Trivia / Unreal II: The Awakening

• Budget-Busting Element: According to former Legend Entertainment mapper Matthias Worch, the dip in quality had to do with the team trying to cram as many things as possible into the TCA Atlantis intermission sequences. They ended up diverting resources into those sections that didn't feature shooting in a game that's basically a First-Person Shooter.
  "If you ask yourself "What is the game about?" and break down a game by its core gameplay mechanics, the main component of the game, the shooting, had better be present in all major parts of the game. Unreal 2 is a First-Person Shooter. And you don't shoot on Atlantis. Instead, you do all the things that slow down the shooting action during an actual mission: exploration and talking. (...) I love the ambition and effort that we put into the level. It works. But all that effort also distracted and took resources from the other areas of the game that could have used extra help. Putting more focus on the Kai (our version of the Nali) for example. Or finishing the SP missions I had to abandon during development."
• Creator Killer: This was the last game of Legend Entertainment, as the studio was later shut down by Epic Games and Atari.
• Dummied Out: The presence of simple point based deathmatch during the tutorials and death messages on console indicate that this game would have featured a full-fledged multiplayer. There's a botmatch mode hidden in the code with a bunch of mutators; it only requires a Game Mod for the menu.
• Franchise Killer: This was the last canonical single-player of the Unreal franchise, as every Unreal game released afterwards would be multiplayer-focused. Unreal Tournament III did have a single-player story with actual cutscenes, but similar to Quake III: Arena and the prior Unreal Tournament games, the gameplay was just multiplayer arena matches against bots.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Epic Games removed all Unreal titles from digital distribution at the end of 2022 (due to shutting down all their multiplayer servers in order to consolidate everything into the Epic Games Store launcher ecosystem, and despite the fact certain titles like Unreal and Unreal 2 still had a sizable single-player campaign component), leaving only the 20-year old CD-Roms still in second-hand circulation as the only legal means of purchasing Unreal 2
• Promoted Fanboy: Shares a page with the rest of Epic Games.
• Refitted for Sequel: The whole franchise has its own page.
• Staff-Created Fan Work: Matthias Worch, author of several levels, released a single-player mission called Solaris Base.
• What Could Have Been: The whole franchise has its own page.

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