you're dying and being replicated.) The replicated person can only exist within the boundaries of the playing field (i.e. why they gib if they go past the map edges) but can live there indefinitely, with no need for water, food, sleep, or air, to fight as long as the Tournament needs them to. This is also why they don't float off into space, they can take a saw blade to the chest and not have their aim affected, etc.
But like I said, that's just Unreal Tournament 99 specifically. How it also keeps happening in Unreal, who knows, and later UTs shifted the lore around a bit.
This comment is amazing, we're pinning it - thanks for sharing all of this!
where is the synthetic lore thing from? ive played all the unreal games and dug through manuals and level descriptions for years, and ive never heard this.
Xanious IIRC-bear in mind we're talking about a 22-year-old memory-it was in an interview in issue of Power, a UK PlayStation magazine, when the game was ported to PS2. The whole article was them asking about the most irrelevant and silly things, which was their style. (Though given it was UT on PS2... maybe nobody wanted to dwell on the gameplay anyway.) If it wasn't Power then it would have been Max. Both magazines were a bit 'alternative' and frequently ran weird coverage.
As I recall they also got into who the announcer is and what exactly the green goo in the bio rifle was made of, but the details of that escape me now.
Edit: for some reason I'm also remembering a manual saying holograms rather than cyborg clones, but that might just be my brain getting mixed up in the nostalgia-frenzy at 1am.
The more specific lore itself (in a TLDR format) is that you're a fighter being placed into the Liandri Tournament. You're being cloned/stored per death and your goal is to make it to the finals and beat the final opponent (Sometimes Xan, Sometimes Malcom) - A side note being that there was a miner's strike before and that for some reason there was a demand for a sport of bloodshed and violence, which isn't really explained. The story's just there to get you into the arena like a guinea pig and blast some heads off. Other than that I'm not 100% sure, I'm also younger than UT1999 by 3 years, having grown up with it when I was 5 onwards.
@@aceflibble im just genuinely curious, especially because the unreal community is kinda mildly prone to lore misinformation, like how one wiki just casually made up shit alongside actual lore, or wikis not citing properly. Take it from someone that dug through old unreal website articles to check if "planet gryphon" was made up fan crap or not (it isnt, but the A-4 designation or whatever is)
not a word about the music? that's a huge part of what made it so memorable
I just heard the music after literally decades and was instantly teleported back to the feeling of those LAN parties back then.
It's okay but not one of my fav UT99 songs. It's more a relaxed song for this level.
Major oversight.
As great as the music is, consider: 2fort is the most popular map in every version of Team Fortress and it has no music in any of them, but as the name imples, it's essencially the same idea - ctf, 2 bases, one way to go between them (well two, but one is less than ideal), snipers' galore.
hell one could argue that Halo's Blood Gulch and Valhalla are largely the same. And in each of these cases music isn't a factor, so I can't say, that was the thing that brought people in, though it certainly helped them stay.
@nosville22 but part of what made UTs edition of the basic idea so memorable is the spinning orbital background and music.
Facing World music is just the right level of Drum&Bass and Electronica bliss.
I've never heard anything like this
Foregone Destruction still pumps me up
I'm partial toward the more acidy tones of Organic, myself, but I'll certainly give Foregone Destruction its due respect. It seems, for some reason, if you gave a mod tracker to a gamer in the 90s, something magical just happened.
Did you know! Videogame music is generally a hollow pastiche of other, better music you could be listening to
@@Roxfox holy smokes that's good!
@@Jamesharveycomics then please, educate me on better music
I'm down for more electronica/techno/DnB stuff
The fact alone that facing worlds has such a beautiful ambient 90's jungle backround track makes it a icon.
I'd categorize it as drum and bass, but yeah - it's such a classic which certainly contributes to the greatness of Facing Worlds.
@@prodigy84bg that’s fine jungle/atmospheric/ intelligent dnb are a lot closer than what kids these days would call it… like breakcore, artcore or some other made up genre..
@@spoolyanddanalixdnb yup, they are certainly related. It's just that I believe jungle was more of an early 90s thing, whereas drum and bass was more of a late 90s thing, which is obviously the era of the game and its soundtrack.
@@prodigy84bg oh yeah for sure.. I guess I really just wasn’t being specific.
Oh yeah. "Dingg-dongg-dangg" gives me shivers all the time. :)
Instagib, shock-rifle only, low-grav, custom large bedroom style maps (where the player is the size of a fly) are some of my fav childhood gaming memories!
Instagib was where it was at. Absolutely beautiful game mode.
@@0tispunkm3y3r 100%
That absolutely gave me the skills at a young age, shooting tiny pixels across the map. So much fun.
I cried when I saw it in the Secret Level episode
They also had morpheus I think. What a beutiful episode.
That was so good
I didn't know I was getting an unreal tournament episode when I started the show. I was literally jumping out of my seat by the time I noticed the flak cannon. I almost ran out of the room at the facing worlds reveal
I'm glad that the video mentioned the endearing anti-lore of the videogame, where the makers would build anything that seemed cool to them, with no need to laboriously connect every dot or make everything fit.
"Yes, we're in space now. No, we're not going to think of an explanation why. Go have fun."
that need to make everything fit is exactly why things are so shitty, generic and replaceable now.
I assumed that the various maps were just different locations in the game's universe handpicked by the corporation to hold matches and that they were wildly different in order to test competitor's skills in different environments, etc. But yea, I don't think many of us played UT because of some intriguing well-written story. The real story was the ones we made while playing. The map makers experimented and gave us wildly different layouts and themes.
Yeah. Spend your time on making things that are fun, not on making things make sense.
Not much explanation needed anyway. They put a gravity generator in the rocks of the structure and maybe an oxygen generator with a shield around it. Done.
Or, if you want a more "Unreal" explanation, the towers are magical. Either lost and forgotten magic or otherwise.
@@AlphaCarinae lol your standards are shit if you enjoy the same game being remade with only new graphics Every year. wanna know why every sandbox/RPG aspect of AAA games feels the same? because the people behind it dont want to try.
"A bunch of aging gamers making hour-long impassioned video essays about old video game shit, so that other aging gamers can feel seen."
Now THIS is a Big Mood.
It's not just that our lives were simpler back then, but yeah. I like that boomer shooters exist because they tap into some of the simplicity that was part of those 20-odd year old designs, but they give it a modern spin. TOXIKK was a good take on the UT-style arena shooter, though it's more reminiscent of UT2k4, which in turn is more like Halo. Maybe that's why it failed to grab people's attention for long, as Halo still has new entries, whereas the UT'99 style has not?
bro ive been able to watch reviews about most ps1 games i missed bc i wasnt groomed to be a super GAMER, its nice to know i really didnt miss anything.
