Ok, to be legally on the safe side: The following is my
PERSONAL opinion. It is NOT an official company statement. Having said that, here's my
PERSONAL take on your post:
TOXIKK is created by people who have a lot of love for the Unreal Tournament series (and for arena shooters in general). In fact, many of them were UT modders once. We started to work on the game in 2012 (a time, when Epic said that there would be no new UT or Unreal based game in general in the near future... as a matter of fact, they still
said that in early 2014) and even encouraged people to
create "their own UT".
This doesn't have anything to do with your post, but it's good to know that the development of TOXIKK officially started at a time, when UT was more or less declared dead.
Back then (in 2012) we felt that this genre must not die... so we decided to leave our own footprint in the Arena-FPS genre. We gave it a lot of thought to come up with our own idea of how the genre should evolve. And while we're all fans of the UT series, most of us were not particularly happy with UT3. Mostly because of the movement... So, saying that TOXIKK's movement looks like UT3 is a slap in the face for us.
MOVEMENT
There wasn't anything wrong with UT2k4's movement in our opinion, so we decided to somewhat resemble that feeling. Combining dodge and double jumps to move swiftly through maps just feels right... also the run speed and jump heights felt good. So why not stick to it?
This may not be fully visible in the trailers... but TOXIKK's movement does not feel like UT3. Not even close. I guess you need to play it yourself, to judge (or watch more gameplay trailers... I guess we need to do something fully dedicated to our movement model). Take a look at
THIS, then watch the gameplay reveal trailer again.
We do not plan to implement "sprint", "wallslides" or stuff like that... the only thing we did, was to add a rocket jump that actually matters (
inspired by the community).
VISUAL QUALITY vs. VISUAL CLARITY
NeoRussia wrote:
What makes it stand out over UT3 other than its shiny new aesthetic (which looks awesome by the way, good job guys)?
We believe that it needs visual quality to keep the genre alive. High visibility and total clarity may be important to old school veterans, but to attract new players to the genre, arena fps games need to stop looking like Quake. Seriously. People coming from CoD or Battlefield will not feel attracted by HOLP-visuals. Staying true to our old-school roots, we promise to have maps with a lot of visual clarity (to be demo'ed in trailers to come), but so far, we really need more players than just the old-school veterans. That's why we put a lot of effort into letting the maps look as good as we can. Also, we offer a free SDK to everyone... so there's hope that the community will pick that up and create a lot of HOLP style maps.
WEAPONS
NeoRussia wrote:
The weapon balance and movement in Toxikk looks exactly like UT3 which is not good at all!
I've no idea how you can say that the weapons' balance feels like UT3 by watching the trailer. We put a lot of brain and love into the weapons. To us, they are the bread and butter of the game. I don't believe that anyone can really tell how they "feel" just by looking at the trailers. Also... it's very obvious that it is a different setup/arsenal. Still... we're not trying to reinvent the wheel. Stuff that felt good in other (older) games, can be found in TOXIKK. That's pretty much the premise: FRAG LIKE IT'S 1999!
Besides UT inspirations you'll also find ideas inspired by Doom (2)... such as the powerful Bullcraft (shotgun, placed on "3"), the Hellraiser... which is a hybrid of the Redeemer and the BFG... Doom's "Plasma Rifle" etc.
VEHICLES
We do realize that a lof of arena FPS enthusiasts do not value vehicles in the genre. But, again... we DO NEED TO REACH new players to build a solid player base. People coming from BF enjoy vehicles. And most members of the team think that they are a lot of fun. We limited them to some maps (the so called Massive Maps), but playing around with them is a lot of fun and I think that UT was very vanguard, when they implemented them in UT2k4. To us... THIS is how the genre should evolve. If you don't like vehicles... fine. Limit your play-sessions to non-vehicle maps. But you'll miss a lot of the fun.
About the vehicles being inspired by UT3: NO! Vehicles were introduced by UT2k4. Inspired by UT2k4? YESSSS! Why? Because they were a lot of fun!
Well, to cut a long story short: We really want to move back in time with TOXIKK (not speaking about the visuals). I can't tell if it's your cup of tea, but it FOR SURE is ours.