Hello everyone,
First of all, I just want to precise I am not willing to make any sort of advertising for this game. I'm simply a regular player and I'm not part of the development staff. I just want to present you this game and to ask your thoughts about its actual situation because sometimes an outside eye would be better than one from the community itself.
Urban Terror used to be a mod of Quake3 but nowadays it's a standalone game. It's based on the IdTech engine.
Urban Terror's concept is very simple: it is a free personal shooter involving the player into a real life background. It is a great mix of Quake's speed, physics and ambiance, with the inspiration of Counter Strike's graphics and mental game play.
You can play many game types: Bomb&Defuse (equivalent of the bomb mode of CS), Team Deathmatch, Team Survivor (equivalent of Quake's Clan Arena), Capture the Flag, and some other game types less known and less played but as much fun and interesting if not more.
Just like in Quake, UrT (short way to write it) has its own mod to work on the movement skills which is called Jump Mode (equivalent of DeFraG). In Urban, you can strafe, slide on the floor and jump on the walls.
Just to sum up quickly the history of the game, we have been playing on the 4.1 version for around 10 years. Then one year ago the game developers released the 4.2 version. Next version is going to be called Urban Terror HD but that's a very vague project they keep in boxes.
If I'm here introducing you to this game you might already know, it is because I want you to give a try to this new 4.2 version. Many bugs, many glitches and many horrible things happened during the first year of this version. However, it is stable and playable now. The actual version shows up very well the potential of the game. Among the numerous features:
- Anti Cheat. Frozen Sand (the name of the people who make it) releases a ban list from time to time.
- New weapons. Some people think it's still a work in progress, some don't think so, let the good people (you) judge.
- More characters and skins. Males and females as well, all sorts of colours, in other words you don't get bored with the simple Red / Blue skins anymore.
- More maps. Urban Terror has actually a mapping community. You can play on a lot of maps (only a few are used in competitions though), a jumping community and also an anticheat community. Quake maps are playable as well.
- Sound, mouse and graphic improvements.
I would like to also put the emphasis on these beneficial points of this game:
- There is an active group of people making it. Not only there are people developing this game, but there is also people around it: shoutcasters, fragmovie makers, leagues, and so on.
- We are a small community. Almost everyone know each other.
- We have people from all over the world. French community, German, Polish, American, Canadian, Asian, and Australian. They even have their national teams (UrT was part of the Nations Cup of ClanBase).
As for me, I find this game fantastic because of its concept. As I've said, it's a mix of Quake and Counterstrike (unreal movements made on realistic maps).
Because a picture is worth a thousand words, let me give you some links to see what it consists of:
- One fragmovie among the myriads from the French player HeMP. He is in the top 5 (if not the best) best players.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxReroHb4NY
- Grand Final Nations Cup France vs Germany (4.1 version though but it's just to show you that it has a good coverage):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhKcz4UfFP0
-
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x16w6ei (good fragmovie maker)
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If I'm here in front of you with this thread, it is also to get your advice on the statement of this game. Most of you should probably be aware that ClanBase.ggl.com suddenly disappeared from day to night (because of financial problems they said).
The problem with Urban Terror is that it's very small. By that, I mean that almost everyone know each other, there are more servers than players (you cannot find a good public server or a good private clan war around 20:00 if you live in North America), we only have 2 to 3 leagues (we had ClanBase and a North American league but the first one shut down and the second one died but will come back next year according to the admins). A lot of people quit when 4.2 went out. According to some statistics (
http://www.urtstats.net/players.php?duration=3months), we only turn around 600 - 700 people playing (for more than 90000 accounts created on the website).
The thing is, a lot of people play competitions and a lot of us wish that we could bring this game on the eSport scene. Some teams started to have sponsors and we had our first participation to the EuroCup of ClanBase (with cash prize included). Unfortunately ClanBase is down and everything got cancelled. Some people are looking for a try-out with ESL.
So the advice I'm asking you is, how would you manage to promote a game like Urban Terror (which is very old btw, 14+ years old) for everyone and to the eSport environment?
Although it's a fabulous game, there is always the same players, same level, same way of thinking, and so on. How can we improve this?
So yeah, I come up here to ask you to give it a second try because now this game got a real good face and feel free to give your advice on its actual situation. There are tons of debates on the official forums about the statement of the game. The game developers think it's going fine, league admins think it's black or white, and so on. But what do the real people who tried it think about Urban Terror? That's my question.
Thanks for reading and I'm glad I discovered ESR because it provides good content.
Cheers and I wish you the best for 2014,
Brainie
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If some of you want, you can try this game with me and it would be a pleasure for me to have a talk with you on teamspeak 3. There's also the official IRC channel on Quakenet on which there will always be people to help you if you have issues: #urbanterror .
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