Wednesday, August 22, 2012

2009: CoD4 & UT3










CoD4 proved to be a hard act to follow. CoD4 has a number of features that many recent games have seemingly been unable to replicate. I have to think this failure to reproduce some of the things that made CoD4 so successful is purposeful. Here are four things that many recent game releases don't have that CoD4 has:
  • Ranked dedicated servers
  • Developer's console
  • Map editor and compile tools
  • The ability to play the game without being logged onto Steam
First, let me say that these are four things I consider to be of critical importance in a first-person-shooter pc game. Plainly put, CoD4 is just different from and better than the CoD titles that followed in so many ways. This game has the capability to run dedicated servers with up to 64 player slots. Things like this make gaming fun and in case you haven't picked up on this by now, the fun is what got me into pc gaming in 1992. Fun is what has kept me doing this for the last 20 years. Our clan had a 48 player CoD4 TDM server, running mp_crossfire which reached the rank of #2 in the world among all CoD4 servers, according to GameTracker.com (see top image). That server was a blast to play in. Just as a frame of reference, three of the four CoD titles that followed CoD4 all allow no more than 18 players in their dedicated servers.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to make 16 maps for CoD4. Killbox maps, one with multiple jump-pads, a pushwall map, a terrain map and more. Perhaps my most popular CoD4 map is mp_chaos. It consists of a large flat concrete area with shipping containers placed in what seems to be a random arrangement. This map has been downloaded over 750 times since April of 2009 and people are still downloading this map today. My favorite of all the maps I made for this game is mp_moose_snot. The name comes from a certain texture I used on some of the buildings in the map that appear to have an ugly greenish color near the seams of the whitish-grey metal. Looks like snot to me. Hence, the name. Another map I made, mp_killbox2, was a lot of fun as well. So much so, that four days later I decided to remake it for HL2DM and it ran on one of our HL2DM servers for more than a year. Wildly popular. Trust me, there are more maps, too many to mention. Suffice to say, the Dawggs of GDawgg Clan played the living crap out of these maps back in 2009. Man, did we have a blast! Swiz also made a map for this game on May 8, 2009, mp_bunker. Great map which includes some pushwalls and many other cool features. Swiz's excellent attention to detail is very apparent in this map. And, this was the first map he'd made for any game. Magnificent job Bro! We had tons of fun playing it.

Swiz also turned me onto UT3 in June of 2009. Geezo peezo! What did he go and do that for!? UT3 has so many dimensions, so many variables, it was a dream get involved with this game from both a playing and a mapping standpoint. Infinity Ward, the developer of the CoD series, placed obstacles and restrictions in the path of anyone seeking to create custom content (maps, mods, skins, etc) for their games. UT3, developed by Epic Games, is exactly the opposite. The doors to making all sorts of goodies for this game are so wide open, it's simply a pleasure to have such a game and the map editor for this game loaded on my pc's. I had played other UT games prior to UT3 and was never really impressed with them. This game was different in that the player models seem to be larger than in the past and, more importantly, I wasn't mapping when I had played the previous UT titles. With mapping as means to release some of my creativity, I went nuts with UT3. Totally. I made 40 maps for this game, 11 of them in the first 42 days that I had the game and 27 in the first 5 months. I feel that I made some of my best maps in UT3. The tools the game offered to work with and the map editing interface simply made mapping so much fun and so effortless that all I needed to do was have map ideas and the process of exporting those ideas into actual gaming venues was completely unencumbered. My first UT3 map, dm-gdawgg1, I really like a lot. Also, dm-killbox_b and dm-nutso-b are two others that I enjoy. However, I must mention the mutators. UT3 mutators are modifications to UT3 that any server admin can employ. There are several that come with the game but they're so easy to make that there must be thousands of custom mutators made by the gamers themselves. Here's three I really enjoyed:
  • Zark: makes the sniper rifle fire like a sub-machine gun - deadly beyond belief
  • Big Head: makes a player's head grow as his kill to death ratio grows - hilarious
  • Juggernaut: player grows huge after so many kills and then more huge after more kills
 As I said, there's thousands of them, crazy stuff!
 
Swiz made two maps for UT3: dm-hangar and dm-jump_v1.2. Both are totally awesome maps with lots of space, lots of teleporters and lots of jump pads. I repeat, awesome maps. Great work Swizzle!

Our clan members played CoD4 and UT3 simultaneously in 2009 leading up to the release of CoD MW2 (Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 2) in November of that year. This one would prove to be a great game but one mired in controversy.

More to come...





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