Unreal looked nice, had some nice atmosphere and visual design, but a lot of the levels were really boring or just transitions (as the scalie mentioned) and there was a lot of them
I don't really recall boring levels. Maybe Dasa Cellars, but it was basically an old fashioned FPS romp. Transitions, OTOH are necessary if you want to have vastly different levels, yet maintain sense of place.
had one enemy with decent AI that was basically a MP bot (the skaarj) and lots of boring ones
Well, no. There were two different flavours of Skaarj (in addition to large number of reskinned variations with somewhat different stats and behaviour inside those two flavours and one flavour having access to the same weapons as player plus energy shield), and then two more enemy types basically sharing the same AI sophistication (Skaarj merely combined this AI and superb agility/aggressiveness). Then there were less intelligent enemies that were employed in diverse roles - from acidic blobs to titan that could smash you dead in one hit.
but most crucially, it had really underwhelming shooting despite the kinda interesting weapons, which is unacceptable in a First Person Shooter.
OTOH having enemies unable to pose any risk to the player is unacceptable in a
Game.
Well, if you're saying that Unreal excelled at this or at that I think I'll have to take your word for it, I never really played it post release and right now I remember exactly two things about it:
1. The graphics were mindblowing.
2. The shooting itself was average at best.
Which prompted me to classify it as a glorified tech demo.
Oh, and apart from the "flashlight" (which should be replaced with some crude melee weapon) Q2 arsenal was fucking awesome, I'd readily trade the whole set of Unreal's weird stuff for a single Q2 gun. I'd throw my mum in if it was about railgun.
Q2 arsenal wasn't bad, but far from awesome. It mostly consisted of the same formulaic FPS guns ID alone has already repeated thrice before (twice if you don't count Dooms separately).
It had two genuinely interesting weapons (chaingun and HB), plus machinegun with semi interesting quirk (barrel climb).
The rest was ok and decent looking, but pretty generic. BFG wasn't as cool as the one in Doom for some reason, SSG had two usual problems (it was overpowered to the point of being all you needed and it had spread making it only effective in melee), SG was SSG, except slightly more accurate and too weak to be of much use, GL was poor man's RL, RL was generic RL (how you can even compare it to Unreal's is beyond me - especially that both have comparable damage per round against typical SP foes), railgun was ok, but had subtlety of garbage truck (compare with HL's awesome Tau Cannon in terms of implementation of the same concept) and there was serious ammo overabundance (meaning you could switch your SSG to RG as universal problem solver if you wanted) - overrated in terms of design, overpowered in gameplay.
Q2 arsenal would have been quite a bit more interesting if enemies would have had the same sort of DT based armour system player used (and they damn fucking should being tincans and all), had pain chance differ from "folds in half when shot with SSG", RG was costly to fire and enemy AI permitted actual evasion (only Icarus could do that, but it was rare foe and not particularly dangerous - give fucker twin RLs or something instead of pewpews).
Maybe then there would be some tactics and diversity to weapon use - SSG and CG would shine against strong but soft targets (mutants) and hordes of weak softies, but wouldn't be mince-it-all machines, RG and RL would be main armour piercers and so on.
Of course the game would still need better enemy reaction times and un-halved enemy damage to be interesting, but maybe it wouldn't be so meh.
I liked Quake 2 for its weapon feel and aesthetics (I actually liked all those brown warehouses with crates and stuff and cyborg enemies, wierd taste I guess) but Draq is right that it was way too easy, nearly every enemy in the game had a build-up period (don't know how else to call it) before firing long enough for you to go behind cover or run to him and unload a shotgun to his face.
I remember taking out two tanks at once with unquaded CG before any of them could start firing. Tanks!
Seriously, it's a game with supposedly scary armoured cyborgs as enemy and yet it feels as if *YOU* were a fucking cyborgized godzilla with a meter thick armour plating stomping a city.
Only interesting enemies where those cyberdogs (or whatever they were called) and Icaruses.
I actually liked Medics (and pretty much only them) - they were the only enemies that displayed some sort of intelligence and actually seemed to realize how much they suck at shooting you.
Unreal was something else in terms of atmosphere though, no other game except Another World evoked the feeling of being in an actual alien world so damn well. Weapons felt somewhat weak overall (I did like flak cannon though) but they did have an interesting look (along with nearly everything else in the game) and besides Unreal was one of those games that just draws you in so much that you stop noticing any flaws after a while.
I think weapons have not as much weak feel as they simply deal too little damage.
Paradoxically enemy AI makes matters worse - they would probably feel just fine for slaughtering semi-passive Q2 mooks.
I'm always surprised when I run into "It holds up even today" argument on the Codex (of all places)
Well, AI is a technical aspect after all.
what FPS in the last 10 years (aside from Fear) had enemies that do more than rush at you?
There are still FPSes where enemies actually rush at you instead of hiding behind boxes?
couldn't keep up with them.
