Weapons - General stuff

Looks and animation

Unreal's weapons sport a very complex look to them compared with a lot of other games. All the guns have some kind of firing animation (slides popping back, shells ejecting, ammo loading, etc), and many even have digital counters on them that tell you how much ammo you have left. That seems a little bit gimmicky at first, but after playing for a while, you realize that you don't have to move your eyes completely off the screen to find out how much ammo you have left.

Where's your head?

Ah the lens flare

Weapon switch

In the Quake community, weapon switching time is a big source of conflict - the hard core Quake 1 fans like instant weapon switch because it allows highly skilled players to change guns in the middle of a fight to adapt to rapidly evolving situations. On the other side of the coin, we have Quake 2 players who are more used to slow weapon switching times. Slow switching forces players to think carefully about which gun they want to bring into a firefight. Unreal Tournament seems to favor faster gameplay, so consistent with that idea, weapon switching is rather fast compared with Quake 2 or 3. It's not instant like Quake 1, but definitely fast enough that you can change in the middle of a fight and usually get away with it.

Picking up weapons, other stuff

The better you get at playing FPS games, the more you notice the little things that differentiate one from another. One of these little things is what happens after you kill an opponent. Do you get a backpack with all the ammo they were carrying and the last weapon they had (Quake 1)? Do you get the last weapon they had only and default ammo (Quake 2 and 3)? Unreal Tournament throws a new wrinkle in this area. After killing someone in the level, they drop the weapon they were carrying at that moment, but it holds exactly the amount of ammo they were carrying when they died. This means you can't assume that the rocket launcher you just picked up has x amount of ammo. You actually have to check how much is left. Get used to it when playing because nothing's worse than picking up a brand new minigun, expecting to mow down a whole room only to find that there were only 10 bullets left! At least the row of weapons along the bottom have meters for each weapon - at a glance you can tell how much ammo each weapon has left.

Woo, barely dodged that one

Double ghetto style

Bouncing around

One notable thing about Unreal Tournament's weapons is that they tend to bounce people around a lot. The ASMD rifle, the Ripper, the Rocket Launcher, and the Flak Cannon all have the ability to toss people way up into the air or all the way across the room. Sometimes it seems over exaggerated but with the amount of bounciness, this might reintroduce "juggling" to the first person community. Recall that Quake 1's rockets had the ability to bounce an opponent straight up into the air. With instant weapon switch it was possible to bounce someone up, switch to the lightning gun, and shaft them as they fell to the ground. This maneuver is plausible with a combination of any of the above weapons and the pulse gun, which has a secondary firing mode similar to Quake 1's lightning gun.

Locational based damage

There is a small degree of locational based damage in Unreal Tournament. Player bodies have three main areas where you can get hit, the head, torso, or the lower leg area. There is jacket armor and leg armor to protect those specific areas, leaving your head quite vulnerable to attack, especially for certain weapons (more on this in the next pages). The good news is that the speed players move at means that it takes a lot of skill (or luck) for your opponents to get a clean head shot on you.