Ooooh M M M MONSTER KILL!
@@KristofDE Its all fails these days because of nerf culture driven by bad sportmanship which is of course driven by the monetary system itself. Whenever you hear the words op, broke etc you know you are dealing with someone clueless who is cashing in on the nerf culture bandwagon.
aging gamer? theres a sting to that reality
You nailed one point: UT 99 was an amazing grab bag of brilliant and garbage ideas. The fact that you could download the official editor and create your own content for it was the cherry on top. I was just a year into my career in software development at the time and I spent about 6 weeks developing my own game mode mod. It was a blast, and so easy. So much content was produced over the next couple years for that game, it was mind-boggling.
Remember Nali City? The UT map site?
@@niveketihw1897 😁😁😁
I just realized the final map in Unreal Tournament episode of Secret Level is Facing Worlds, very fitting.
If you watch again closely, they're all original UT maps. The one with the redeemer is DM-Morpheus
@@iClamperson Slightly edited though. The one in the episode they had bridges connecting the towers. Facing worlds had elevators instead of teleporters.
Guess its because all the maps are inside a stadium. Also because the episode takes place before UT99, so it could be that they didn't have the tech to simulate the worlds proper.
The music, the simplicity of the map, the exposure...running back with the flag, the vantage snipe points, the nuke, the space atmosphere. Facing Worlds is one of my most favourite maps ever.
14:10 "And players want that: Levels have to be detailed, beautiful, dense."
Actually I never asked for that. For many years around then there was this unspoken rule that shooters would ship with a MINIMUM of 16 multiplayer arenas on board. I don't recall any of us being asked if we were OK with developers trading the variety of levels, weapons, replayability, player choice and freedom all for graphics and graphics alone. Facing Worlds may indeed be dumb fun- but it's held a following for over 20 years now. So has Facility, Wake Island, Dust2, Blood Gulch etc. If developers continue to sacrifice everything for the shiny trailer visuals, I don't see us getting multiplayer maps that stand that test of time ever again.
I call this "technical debt". As games get more detailed, content becomes more expensive... but we don't need all that detail. Look at Team Fortress 2. It's style is simple enough that the basic level geometry does most of the visual work. Detailing isn't hard. Hell even CS:GO has easy map work.
The epitome of this is the "orange" maps: Maps made with developer textures. Pure gameplay. Maybe some level geometry to give areas some flair and identity. It could be textured and finally detailed, but frankly, who cares? Team Fortress 2's style is so minimalistic that it even fits!
Yes! The visual simplicity of UT99 maps is its advantage. Without too much detailed fluff you can focus better on your enemy.
Yea, the main reason everything went to shit in gaming is exactly that, graphics. People say they want graphics. Hell, they think it too sometimes. But no one really does, once they play something good, captivating, etc. they don't need the graphics at all. Here's a great example, mortal kombat alliance for the game boy advanced. I played that in 2022 with an emulator just because I like it so much.
I mean, there are a couple maps from more modern games that are pretty memorable. A standout for me is Eichenwalde from Overwatch. Everyone loves a good castle, and that choke point at the bridge and gate makes for some great chaos. Maybe a little less recent is that Halo Reach map set on an orbital station, with a low gravity environment in it, always remember that one as a fun time, but to be fair that game is like a decade old by now
@@BusinessWolf1 I'd go as far as noting that the death of demo's and the increased normalization of videogames in the modern age killed it. It's the main reason why most devs these days focus on visual, as visuals sell. Back in the day you'd buy a lot of games either because A. you thought the box was cool, which often wasn't representative of ingame visuals, B. played a demo or played it at a friends place or C. saw it in some monthly magazine where someone else which was also a gamer played it (and the monthly and gamer being important). All of which on some level related to gameplay or with an idea of gameplay.
These days it's screenshots, trailers or seen some influencer playing it. All of which are visual and social to quite an extend and not so much gameplay based (with the obvious exception to an extend).
All those years later Unreal Tournament is still the most fun game I've ever played. It was a weird, nerdy guy to Quake's frat dude bro. The most satisfying rocket launcher ever.
Quake was a nerd Lovecraftian spooky bro tho
@@dominiksikorski8479 No it's more like the Monster Energy Drink to Quake's Red Bull
@@BlueLightningSky Quake 3 Arena is like UFC, to Unreal Tournament's WWE
Getting lock-ons on particularly jumpy enemies was always great.
@@rorychivers8769 That's very accurate 😂
The user-made maps were really what made this game great, especially UT2004. CTF-Bedrooms, a CTF map with Burger King and McDonald's stores, UT99 even had CTF-StormchaserV-3 with a tornado that would randomly drop and move across the map. Low gravity mod, double jump, wall dodging....God, those were the days.
the soundtrack deserves much more credit, one of the best soundtracks ever
I think a genius part of FW is the slope in the middle. It causes the ground to be split in two at the middle point, which causes ground troops to dance as they reach its peak: Do you push forward and meet the enemy team? Do you wait for them to come? I think one of the biggest parts is that if you try to play defensively, the enemy will already be halfway to your flag. And when they take it and run away, past that crest there's little you can do.
It creates an element of surprise and tension, and what I like the most about it is how natural it is. It doesn't require any planning or tactics, just run forward and you'll be creating a situation for the enemy
i used that slope alot to trick other players translocated to the other side . :D
"The reality here is that in the past twenty years, level designers have come to understand what makes a good multiplayer level."
I guess generic, symmetrical three-lane maps are just the pinnacle of level design. /s
Ahaha. Like its every team game now, not only shooters.
When the theorizing stops, orthodoxy begins.
Edit: It's a kinda ironic line of reasoning given we're talking about a symmetrical 2 lane map here.
Yeah, I was pretty disappointed with that conclusion. I'm hankerin' for a return to eclecticism.
@@citizencrimson201 You're not wrong. Gaming has become very homogenized, which is kinda why it sucks more than ye olden days.
Although Facing Worlds is DAMN good, I actually consider Deck 16 to be the absolute best map of them all, hands down. The layout is fucking PERFECT. Well, maybe a little less than perfect, but only because Deck 17 in UT2004 made a nice little corridor linking the flak room with the shock alcove which actually works very nicely.
Back when El Dewrito (Halo Online) was a thing, I made a full precision Deck 17 replica in Forge, and after a fair few games, I found it played perfectly, even in Halo, where the core gameplay is pretty different. I just had to reshuffle the weapon placements somewhat.
