Compared to its peers in the genre, such as
Quake II, Unreal brought to life not only
highly-detailed indoor environments, but also easily the most impressive outdoor landscapes ever seen at the time.
The Unreal engine brought a host of graphical improvements, including
colored lighting. Although Unreal is not the first major release with colored lighting (see
Quake II), it is the first to have
a software renderer as feature rich as the hardware renderers of the time, including colored lighting and even a limited form of texture filtering referred to by programmer
Tim Sweeney as an ordered "texture coordinate space" dither.
Unreal was
one of the first games to utilize detail texturing. This type of multiple texturing enhances the surfaces of objects with a second texture that shows material detail. When the player stands within a small distance from most surfaces, the detail texture will fade in and make the surface appear much more complex (
high-resolution) instead of becoming increasingly blurry.
[4] Notable surfaces with these special detail textures included computer monitors and pitted metal surfaces aboard the prison ship, and golden metal doors and stone surfaces within Nali temples.
Upon release, Unreal was
praised for not only for its graphics and environments, but also for above-average AI and gameplay. Enemies would dodge out of the way of projectiles and pose a competent threat.
Headshots would do more damage as well, and the player could even decapitate enemies with weapons such as the Razorjack and the Sniper rifle. The planet of Na Pali was rich in atmosphere compared to many other FPS out at the time—outdoor levels were populated by many small creatures and birds, who did not attack the player.
Its engine was considered revolutionary at the time, boasting huge environments and colourful lighting available in software as well as hardware-accelerated mode.
Tron was hardest to find.. It also set me back about 1500.
