eXpanded MultiPlayer

Overview

Gallery

eXpanded MultiPlayer
Goal limits	Captures Time
Is team-based?	Yes
Appears in	Unreal II: The Awakening

eXpanded Multiplayer, shortened as XMP is a class and vehicle-based gametype in Unreal II: The Awakening.

Overview

XMP is a team-based game, where the players are split into two teams, red and blue. Both teams have a base with an Artifact Node. Each Artifact Node initially contains two Artifacts. The main objective is to steal the enemy's Artifacts and then register them at the Artifact Node belonging to the player's own team, but a team can also win by capturing and holding all generators, effectively draining the enemy team's energy.

Energy is required for almost everything in the game: weapons, vehicles and even the player's advanced movements. Autonomous mechanical defenses (so-called "Deployables") consume the most energy. Without energy, registering the enemy's Artifacts as their own cannot be done. Each map has a number of Generators which can be hacked by each team to provide energy. There are two separate supplies of Energy a player is concerned with: their team's Energy supply (the tall blue bar to the extreme lower right of the HUD) and their personal Energy reserve (the short yellow bar to the immediate left of the team energy bar). The personal Energy reserve is depleted when performing any of the 'advanced' functions of the game; i.e. hacking an object, deploying a turret or a mine, healing a teammate or activating jump jets. Some things, however, draw directly from the team's energy reserve, such as deployed turrets, or driving or firing from a vehicle. The player's personal reserve is refilled from the team's energy bank; therefore, if every team member 'spends' their energy frivolously, the team will soon find itself without defenses, vehicles, or even a place to register stolen artifacts. For this reason, a player should handle their energy responsibly, at least until their team has enough Generators under its control to support multiple energy-intensive activities.

Throughout the battlefields are deployment points at which players can spawn after being killed. Most deploy points can be hacked like generators and hence taken over by the opposing team.

Classes

In XMP, players can choose to spawn as one of three character classes. The classes have several different attributes, such as speed, armor and weapons. All classes have a stamina bar and the ability to sprint; sprinting roughly doubles the player's base speed (determined by their class) and depletes their stamina bar at a constant rate. In vehicles this is represented instead by a turbo bar, activated by the driver with the same key. The player's speed is represented by a tall blue bar to the lower left of the HUD and an abstract value next to it; stamina is represented by the short yellow bar to the immediate right of the speed indicator.

The Ranger class is the lightweight class of the game. As such, it has the highest speed in the game while also having the weakest health stats. It also doubles up as a sniper and a medic. His loadout is composed by the Widowmaker Sniper Rifle (with a slower ROF and three rounds per clip), Aida's 'Grace' pistol, a grenade launcher capable of firing Frag and Smoke grenades, and the Shock Lance. Also, as the medic class of the game, he can drop packs of health for his allies, giving him an edge over the Tech and the Gunner, since the three classes can revive fallen allies, but only the Ranger can heal.

The Tech class is the mediumweight class of the game, with medium strength armor and medium walking speed. He's specialized in equipment, vehicles and other technologies, being able to hack faster than anybody else. His loadout is composed by a grenade launcher capable of firing EMP and Toxic grenades, the Shotgun, the Combat Assault Rifle and portable forcewalls, autoturrets and rocket turrets.

The Gunner class is the heavyweight class of the game, strong but slow. Its loadout includes the Rocket Launcher, the Flamethrower, a grenade launcher capable of firing Concussion and Incendiary grenades, and laser-triggered mines.

Vehicles

XMP has three vehicles: Raptor, Harbinger and Juggernaut. Like the player classes, each vehicle type has specific advantages and disadvantages over the other ones, like speed, armor and weaponry. Driving a vehicle or firing a vehicle weapon uses energy from the team's reserve.

Hackables

The following are key objectives in the map which both teams fight for:

• Deploy Point: Spawning point for the team that owns them.
• Energy Source: Energy generator, allows teams to use advanced features and vehicles.
• Shield Wall: Hackable panel that generates a wall that allows players, but not vehicles, to pass through it. Found in XMP-Alcazar.
• Door Control: Locks and releases controls for certain doors. Located in XMP-Garden.
• Turrets: All of them require controlling panels and require enough team energy.
  • Ion Turret: Launches a powerful blast over an area in the map. Located in XMP-Freefall and XMP-Lowlands.
  • Pole Turret: A turret rotating over a pole which can freely shoot at any direction it can look at.
  • Roundhouse Turret: A turret rotating over a single plane.
  • Garden Turret: Rail-based turret located in XMP-Garden.
  • Winged Turret: Special turrets appearing in XMP-Lowlands.