I used to play on a server that had friendly fire on but it did no damage so one of the strats was to grab the flag, take the teleporter to the top of the tower, and have one of your teammates load up three rockets and just blast you across the map back to your tower. 😆
lmao
I played on one like that all the time, but it was instagib, you could really get your friends flying!
redeemer on was a big mistake as well, you could boost the flag back to your base
This rules! Wish i'd tried that back in the day. Low gravity on this map was pretty common too, which made it easier to get across the map, and lsihgtly harder for snipers. That's how I remember playing it most often. So much fun.
I'd honestly forgotten just how kick-ass the music for UT was.
As one of those other aging 90's gamers looking to feel seen, thank you for making this.
On the design front, I have to agree that simply regurgitating this era of map and game design isn't going to stick. But you bring up a great point that I think has been a major loss in the time since: player created spaces in game. Joining a dedicated server with a recreation of Homers house that plays Mario sounds when you shoot a guy is all but impossible in the way many competitive games are built and operated. It helps explain why the modern equivalents do feel more staid and sterile despite the growth in design wisdom since.
you can see this in metaverse maps today with their built in soundtracks and surreal concepts. arena shooters really paved the way for multi user 3d environments and some things really havent changed that much
Agreed. Tip of the Spear: Task Force Elite is one of the only recent FPS games with a map editor reminiscent of those good old days. Small community, but they’re getting new funding and should become really incredible in the coming months/years
Basically the only games that really carried on that mindset is ironically Source titles like TF2. And even then, there hasn't really been something like that since, well, TF2.
@@gratuitouslurking8610 TF2 is an interesting one because it played a huge part in the shift. It was the laboratory where Valve began to tinker with character cosmetics, free to play, item crafting and trading, loot boxes and keys, etc. Call of Duty was locking up multiplayer on console and Valve was laying the groundwork on PC.
I think the big thing you listed is the loss of player servers which can act as digital communities. Ping forced people to play on servers near them so there were regular faces on each server you came to know. I know that in UT99 I had 1 real port of call, a server with slightly faster than normal movement speed, all snipers, and custom maps. Great time.
I had so much fun watching this. Probably mostly because of the same nostalgia. I'm the same age as you and to this day I remember when UT came out. Even with bots this game was so much fun.
I remember someone on my floor in college handed out the game to all of us. We were all on the building network playing nonstop. We eventually found other floors and the whole building got into a giant challenge for like 3 months were we just talked trash to each other and came up with elaborate tournaments. Great times.
I feel like a lot of these shooters have "that one" classic map, its big, symmetrical, but usually plays like a stalemate. Face, 2fort, Blood Gulch, they all are very similar in how they play.
Classic tournament maps. It's the same with RTS, there is always at least one map that is completely symmetrical, offering the same starting situation for every player.
Katabatic in Tribes 2
Edge
People can not bitch about unbalance if a map is mirrored...
I was about to suggest that Unreal's weirdest map is actually Pyramid, but I think we're on similar wavelengths after roughly 4:52 in the vid.
That said, you said it has no secrets, which is false: there's a modestly hidden damage amplifier in the upper supports of each fort's lobby entrance which must be translocated to.
I loved the pyramid with the last man standing mod. I remember training on this map for hours against increasingly harder bots and loved all the cool buffs located on under the pyramid in small gravity well.
UT was a huge part of my teenage years. I spent many hours making maps for the community and my clan - so much fun. Thanks for sharing this video; blast from the past!
the mod community was great too. and devs were all heavily involved.
I'm 17, I've never played Unreal Tournament (im a quake 3 girl myself) but the ending made me cry.
The modern games industry has one big issue and its professionalism. Games had personality, it was a craftsman's industry, people had to get creative. This was when any amount of guys could get together and make a game. And as someone that one day hopes to make games, that hits me emotionally to my core. I want fun again. I want stuff that isn't the best designed but has heart. I fucking hate modern games, I'd only read modern Halo and Overwatch lore if I reach a DEADLY level of boredom. Charm over polish. Fuck game critics.
This made me want to pick up and play Unreal Tournament for myself, so, thank you. I think I'm gonna like it.
A young gamer girl who cares about quality and lore and appreciates old quality games like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament?! 😶
_HOPE... IS REKINDLED._ 😢
*_THERE IS STILL HOPE FOR THIS WORLD!!!_* ✊
PRAISE THE SUN, YOUNG SISTER! FOR THE EMPEROR!!!
It's truly a soul-crushing industry. I am a pragmatist so maybe don't take my word for it, but I too wanted to be a game designer when I was in college, and quickly pivoted to commercial software when I realized what working on games was like. Maybe if I could have actually found a group of people I liked to start our own studio together, things would be different. But applying to studios was not a great experience at all. They demand a lot out of you and wring you for all you're worth.
@@CrizzyEyes Yep, to be honest, the only way to enjoy game-creation now is to approach it as a form of "pet project", which is not bound to deadlines, metrics, inversors, company guidelines, and things like that (it also means one shouldn't expect to bank on it tho).
Just you (and your friends) coding and making things looking for what thing is the most fun to add.
At least we still have indies, don't get me wrong some indies games have also take some of the bad habits of the AAA industry but you still can find passion projects among them.
@@DeathMessenger1988 Yes there is still hope in the new generations, even my 13 year old cousin fucking loves late 90s to late 2000s RTS and FPS games, even he has realized how fun old/the original games can be compared to the current ones.
There's definitely a demand for fast paced shooter games most people just don't know they exist, the recent resurgence of singleplayer fast paced indie shooters have proven it, now we need to make Arena shooters popular again.
This game got me into gaming as a whole. Staying up late, watching over my dad's shoulder as he and his friends chatted on Roger Wilco, shredding people with sneaky translocator spots. Every so often when I still lived at home I'd boot it up, my dad would hear the iconic sounds of Foregone Destruction and ask if he could play. Thanks for the video Danny!
I do feel I am living in a wasteland of broken dreams.
*Green Day Inc. has demonetized your comment.*
Let me give you something to look forward to. If you make it to the end of the world, you win! No matter what choices you make in your life, you couldn't possibly get farther than that point, so you did it! Yay, right...?
@@MiguelBaptista1981 yeah what the heck is going on with green day being the arbiter or gold standard of marketability according to RUclips?
If you stop having expectations everything becomes a delightful surprise.
@@user-account-not-found Tried this! The knife wound WAS surprising! It wasn't delightful, though...
This was easily one of my favorite levels.
1. Cause I love capture the flag.
2. I love spacey Sci-Fi stuff.
3. THE REDEEMER.
4. The simplicity of its design.
And last but not least that beautifully tranquil soundtrack.
