But the article won't tell you the background though or why it appears that way. I did some research into the game and to put it in a few words the game started out as an expansion pack for UT (you can still see that in few things like the bolta harpoon gun is definitely from that time) and got turned into Unreal: Devastation and then cancelled, but the developement team secured new publishers and made it more of a standalone lower budget game but you can still count this game as prequel to all the Unreal games in a way.
I played it when it was first released with my friend but I didn't get much interest in it, until now when I decided to revisit it especially with the information knowing it was to be an official Unreal game once. Some very known mappers worked on that game including Phil Cole who even had a map in the Fourth Bonus Pack I believe.
But yea it came around the same time as Unreal 2. There was like explosion of Unreal titles around the early 2000s, but not every project survived and some were reworked to different titles including this and gears of war. But due to the references and leftover stuff they can still be considered taking place in the Unreal universe. Devastation nicely sets up the idea of respawning with going a little bit deeper into the explanation like nanotechnology techno blabble. It could all be seen as leading to stuff like tournaments in the future. It is a bit of a stretch but here its really well done imo. At later point of the game the soldiers are basically cloning themselves after death in those teleporter like pads and you see them materialize with the "mimetic-fluid" around them and first you see skeleton before the body forms. It is quite neat but also creepy.
It is also quite like Blade Runner at some point, kind of like this is Blade Runner's equivalent in the Unreal franchise, I mean Blade Runner is now retroactively even considered part of the Alien canon despite being based on Philip K. Dick's stuff.
Philip K. Dick did receive a credit for this game though and it even has a final fight on rooftops just like Blade Runner did.
Didn't realise it was an Unreal Engine game. I tried the Demo - thought the environments were well done, nice atmosphere, models and skins looked good as did the weapons. Not keen on the gameplay though so I didn't keep it. Can see how it fits into the Unreal Universe - pity nobody has extracted any of the models/weapons.
I looked at the models, there are many older models still in the game that use vertex meshes, I believe even the pickup mesh of bolta is, but unfrotunately not the first person mesh as it was rigged to the plaer's arm so it was skeletally redone. Maybe umodel will be able to extract it.
Oh, that's a good one, dear EvilGrins, but consider this:
It might be a small group of Illuminati who will form Liandri in the future and thus if that group is responsible for it now, they are de facto the lumminatiliandri, hahaha.