Tips and tricks

• Using the Sprint button during a dodge helps you dodge further.
• While you are in the air during a sprint-dodge, if you jump (ie do a jetpack boost) you can fly much further - especially if you're playing with the light Ranger class.
• Auto Turrets are slow to lock on; it's not too hard to keep moving and jump out of their range of vision long enough to get behind them and blow them up.
• Your vehicles respawn when blown up. Blow up any Raptors on the way to the enemy base in hopes one will be there by the time you grab an artifact - take their car and leave in a hurry.
• If someone's in a manned-turret, and you want to take them out, shoot at the control in the little room with a grenade or something strong. The Ranger class can get more use from the Shock Lance secondary; if they are still in it will take them out in 1 hit. Plus, Grenade ammo is much more valuable than Shock Lance ammo.
• The Raptor can go up some pretty steep slopes. In order to keep control, you may want to keep it slow, but it'll go. It tends to spin out when you try to turbo it onto a slanted surface (or it lands off-kilter) which can get you killed if you're trying to make a quick getaway. Just make sure you don't go slow with someone else in it around the normal circuit.
• It's possible to move while hacking something, you have to stay within hacking range and keep your reticle centered on the object, but you can sidle around deploy points and other hackables in order to keep an eye on potential attackers.
• If you're low on power, "use" turrets and walls deployed by your team, in order to get rid of them.
• More than one person can hack a Door Control/Energy Source/Deploy Point to speed the process up.
• If you travel in pairs/teams with a Ranger/medic its VERY easy to just wait until all enemies are dead and revive each other then the Ranger/medic can 'repair' the others and drop medpacks for himself before moving on. Without a Ranger/medic you're pretty much going to have to rely on fighting only near buildings/tunnels with the medical stations.
• If you want a good way to defend yourself leaving the base, make sure you're a tech and have a gunner nearby, get him to stand there and keep 'repairing' you (ie, giving you more weapons). Keep dropping both types of turrets and being 'repaired' until you have a small army around you (2-3 of each) then pick them all up. On your way into the enemy base make sure you leave them facing both directions to cover you as you leave. If they're not destroyed when you are on your way out they will most likely be destroyed soon enough so they pose less of an energy threat than leaving stuff to protect spawn points.
• While leaving Auto Turrets and fences around Deploy Points can be wasteful (unless the fence is to protect from spawnkilling) leaving defensive systems around Energy Sources is often a good idea.
• If you walk up to a friendly energy fence and hit the 'use' button while standing before it, it will turn green allowing you to pass through without disabling it. If you're on the run and time it right you can slow down not much longer than it takes to dodge again and still pass through.
• Using next/previous weapon while ZOOMED in with the Sniper Rifle will step back & forth between 10 levels of zoom.

Trivia

• There have been three large bonus packs for XMP, although none by developer Legend Entertainment or publisher Atari.
• The mod was unofficially ported to Unreal Tournament 2004 as Unreal Tournament: Expanded Multiplayer (UT XMP) "with the blessing of former Legend Entertainment employees". The mod was announced on April 30, 2004 and Free Monkey Interactive started porting it. Besides porting XMP content, original material was added.