Foregone Destruction seriously had no reason to be that good and I STILL listen to it today. UT literally helped me have better teenage years than I might have otherwise.
I was the weirdo that used the camera mode and explored every facet of this map while vibing with the song in the background. I would spend literally HOURS doing this when I was bored with enough time on my hands. 😂 The fact that it was a floating rock rotating in space with an earthlike planet in the background was INSANE to me, and so peaceful. It’s my favorite map and very special to me, but I never knew or realized just how popular it was.
I remember I was in high school and was showing UT '99 to one of my friends on my G4 Mac. I played half a match, let him play the other half, and we immediately figured out when CompUSA closed. After 10 minutes of him demonstrating flagrant disregard for the speed limit we had a PC copy as well for his computer. Once we turned off AppleTalk, the game ran cross-platform on LAN flawlessly, and we did not sleep that night.
Infinite nostalgia.
Love reading stories such as these for these vintage games of the 90's. Kids these days will never understand the privilege we had back in the 90's to experience games such as Unreal Tournament when it first was released. I remember that I bought a local games magazine which had the UT99 demo. My friend and I were keen to check it out and after school we went to his house. His brother bought him a Riva TNT graphics card for his birthday and man, did the demo look amazing on that hardware coupled with a PII 350Mhz that he had at the time. Sadly for me, I had to play with software mode as I wasn't as fortunate to have a graphics card, but hey, I still had a blast even if it didn't look so good. What a time it was to be alive back then :)
so no hobbies?
I think you missed one important factor: the stalemate nature of the map meant that you could literally spend hours playing one game here. Those battles stick in your memory forever. Look at Halo: Combat Evolved. If you ask most casual players of that game what level they remember the most, you're gonna get "Blood Gulch" 9 times out of 10. The other 1 out of 10 might be "Hang Em High." Why? Because it was a huge, empty sniper fest that heavily favored defense, and led to hours-long matches. Chill Out is a way better level, but outside of the competitive community, most people completely forget it exists until you show it to them.
One TFC 2fort battle, they got the jump on us. Flood attacked. We spent the whole 20 mins fighting in our ramp room and outside of spawn. Utter fucking chaos, sound card locking up from explosions, they got our flag a few times, super intense battles on the long spiral ramp. Just madness. Ended in a zero to zero tie. Fantastic battle and I still remember it and it was 25 yrs ago.
I mean, the fact that Blood Gulch was one of only two maps to allow vehicles (and Sidewinder was both oversized and visually boring) might have something to do with it as well.
I sent my server up to play with sniper rifles only zark 2004 rifles I sent the flag capture limit like 900 or something. The game went on for a week the bots would play I would play friends and pop in and out. It was awesome
@@gregoryhayes7569 and both maps played like ass
jesus christ that's sad. imagine having a life so empty that you'll willingly throw away hours of it staring at the same fucking map in a computer game
I strongly disagree with the idea that modern MP games have better level and map design, or even that modern games in general have better map and level design. Why do I say that?
Because Doom Eternal and its DLCs and Elden Ring follow the OLD mapping formulas more than modern ones and are PRAISED for their level design in the modern day.
There's a balance to be had. I remember watching nostalgic people making videos on how the complex maps of Doom 2 were so good, with all the hidden nooks and crannies, how you needed to explore to progress, and so on. Sure, sounds great on paper. In practice, when I played them way back, I HATED them. Over and over I had to stop the action, and then look at the vector map to see if I miss something. And even if I saw, say, "oh, that fake wall can be opened up", there was no damn indication how. Sometimes pressing some random shit half a map away. I never actually finished the game, I was bored by these hung-ups, especially since dying meant I had to start the level over, and often I could not remember anymore what's where. Complexity is not necessary a good thing on its own. Half-Life was a hell of a lot more fun for me, and it had a level design that was much more like modern military shooters that people seem to dislike: completely railroaded maps where you could go pretty much in one direction only, with some hidden side corridors and rooms with loot here and there. It meant that I could focus on the action, instead of tearing my hair out looking at the cryptic map.
Agree. Mp maps over the last decade or so have become over-balanced. They cater too much to the punk ninja style of shooter gameplay.
Even the thing about gamers wanting more detailed level design. The big reason (besides performance) to play on lowest settings is to have less clutter on screen. On that competitive level, less is more. There is a reason games like Overwatch, TF2 or Valorant go for simple graphics. Instead of throwing all the effects and hyper-detailed models at the player, they take it simpler and put the focus on gameplay on well build layouts.
Creativity was definitely out there and the 160 polygon budget seems to have not prevented them from coming up with some really cool stuff.
It's really "unreal" map and has very cool music. This map is more like action for one painting and its like an art.
All you need is two players - one sniping from somewhere low down, beside/behind your own tower to keep the enemy snipers away from the top and middle positions, meanwhile the other player is rushing over the bridge to grab the flag.
I refuse to accept that everyone has moved on. In part because I'm a stubborn git and love the adrenaline rush of playing these games, the speed and accuracy needed, the high skill ceilings...
But also because it's always felt like sometime around ~2008 or so, we lost a lot of what made Multiplayer PC Games great, no longer did we HAVE those mod tools, with sandboxes to play around with, along side the community hosted servers that made the custom content accessible.
While the industry has undoubtedly moved on, I'm unsure if it's truly for the better. Games have a set lifespan now, maps are, while generally technically impressive, lack creativity, and there just AREN'T communities to be built around the games. It used to be that you could create custom content, host it on your own server, and build a community around it, and every night, you could essentially have a party in a game full up with friends shooting the shit, having fun, and killing each other mercilessly.
Now we're locked into games where you can generally have no more than 4 friends, custom content is essentially non-existent, and the games themselves wear out their welcome far faster because everything ties into either monetization or customization that we used to take for granted when it was free.
I think we lost a lot in that transition, and it saddens me to this day. The amount of time I was able to spend in UT99, UT2004, Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, Counter-Strike Source, and TF2 was immense, and few games ever matched those because of the sheer breadth of content we had available.
I will forever mourn the loss of that experience in today's hyper-monetized world.
Or alternatively: you can buy Titanfall 2 and install it with the Northstar client, which switches the game to using a community server browser with all kinds of user-developed game modes, mods and maps, with all game features unlocked. Titanfall 2 is one of the fastest-moving modern multiplayer shooters to begin with anyway, with a very high skill ceiling and player mobility - far closer to old-school shooters than most modern games.
