Why does everyone love Unreal Tournament's weirdest map?

Comments · 2.3K

• AC

  @aceflibble · 4 years ago (edited) · pinned

  RE competition, Facing Worlds always was and still is the tournament and league final map in pro UT. I used to compete (mostly national, very rarely international, and I&apos;ll grant you that back then it was completely different to esports now) and <i>every</i> set at <i>every</i> event ended on Facing Worlds. A UT weekender where the last match wasn&apos;t decided on Facing Worlds was unheard of. To this day, I still haven&apos;t seen more than a handful of maps in any shooter that are more competitive. It&apos;s perfectly symmetrical, and as you said early in the video, when you&apos;re playing on LAN with classic 5v5 or modern 6v6 &nbsp;teams, it works perfectly. It was always standard practice to have two people on the team assigned to sniper &amp; spotter/counter-sniper duty, in any map, and Facing Worlds is ideally designed for a spotter up top, sniper halfway down, and three (or four) people legging it across no man&apos;s land. In those smaller LAN games the ground team could actually get things done, while your guys in the towers took each other out. Is it less &apos;usual&apos; than a flat arena deathmatch? Yes. But is it balanced? Yes, absolutely perfectly evenly, both horizontally and vertically. And that made it the most competitive map.<br>CTF-Face and de_dust2 should be the standard by which all other competitive maps are judged. I don&apos;t think it&apos;s any surprise that the Overwatch team said on their forums some years back that they were inspired by Facing Worlds and Lava Giant for some of their CTF maps. (Though that could also just be because they love UT regardless of quality; just look at Sombra&apos;s translocator.)<br><br>... But yeah, it&apos;s a total garbage map for online and blowing away bots as they spawn in absolutely was the most fun thing to do with UT.<br><br>EDIT: Oh yeah, and as far as the &apos;99 Tournament-specific lore goes—this is not true for general Unreal lore or later Tournaments—the players can run around and breathe on the map because they&apos;re synthetic, and not actually breathing or affected by gravity (or the lack of). After a combatant dies or teleports for the first time, the respawner/teleporter replicates them as a cyborg in their last fully healthy state. (So, yes, you&apos;re not actually teleporting when you use the translocator; you&apos;re dying and being replicated.) The replicated person can only exist within the boundaries of the playing field (i.e. why they gib if they go past the map edges) but can live there indefinitely, with no need for water, food, sleep, or air, to fight as long as the Tournament needs them to. This is also why they don&apos;t float off into space, they can take a saw blade to the chest and not have their aim affected, etc.<br>But like I said, that&apos;s just Unreal Tournament 99 specifically. How it also keeps happening in Unreal, who knows, and later UTs shifted the lore around a bit.

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• EN

  @EncartaCDROMBoxset · 4 years ago

  &quot;A bunch of aging gamers making hour-long impassioned video essays about old video game shit, so that other aging gamers can feel seen.&quot; <br><br>Now THIS is a Big Mood.

  1.4K

• DE

  @deusfaux · 4 years ago

  not a word about the music? that&apos;s a huge part of what made it so memorable

  713

• SI

  @silentcafejazz · 4 years ago (edited)

  The fact alone that facing worlds has such a beautiful ambient 90&apos;s jungle backround track makes it a icon.

  887

• MR

  @mrpetebojangles21 · 2 years ago

  Instagib, shock-rifle only, low-grav, custom large bedroom style maps (where the player is the size of a fly) are some of my fav childhood gaming memories!

  93

• ST

  @Steve-ln3kl · 4 years ago

  I&apos;d honestly forgotten just how kick-ass the music for UT was.

  49

• HE

  @hemangchauhan2864 · 4 years ago

  Facing World music is just the right level of Drum&amp;Bass and Electronica bliss.<br><br>I&apos;ve never heard anything like this

  874

• JO

  @johnarmstrong5533 · 4 years ago

  I&apos;m glad that the video mentioned the endearing anti-lore of the videogame, where the makers would build anything that seemed cool to them, with no need to laboriously connect every dot or make everything fit.<br><br>&quot;Yes, we&apos;re in space now. No, we&apos;re not going to think of an explanation why. Go have fun.&quot;

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• CP

  @CptMonstruoso · 1 year ago

  I cried when I saw it in the Secret Level episode &lt;3

  64

• HA

  @haldq · 3 years ago

  Everybody knows that &quot;Oumuamua&quot; is just CTF-Facing Worlds

  7

• HA

  @hasnopants · 4 years ago

  I do feel I am living in a wasteland of broken dreams.

  195

• R1

  @R1ckDeckard · 4 years ago

  All those years later Unreal Tournament is still the most fun game I&apos;ve ever played. It was a weird, nerdy guy to Quake&apos;s frat dude bro. The most satisfying rocket launcher ever.

  253