Development

• The addon was spearheaded by Aaron Leiby and Scott Dalton.
• The gamemode was intended to be a lot different than it turned out to be in the end (again due to lack of time). It was never complete due to the lack of time. The project was ambitious, and Legend Entertainment simply didn't have enough time to complete the gametype. A lot of alpha-state code is still in Unreal II, though. The gametype was never attempted to be remade to the original form (U2XMP was made in a hurry and was simplified for a small team with only a few months of time to complete the task) mostly because not many people knew of the gametype:
  • It was initially meant to be a much more strategy based game, even called "Real-time strategy in a shooter game" by a few review sites. Each team initially started with one Replicator and a few Energy Relays in their possession.
  • Energy Relays were meant to be used to get energy from Energy Sources, instead of the later Hacking. An Energy Source could fit up to 8 Energy Relays, but the energy output was shared between all of them equally, and the sum of all individual Relays generated energy equals the energy generated by a single Relay if it's the only one attached to the Source. Each Energy Relay had an amount of health that was automatically regenerated by stopping all of the energy production and then using the energy to heal itself. If a player destroyed an enemy Relay, they would have gotten points equal to those given from destroying an Automated Defense deployable. This introduces a variety of strategies - you could either lock the generator by placing 8 Relays at a single source, place relays on already used enemy generators to steal energy or place one Relay on each Generator to save time. Replicators were the heart of the game. They were used to generate all the technology for the team. They were controlled by players that were either Techs or had a rank of Commander. Replicators were immobile and appeared to be much like computers. When used, players were given two categories to choose from - Research and Production. All technologies had to be researched before being able to produce anything. All operations take an amount of time and energy (as a rule, better technology takes more time and consequently more energy). Technologies have to be researched only a single time before production can be started. Only one operation can be executed at a time, so there's nearly infinite amount of possibilities of using the Replicator.
  • The core of the gameplay, as in U2XMP, is to capture an amount of Artifacts. But unlike U2XMP, Artifacts could be placed absolutely anywhere in the map, giving more possibilities for Level Designers. Artifacts could be placed like in U2XMP - in the enemy base, or out in the environment. Each of them could require different qualities to reach - one could be accessible only by jumping over lava pits, the other would require you to go through a room full of monsters from the single player game while the third could require you to solve a puzzle or go through a maze. Generally the gametype was highly customizable and thus let Level Designers have an almost unlimited control over the gameplay.
  • Unlike U2XMP, it was meant to be a pickup-based gametype, but items don't respawn like in the single player campaign. Instead, you have to use the Replicator to get the items you need. To make it less annoying, you only have to get the weapons, and ammo comes in "Ammo Packs" for individual player classes. Each player class could use a lot more weapons than in U2XMP, although still had their own restrictions. For example, Rangers were the only ones that could use the Sniper Rifle, while Gunners were the only ones that could use the Grenade Launcher. Each class also had different starting weapons (except the Dispersion Pistol, which was available for everyone).
  • Jet packs were also not a part of the energy suits of players. Instead, they had to be researched and produced with Replicators as all other items. That's why Field Generators were useful - you can't just jump over them if you don't have a Jet Pack.
  • Replicators could also produce all kinds of things, ranging from deployables to vehicles to security cameras and security bots. There were also research-only options, for example, Manned Turrets. Level Designers could also configure what teams are allowed to build and what not. All production went to special Level Designer marked storage rooms to make it more realistic.
  • It might sound as if it required a large team of players to make the gametype playable. But bot support was available and already in Unreal II, and even if bots were disabled, a one-on-one match was possible, without even restricting players to the Tech class. If there is only one player in a team, he automatically becomes the Commander. Commanders have no pickup restrictions and can operate Replicators even if their class is not Tech. Replicators were also meant to have queues, so the player can select what he wants to get and let the Replicator work for him. And even if it wasn't operated, it would automatically research and build what it thinks would be useful for the team.
• The original Unreal II (released February 2003) wasn't as popular as other Unreal games, partly because it didn't have a multiplayer component. XMP was Legend's solution to this problem; the developers worked in their spare time to create XMP, unsupported by publisher Atari. XMP was developed by Legend Entertainment for Atari to deliver on the original promise to extend the original single player game Unreal II with a multiplayer functionality. The first playable version was released and made available for download on December 9, 2003, and requires Unreal II: The Awakening's play disc to play. Almost nearing completion, the development of the game was suddenly halted by the unexpected close-down of Legend Entertainment on January 16, 2004. On January 26, 2006, community member ]HoC[Omen announced that a new master server was already online.
• Bot support and female models were no-gos because of budget and time constraint reasons.

Preview Notes

"In the new expanded multiplayer game, player teams will fight for control of planet surfaces and alien artifacts using nanotechnology replicators to build ever more sophisticated weapons such as automated gun turrets, force fields, sensors, recon and repair robots, and more. Players will choose one of three player classes at the beginning of play - class selection establishes a balance of speed, special abilities, armor, and firepower. All races, abilities, weapons, equipment, and tactics will have precedents in the single player game - but the expanded multiplayer experience brings everything together at the same time."

– Unreal II website

Essential files

Main article: Essential files#Unreal II: The Awakening

Here you'll find everything needed in order to play XMP.

External links and references

• Wikipedia:EXpanded MultiPlayer - Wikipedia's article on eXpanded MultiPlayer

See also

• Unreal II: The Awakening

Gametypes for Unreal II: The Awakening
Campaign gamemodes
Single player • Cooperative multiplayer (Xbox version only)
Multiplayer gamemodes
XMP
Other
Deathmatch • Team Deathmatch