I heard you can make map in DIabotical, I might be wrong tho
There's a lot of things he got wrong in the video. The newest unreal tournament game shows that there are people who still wants to play those types of games, tho at the same time it is a hybrid between arena shooter and hero shooter, since they want both old and new audiences. He also can't make up his mind if unreal tournament is a great map or not which annoyed me. When he said "we" I was shaking my head in disapproval. I installed UT2004 not too long time ago to play it just to see how it felt today again and I enjoyed it quite a lot. Thanks to bot support, I can play it a lot even if not many players are on at the time that I play. He also got the developer risk wrong. He said consumers had higher expectations of developers and therefore they took less creative risk, but that's not the case. It's because it is not as profittable because they already make a lot by copying trends. I blame the fact that the gaming industry is so mainstream now that the quality in games creatively is dying.
Still playing UT2004 with friends at mini LANs to this day. Though LAN partys is where those game make the most fun cause we don't take it totally serious so there are no real sweaters and even noobs can join and have fun without feeling totally left out (as it often happens in today online competive games)
@@TheAzureGhost That's awesome! I always wanted to set up a lan party for playing UT and Quake
This starts to touch on why I don't play Counter Strike anymore: I don't want everything revolving around competitive matchmaking. No one played CS 5v5 matches at the lan cafe, or over 56k, we all played de_rats_2000 with 16v16, with the UT announcer modded in, and some weird Warcraft 3 based RPG mod.
This. CS 1.6 LANs will always have a special place in my heart.
Don't forget the servers where the admin would change the gravity in the map, or the players that would rally the team by playing songs like "we're not gonna take it" through their microphone when the team was behind.
Don't forget "fy" maps, surf maps, zombies mode, gungame - all of which were made/invented by fans.
Man, if I had a nickel for every time gamers fell in love with a mostly symmetrical pair of forts, one red and one blue, connected by a bridge and dominated by sniper sightlines that acted as a CTF map, I'd have 2 nickels, that's not a lot but it's weird that it's happened twice.
You forgot Blood Gulch
Atleast from what i saw in the server browsers back then, the 2 fort symetrical (that with its 3 "lanes" looked alot like Moba game maps) Map design was also very popular in Tribes 2.
@@TheAzureGhost but Tribes had skiing and grappling hooks
@@jlinkous05 Those came with tribes 3, tribes 2 just had vehicles and jetpacks xD
@@TheAzureGhost Technically couldn't you spam jump to ski in the first ones, and then they implemented as a proper feature?
Slap the low gravity mutator on and BOOM. You’ve got your “realism”.
I was an UT Assault player, but when we wanted to play something different, we always headed to CTF and usually this map for some balls out, turbo charged, fat boy, low grav, instagib hilarity.
You can’t beat it.
Facing Worlds:
Set up your translocator
Fire a Redeemer at the opposite tower where you will be teleporting to
Teleport to said tower
Shoot down mini nuke warhead in the middle of it's route, taking out anyone in the middle.
What a laugh that level was!
Unreal Tournament is a masterpiece that no one can replicate to this day
UT99 had bad movements mechanics, other than that it's still the best UT.
@@attractivegd9531 what was bad about them?
@@Eternal_23 Movements were too simple, UT 2K4 tried to pull new moves but the dodge mechanic was badly implemented on all UT games. If you want to see how to make it good look at how Clutch champion was made in QC. Besides the UT dodge is still an inferior dash compared to Warsow and the likes, Diabotilac etc.
@@attractivegd9531 well considering the time of development it was sufficient
@@attractivegd9531 well it was perfect for many people including me
I like this kind of content. If it were possible to track down devs of popular old mods to pick their brains on how they built those mods would be awesome. The Half-Life 1 mod scene is where I started and have so many good memories of the weird things that came out of it.
This reminds me of a pretty interesting level design video from GDC14; "The Importance of Nothing: Using negative space in level design", which uses this map as a reference. (available on the GDC RUclips channel)
I spent hundreds of hours playing on sniper-only servers with every player popping off non-stop no-scope headshots.
That was the golden era of online FPS.
That sniping spot alone was why i loved this map ever so much.
Unreal Tournament 2004 has got to be my favorite rendition of this map coupled with gameplay. With the Translocator and low gravity it really added a new element of play that otherwise wasn't available in other games. Was perhaps the closest we'd get to playing something like Slipgate in the early 2000's, especially when it came to the eventual portal gun mods that'd make their way into the game.
I remember the first time I got Gibbeted using the translocator. I was chasing some guy back and forth thru the translocator, until somehow we both used it from the same end at the same time, teleporting both of us to the same location at the same time, and thus exploding into bloody chunks. That was when I knew that game was truely wild.
Gibbing with the translocator, the ultimate domination of another player. I miss it so much. team fortress 1 had the very similar and deadly engineer grenade that was awesome as well.
Players have spent the last two decades recreating this map, as well as various other classic maps, within every FPS that supported player-made maps. While there is a lot of nostalgia involved, players haven't moved on. As for modern attempts at arena shooters failing, there are plenty of reasons other than "old school map design."
Doom 2016 was probably the best I've played for the modern era, with Splitgate right behind it. No fancy perks, everyone gets the same weapons, go play and git gud.
@@shadowmancy9183 Doom is the ultimate evolution of the classic shooter. There's a plot, sure, but is it really relevant? And the multiplayer is there to blast people, and that's about it. There's nothing complicated about it beyond the weapon mechanics and preferences.
@@PaulGuy Absolutely agreed, which is why Eternal's multiplayer was such a letdown. Battlemode is nice and unique, and credit to the devs for trying something different, but at least give some classic deathmatch/CTF on top of it.
Yea there is a version of this map in Cube 2: Sauerbraten, which is where I first played it since I wasn't even born when UT99 came out. I now play UT99 all the time and can say it is one of the best/most fun games of all time, even without nostalgia goggles.
Main reason is the majority of gamers are 13-21 ish, and if you grew up on UT99 youre at a minimum of 28-30 (I started playing it when I was 4). So of course arena shooters dont do well nowadays, the people who want them are too old to play all day everyday, and the people who do have the time for that want something else.
This was fantastic. Perfectly mirrors my own memories from those times. Slight rant, but the introduction of matchmaking over server browsers and community hosted servers is one of my least favorite aspects of modern gaming, because you just don't get those naturally born communities from servers anymore. Now you're floating in the void with thousands of other players based on some algorithm that guarantees you don't actually notice getting better at the game. I miss being able to join a familiar community server full of players I've played with countless of times, and to see my practice pay off because I can easily compare my progress to these people. That direct sense of accomplishment was far more rewarding than any of the modern day rankings or cosmetic carrots on a stick ever will be. Nostalgia is definitely strong towards those golden years of Q3, UT, CS and the countless excellent mods of the time.
