The Unreal
engine was produced not only as a
game, but with the
intention of
licensing the
engine out to other gaming companies for
modification in creating new games. Unreal, along with
Quake II, was one of the first engines produced with this intention. A few games have been created with the engine, such as
Rune,
Wheel of Time and some, as of
today are still in
development, like the highly-anticipated
Duke Nukem Forever (the
production time seems to be living up to the
title).
Unreal also added a little more story
depth to it's
genre with the
translator, picked up at the very beginning. It allows you to read signs written in
alien writing, logs left behind by
dead humans as you pass their
corpses, (giving you a
hint of how
those who came before perished as opposed to simply leaving them there for you to find), ship logs, and even the logs of the
Skaarj commanders against whom you wage
war. This adds a
literary element to the game somewhat like the various
books you can find and read lying around in some of the
Ultima games.
The basic premise of the story is very similar to
Quake II. You're the
survivor of a crashed
ship. in Unreal, however, it was not a
marine troop carrier, but a
prison ship with a cargo of condemned
humans. So however the crash puts you in peril, it is also your
salvation. You must find a way to survive on a
strange world. Discovering along the way that the same
aliens who attacked the prison ship have also
enslaved the indigenies who await their
messiah, an
offworlder who is
prophecied to deliver them from the hands of
slavery and
oppression, but you just want to find a
ship and get the
fuck out of there.