UE3, Hoopworld, and Legions

Epic's Unreal GDC Demo

Epic Games's booth had their Unreal Engine demo presentation and they used the opportunity to show off gameplay from both of their upcoming titles, the Xbox 360 game Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 2007, which was running on a Playstation 3 dev kit. For the Gears of War demo we saw a sequence at night in the rain as the human troopers did battle in the open against some small but nasty alien monsters. We were particularly impressed with the rain effects in the demo which could be perhaps the most realistic and moody weather we have ever seen in a game. The weapons and fire effects as the firefight broke out between the troopers and the monsters also looked cool and cinematic.

A demo was then shown of the FaceFX features in Unreal Engine 3 which show how detailed the facial and voice animations can be with the highly detailed characters in UT 2007. Yet another demo showed off how the look of the game could change from regular, to light bloom, and finally to a sepia tone just by linking shaders together. The final part of the demo showed off gameplay from the PS3 build of UT 2007 on a quickly made map (we were told it was made in just three days). Basically the demo looked like a high-powered version of UT 2007 with some cool effects for the rocket launcher exhaust and the game’s physics. Here Epic’s demo consisted of a ball that exerted gravity on objects around it. In some cases the force of gravity was strong enough to push the objects into orbit, and sometimes reach escape velocity. Overall the demo wasn't the "gosh wow" stuff that we saw two years ago when Unreal Engine 3 was first announced but it was still great to see the progress Epic has made for the game engine.

Hoopworld

Streamline Studios is a European-based game developer that mostly does outsourcing jobs on games like UT 2004, Ghost Recon 2 and more. However they have been working on a simple but fun sports game called Hoopworld for some time that will soon be released via Xbox 360's Live Arcade. In a GDC demo Wednesday we saw a current, but still early version of Hoopworld that can only be described as "basketbrawl" with various characters battling it out in several different courts (forest, desert, etc) as they both attempt to outscore each as well as fight in the game. The game is very skill-based, as you must learn how to master both the scoring moves and the fighting moves. Overall Hoopworld is looking like it will be a fun game for Xbox Live Arcade. When it is released later this year the game will come with two levels with a content pack containing more levels to be released later.

Legions

As promised, GarageGames did indeed show their tech demo Legions which looks at this stage an awful lot like a new Tribes game. Legions, however, is clearly just a tech demo at this point with not a lot of content; just two players in multiplayer with one rocket launcher as a weapon. What was cool in the demo was the vast outdoor level which we were told was the equivalent of 100 square kilometers. In short, it looks like the Tribes game we wish Tribes: Vengeance could have been. We hope that GarageGames releases this demo to the public soon.

That's it for Day 2 of my GDC reporter's notebook. I'll be back tomorrow with some more observations from the conference.