The DnB track alone makes this such a legendary map. I’m always listening to unreal tournament DnB mix whenever I’m working or aim training
I was in University when this game was released and everyone in my house was in a clan together and we played online. This map is pretty epic because the odds are exactly identical on each side and the only difference in outcome was the skill of the team. oddly, in really competitive games, not many people use sniper rifle. Usually only to counter snipe a noob who does use sniper. There is a risky way of traversing the map without getting shot at. Go to the top of the tower, put a teleport disk right at the top of the ramp, and charge up your impact hammer and walk towards the disc. it will hit it so hard that it will land mid way up the opposite tower (if you do it right) and you can drop down and swipe the flag. getting back across is the trickier part.
I'd get chills playing on this map, because to this day I still have this weird phobia of space.
I can tell who ever edited this had a blast, which lead me to have a blast watching. Incredible job, love the smaller focused videos. Great new channel cant wait for what’s next!
I would 100% accept FW types maps in the 2022 AAA space and less visual noise in mp maps. I don't think any of the arguements here actually hold teue. Rather its just no real AAA game is willing to try. Halo infi ite suffers grwatly due to how it respects the lessons of modern fps map design.
Great video.
Which is why a lot of people are excited for Forge. I hope it launches with a "Forgeworld" type map so that people have a great canvas to build off of.
@@matthewjoy475 i hope they dont waste ti.e on forge world. It ultimately only limits and a canvas generator option set wkuld be greatly preffered by me. I have fond memories of forge world but its both unrequired and hindering in the currwnt space.
Forge sadly does not really solve the issue as forge maps arent ever going to be as clean as dev maps.
Cant wait for forge but it doesnt chamge my point of view. And im scared of how 343i will bung that like every other part of infinite.
UNREAL GOTY FACING WORLDS - Nothing will kill the memories. Pure perfection. I miss it so much.
Hey it's me from the future. Secret Level came out today and the short film specifically singled-out Facing Worlds in its epic finale.
I just love that.
I grew up with UT99 in my veins. It really sculpted my views on games, music, culture, and hobbies back then. Which is saying a lot, because I'm grateful to have experienced this when I was young, and it's all thanks to the designers and creators of this wonderful game! Interestingly I think 2fort from TF2 has the same but different effect as Facing Worlds, for those that played or still play TF2 I think you understand. Also the part about the "science" of Facing Worlds? It's a video game man, where human bodies explode, cyborgs exist, teleportation portals exist, plasma rifles shoot energy balls, the physics of human movement make zero sense, and you can fall 10 stories and still survive. I mean the whole game is absurd, I think criticizing it's realism is like asking why a character in Looney Tunes hangs in the air for a few seconds.
This. The guy literally just shot five people's heads off with a sniper rifle, and they magically returned to life within seconds, and he's then questioning how realistic it is to be on a small asteroid in earth orbit with buildings on it...
I completely agree it was absurd to wonder about the realism of the level as though everything else was beyond question
What an excellent comment
The catering to the "competitive" player base is the biggest death to creativity since the death of modding in modern gaming. Watching games change their balancing to cater to the people who are racing to see who can break the game the hardest and fastest while I'm just over here trying to have a good time with what few friends can still get together has created a deep sense of anti-fomo in me. I don't have 48 hours a day to devote to a game. If I have to treat it like a second job just to reach the baseline of fun, I'm moving on to something else.
That said, I'm really happy that the indi scene has catered to people like me. There are so many games built just around having fun. It's also the sort of space where you see the modding community welcomed in.
Facing worlds is just that: having fun. That's why it went on to be reborn in later games in different versions. Just look at 2-Fort.
The original Team Fortress actually came out before Unreal Tournament by about six months, so 2 Fortress, the predecessor to TF2's 2-Fort, wouldn't have been influenced by Facing Worlds. Otherwise, I very much agree with you. There is a place for competitive games, but it feels like they've pushed casual multiplayer pretty much completely out of the industry. I think a lot of this can be boiled down to games moving away from server browsers and relying completely on matchmaking. They both have their strengths, but it really feels like developers are treating a side grade like an upgrade.
Also breaking a game is fun. The hours I sunk into finding and exploiting bugs, flaws and bad AI on a casual level is wild. Taking that away from the experience really makes me sad.
lol such a dumb comment. wrong on bunch of stuff, but ill just say something about the main thing. people not valuing creativity - creativity not making enough money in comparison to bullshit people actually want to buy - is what killed creativity in gaming (industry). it has nothing to do with competitiveness
Unreal and the UT series define my entire existence for a period of about 5-6 years during my twenties.
I started playing online in November '99 on the old Wireplay 2 client playing the original Unreal and got completely hooked. (social anxiety and depression meant I found the online gaming community very emotionally compelling and helpful, I felt I 'belonged')
I co-founded a clan [DOA] and when UT hit, my life was consumed with competing on Wireplay, Barrysworld, Jolt and Clanbase.
I still have nearly all of [DOA]'s match result screenshots from the end of UT matches.
UT2003 came along I took over as Wireplays UT Community Liaison and Server Admin (I was also an official mIRC channel admin on Epic official UT channel) and introduced the concept of a map pool and players being able to choose their map for any given round (each player would chose a map fromthe map pool and there was a fixed 'decider' map for a tie).
This was to mix up the map choices and introduce an ability for competitors to use map choice intelligently and strategically depending on their opponent.
I also ran a VERY popular and busy Unreal 2 XMP server community with voice chat that was insanely good, it was such a shame the serve code was really poor.
Unreal, UT and [DOA] hold a very, very important, special place in my heart and psyche.
The nostalgia is incredibly strong with this game series.
Hello to all the old skool Unreal/UT UK players from Wireplay, Barrysworld, Jolt and Clanbase from [DOA]Guyver1.
what gametypes did you play? gr Kr4zY_[xtc] haven't used that nickname in 9 years lol
@Kr4zYm0f0 tdm and ctf and then double domination in 2004 👍
I had forgotten about this beauty... all the hair stood up on the back of neck. Amazing!
This map was my introduction to PC FPS gaming. My cousin put me at the top of the tower with the sniper and I just practiced the mouse movement until I got comfortable enough to start running around. This map holds a special place for me.
On a side note the map design might be out dated but the sound track of UT99 certainly isn’t and you just don’t hear music in FPS shooter anymore..
Awesome video! I don't like the implication that people liked Facing Worlds largely because they primarily played against bots. Not sure if that's just your experience or what, but I grew up playing on this map online constantly in UT2004. Other things worth mentioning might be that the 18-second death walk could be shortened significantly using the translocator, and you could also avoid fire by repeatedly jumping off the sides or into the center pit, then translocating back onto solid ground. Rinse and repeat.
