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Rob Elam, the creator of One Must Fall 2097, started off on OMF2 under Epic's wing. It was supposed to be a 640x480 parallax-scrolling fighting game for Windows 95, and it required a new engine. It was coming along nicely and had some cool features, but at the same time, 3D stuff was becoming increasingly popular and achievable on the PC and so Rob had to make a tough decision. He could either continue writing OMF2 as a 2D game and, after a year or so, make a fun but widely overlooked game, or he could scrap everything he’d worked on, and jump into the wild new world of 3D. Since he chose the later, and Epic was all for it, designs for OMF2 the 3D game began.
Unfortunately, Epic also had it's Unreal project started around then, an immersive first person shooter. Rob was concentrating more on the character-concentrated graphics at that time and was not giving much attention to the game enviroment. So he decided to trade: Unreal could get some cool character-related graphics, and Rob would get the cool environment enhancements. However, this was not to be. And so came the fateful day where Rob left Epic and continued working on OMF2 with Edgar, a local programmer. That effort is about to pay off with OMF: Battlegrounds, estimated to be released somewhere during the first quarter of 2002.
The story is similar to OMF 2097, where humans are still remotely controlling robots to settle their disputes. Confirmed robots are Jaguar, Pyros, Chronos, Katana, and Gargoyle from the original OMF, as well as Force and Warlord, two new mechs designed for the game. Now, if I only I had access to these babies back then... Anyway, the story will take part 20 years after the original OMF, so most of the characters will be more matured, except for Grandpa Ibrahim perhaps. Not to worry. The main focus of the game will still be the action, so die-hard fans have no reason to worry. Scrap and Destruction moves are also still included in the game. Players should be able to learn the controls with no great difficulty, only that the gameplay will be slightly different due to its new dimension. However, this has spawned different problems for Rob and his team. You remember all those globes that kept floating around the fire pit in OMF 2097? In order to trigger it, players had to kick it and activate a massive fireball to knock your opponent off his feet for a while. Well, in OMF: Battlegrounds, most of the obstacles will have to be player-triggered instead of happening randomly, except in the case of the Blade Arena. For example: The fighter jets in the new desert arena are player triggered hazards as well. When you grab a pickup and throw it at someone, it'll cause a group of fighter jets to be summoned and attack the selected target. When this happens, the leader of that squad will inform your victim of their attack, so even if you didn't notice someone throwing the pickup at you, the pilot will notify you of his attack. So in conclusion, the fighter jets will not attack randomly.
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