Fair point - I'd be interested to hear what others think too. I'd say that I played a lot more 2004 online than UT99. But also those 5 years were like eons apart in terms of internet connectivity. - Danny
@@NoclipCrew That's a good point! You were playing before I was, so I didn't have that bot-heavy experience outside of the single player. I also find it interesting that this map stands out so much to me despite not really being part of a community or playing it with my friends. I think its simplicity is probably a big part of why it stands out. As you list other map names, I remember them but can't picture them (aside from Deck), but Facing Worlds is so simple it's unforgettable. Like the Nike Swoosh of map design.
@@NoclipCrew Playing CTF-Face against bots is a lot like playing Moorhun. It's fun, but it gets old. Taking up the challenge agains real opponents is just so much more satisfying. Or play it in a clan and actually train some mad strats. :-)
I never played against bots on CTF-Face. Only humans provided enough competition to keep me engaged. I made a bunch of good friends on a local server (lpb's) and we would play CTF-Face and loads of custom maps for hours at a time. Bots couldn't swear back at you or give any real competition.
I do remember launching my translocator disk to the other base with the piston and if low-grav was turned on I think you could piston jump all the way back to the base and the double jump would get you pretty far. On normal grav there was a dirty trick where you could piston jump and somehow get the flag back to your base but your actor would die. Timing it right though, your teammates would be ready & waiting to grab it where it landed.
The map/mod community of UT99 was incredible. We had a huge inventory of awesome community generated maps to prevent monotony. You can still find a lot of them out there but the repositories are scattered. It is unfortunate that gamespy/fileplanet died.
@@clayhicks2766 In fairness, UT99's bots are still to this day the best in the industry. UT2004's bots come DAMN close though. Maybe UT3's bots as well.
holy shit this has got to be one of the funniest, most cleverly put together and entertaining videos you've ever made. Seriously, everything is *on point*.
P.S.: "murder battle" is probably the weirdest way to say Deathmatch I've ever heard
kill skirmish
One aspect that you overlooked is scale. Prior to unreal (which had close to zero multiplayer following) there were no "large" outdoor areas in FPS. Quake could not handle it, quake3 semi tried with things like dm17 - but r_speeds were decimated if things became much more complicated. UT99 was Epics first entry to multiplayer and the first FPS that had large scale outdoor areas - at least compared to what came before. So we had face and lava giant. Much larger and much more outdoorsy than older titles. These maps shipped with ut99 and were two of the more popular ones early days - its not surprising that face won out as the simpler of the two. Like fortnite a lot of it was right place at the right time.
I wouldn't say Unreal was particularly amazing in this regard. Look at Delta Force 1. Look at Terminator: Future Shock. Look at various non FPS games, for example Ocarina of Time. Look at Daggerfall. Also, look at a Let's Play of Unreal and notice how little of the game is in large outdoor areas.
It's really just down to the Quake engine getting licensed all over place and not being good with large maps.
@@BaddeJimme yes it was in large part because of quake being the goto engine. Sorry this wasn't intended as a "no games every did this previously" (I can see how it reads that way) and more as "no games that were played by large numbers of people in a multiplayer environment". Note that face was possible in original unreal - the engine could handle it fine. So this was the first mainstream title where large numbers of people played an openworldish map compared to atriums in quake. It was also many peoples introduction to online FPS and the "newer" players often picked UT99 over Q3 - further ingraining this map in their memories. Many people at the time picked UT over Q3 because of the expanded gametypes - shipping with DM/TDM/CTF/Assault etc. Q3 did not ship with CTF and people wanted it - and they also wanted a map like this even if they did not realise they liked chunky pasta sauce at the time.
I don't need to look at lets play - I played those titles at release. My LAN group played terminator skynet (the follow up to future shock) quite a bit - but it did not have the same "large" level feel or visuals that UT99 offered.
UT was the first and it makes sense why face would be the iconic map. The other titles are older and online play was more challenging for them at the time, so no uptake - similar to why unreal1 multiplayer aspect failed.
One of the reason Facing Worlds was so sniper heavy was that Headshots were ridiculously easy in UT99. More like: hitting the upper half of the torso was enough to get one, which almost always was an instant kill.
Mindlessly slaying to a stellar 90's DnB track on a simple to play map that captured the inner dream of walking in space. There. Thats why.. I'll always say this is my favorite map ever created.
I remember my dad presenting me with this game on his work laptop when I was at the healthy age of 4 years old, telling me "hey, come take a look at this!" My online alias and avatar do a decent job of broadcasting how much it's stuck with me. Thanks for the video, my guy! The trip down memory lane is much appreciated!
oh wow you guys had a laptop that could run UT? mustve costed like 4 grand back then
@@paddington1670 It was a laptop provided by his employer, and he worked as an engineer for Xilinx at the time. Speaking from experience myself, tech companies with plenty of money do NOT skimp when it comes to giving their engineers tech to do their job.
You clearly had fun making this, and it shows! And I agree!
Enable a few mutators such as instagib, and UT99 was a blast. M-M-M-M-MONSTER KILL. GODLIKE!
facing worlds, low-grav, instagib was my favorite.
@@vancomycinb the 2004 special was indeed the best way to enjoy this craziness.
Music, setting, atmosphere, layout, and did I say music? It wouldn't be the same without the music. Perfection.
4:53 HEY RESPECT THE MAP WHERE ALL THE ASCENSION RITES END
Subscribe because there are probably more UT99 videos coming www.bit.ly/noclipcrewsub
Ps the first unreal map I think about is the mod map Area 51.
Used to play instagib ctf on that beauty.
The music and the fact it caters to every type of player but it only works if everyone works as a team
Size wise FW is a rather small map (that feels way bigger trying to run home with the flag). Ultimately its an endurance test of the teams. Teamwork, communication, fps skill, and as said endurance.
Not to mention the best map soundtrack in the game.
Our school was one of the first highschools in the state to require laptops, and hadn't quite worked out that they needed more than just "Ted the IT guy" to prevent kids from hosting LAN games mid-class. We played UT *CONSTANTLY* and ONLY played Facing Worlds
15:17 I love how it says:
" Getting in the game is *EASY* "
And just next to it - you can see a screenshot with opened 13-tab windows with Terminals and shit.
This made me sad, good coincidence I was installing all my old favourite games, MDK, beyond good and evil, as well as UT... and then this video... makes me feel incredibly sad. like you I had a great 13 year old memories. 1998 and 1999 were the best years, with starcraft, and learning how to connect the LAN in old win95 at the school stations, making friends with the teacher to get us a few hours of play per week, learning to have fun. I learnt bus lan, central lan... can't remember the looping one... but all mattered when it came to playing. they were good memories.
Damn you can feel the creative energy flowing out of this one, that was incredibly enjoyable to watch. Bringing on the scientist for an interview was both hilarious and actually insightful, I loved it. Don't get me wrong, the documentaries and whatnot are great as well but this more eccentric opinion piece really worked for me. And in a world where OpEd shows like this are a dime a dozen, this still manages to stand out as original and fresh.
Okey, to see Danny swearing is another whole level of fun.
Can't believe you just noscoped the whole video essay genre in the first 3 minutes
Because it is simple, straight forward, cool looking and has one of the best songs in the entire franchise.
Long matches, and the most fun map with low gravity. Like a giant bouncy house where you get to shoot people.
the reason this was so popular at the time was that it was just constant action non stop and getting a multikill while running up to the other tower with a flag in hand was just epic.
the action for a new player could be you die in less than 5 seconds in that map so they went behing the tower trying to get a sniperrifle and camp or trying to get to the top from outside and usually not making it. The usual lenght for a somewhat experinced player was 30 seconds of gameplay until respawn unless you were one of the untouchbles - 50 frags no deaths and 3-0 flagscore and win
"We found this thing, it's fuckin mental!"
Couldn't have summed it up better myself
A friend of mine did voiceover work for this game. It was one of my favorite games. It made it more thrilling when he told me about the work and did some of the lines for me. I recognized him in the game. What fun!
Which voice was he?
Which voice man
thats awesome i wonder was it the male 2 voice?
bro pls tell us which voices he did
Morpheus & Facing worlds are the 2 maps I played SO much in UT2004. Just fun, small maps to shoot ppl, respawn, shoot again. Easy to learn too.
I played a TON of Facing Worlds. I loved taking out snipers with the translocator. Got really, really good at it. Cool video!
At first I was put off by the obnoxious edgy humor and jokey audio cut-ins, but then I realized that the production on this video was basically recreating the era of 90s media that targeted the same audience of this game - heaps of ironic, derisive snark, and an overabundance of rapid-fire MTV-style editing. Which is actually quite clever!
The Flak Cannon and The ripper.
Two absolutely *perfect* FPS weapons.
Change my mind.
Detonating the secondary fire of the shock rifle 😉
They all were simply perfect
@@viciousyeen6644 Can't really argue with that. :)
@@jasonwaltman3566 Hmm. Going to have to reload up my UT copy and refresh the grey matter on this one.
UT'99 was the first game I dumped thousands of hours into. Between the game and UnrealEd I can singlehandedly credit it for starting or solidifying my interests in PC gaming, electronic music, and creative computer hobbies (level design, 3D modeling, music production, programming, etc.). The fact that people are still making videos about it to this day makes me unbelievably happy. And yeah, long live Facing Worlds!!
I remember the first few times I played this map. I got vertigo, dizziness and it felt like the ultimate immersion. I've always imagined what it would be like in space spinning uncontrollably, everything around you fizzing into a blur. Pure insanity manifesting in physical form. Space still scares and astounds me.
I played instagib low gravity facing worlds and I played 85% just that and enjoyed every second of it, and I did it online. It had its own strats like hitting your own players with the shock rifle to send them flying into the other teams tower. It was so crazy and good fun nothing in all my fps gaming history has even scratched it.
Please tell me you played on the Ondoher's Bistro server!
I played UT to death (anyone remember the little stat app it came with originally?) and while I did like Facing Worlds, my favourite was far and away DM-Morpheus. Drifing through the air raining down rockets/flak shells just took on a whole different feel to other FPS games.
Also, the easiest way to get across the FW map was translocator spam which was hella annoying.
As much as I loved FW, I also loved Deck 16 and Hyperblast. I loved downloading variations of them, even more in other games. Heck, I muss UT in general. Ashame the cringe crap Fortnite is what Epic did well with and then crapped on UTs future.
Even if you hate it, Fortnite still carries some of Unreal's blood in it. Some of the custom gamemode people do derive from TDM modes and are endlessly fun.
Check out Xonotic.
Yeah but at least Unreal Engine is still kicking ass.
@@jamisunne Don't care. Epic absolutely spit on UT's grave, and at this point, they don't deserve the Unreal IP anymore. If anything the small callbacks in Fortnite are even more insulting rather than just ignoring it. "Hey check out the parts we cut out of a much better game to put into our microtransaction daycare simulator and then kicked into a corner because it's currently not making us all the money in the world."
@@bb010g Is that still being developed?
Was a really fun map to play with Instagib. People one shotting each other across the entire map. Would always be one guy who clearly had an aimbot but wasn't good enough to time their shots properly.
When you were 13 in 99-00, you went home and did this after school. There was no exception
I'm just gonna say it now, this map was the biggest part of my childhood. And I just found out that they're pulling the plug on the servers to a few Unreal games in January. So let's start a string of favorite maps from the series, I can't really remember much of any other game besides UT99, my favorites were....I honestly can't choose.
The part of this video which really made me feel seen was when you mentioned loading it up against middling skill level bots just to mindlessly farm headshots.
I have been doing that for damn near TWENTY YEARS
and the hitboxes were so huge in ut99 compared to 03 and 04
I love how they’re like “we’d need a reason to spend the money to do this”
And the answer is that… sometime in the future we will need space battle tournaments. And they will be unreal. Unreal Tournaments.
Like Danny said, this game is still actually a lot of fun to pick up and play. It has such dumb and blunt design in the best way. So many games are so complicated visually and gameplay-wise these days and almost "overtuned." That along with the variety of mutators, mods, maps, weapons results in such a sweet combination of it being exactly as much game as you want but also lots of it.
Good point. I always had the feeling UT just looked (and played) so 'clean'. Never managed to figure out what it was exactly. Half-life also had it a bit. Quake3 looked more fancy but missed this clarity, as did basically everything after it, including its own successor UT2004. Additionally, its still something I can just do for 15 minutes and have a blast with even against bots.
I loved this map. I was quite mediocre at quake III and counter strike, but at Unreal Tournament, specially in this map, I used to be the leader both in kills and in captured flags. My strategy was to go to capture the flag using a sniper rifle as an assault one. Nobody expected this because of the low fire rate, but a headshot meant instakill, and the slope between the two towers used to give many easy headshot oportunities. To avoid snippers from the other tower, jumping constantly was a good strategy.
Sniping bots and getting M-M-M-MONSTER KILLS while listening to that amazing music was definitely a great gaming memory.