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UT3 news -- Epic's President admits to UI being f*cked
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User Interface.
I'll sum up this debate before it happens: Opinions lol. Some people like lots of hot keys and precision aiming, others prefer analog movement. With today's tv screens doubling as monitors and the prevalence of wireless keyboards/mice, there's no more couch vs. chair argument.
How much you care about that varies.
You're mixing two different monsters here. Halo is a Console game, and so is Gears of War.
UT, Quake, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress are the FPS multiplayer game series to play on PC. PC gaming back in the 90s was just as obscure as it is now. Only difference in PC gaming now is that it's just more flashy than it was before (Both graphics wise and peripheral decorations wise (Cases, video card designs, etc).
Saying UT3 is no Halo/GEoW is like saying Drake's Fortune isn't a game series capable of receiving mainstream acceptance just because it isn't Halo. Sure the game isn't on a console with a huge install base, but that doesn't mean people won't enjoy the game. The only difference here is the amount of people that have access to said game.
UT has always been fast paced, and so has Quake. People who play on the PC are used to this. Especially people who constantly play online competitively. The only thing that changed here is the fact that Consoles have gotten even more popular than they have been in the past.
And to couple this with UT3's poor sales, well, marketing for UT3 explains it all.
So yeah, I'd blame it entirely on shitty marketing. All I remember was hype hype omg this looks amazing! then one day "Yeah, UT3 has been out for a few days now"
Really? You're gonna have to source that because I'm surprised it would have sold more than the Sims for a year and a half.
Hell, it came out in October of 2003, which means during that year and a half it would have ran into Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft as well.
And The Sims 2. I don't believe that for a second. Number one selling for a month? Maybe.
Also, in a related article, Epic's CEO, Mike Capps, essentially lays the blame (without explicitly stating the developer or the blame) for UT2k3 on Digital Extremes, who played a fairly large part in the success of the original Unreal and UT. Pretty fucking low if you ask me.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Apparently, according to the article, Unreal Tournament 2003 supposedly felt "not finished" and that UT2k4 is what 2k3 "should have been" and it's all Digital Extreme's fault.
I think that's a load of crap. UT2k3 was awesome. I don't care if 2k4 expanded on the team stuff (I, for one, was bored by the stupid team stuff in 2k4 despite everyone else on the web loving it).
2k3 was still a fantastic, fast paced, twitch deathmatch FPS shooter with awesome levels, great weapon balance and variety, and an easy way to enable mods and great network code.
2k3 is my favorite personal DM twitch shooter just under Quake 3.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
http://halo.bungie.org/news.html?item=12397
#7 in overall sales. #1 week to week.
Sounds like you're due for about six months straight of the original Unreal Tournament to whip your opinions into shape ;-)
Huh? How can it been #7 overall if it's #1 week to week? (And where does the article you linked mention it was #1 selling week to week?)
I'm getting UT3 as soon as I upgrade, hopefully it lives up to 2k4.
Furthermore, it says that the game was #7 overall a year and a half after it was released. It didn't say that it was #1 for a year and a half, or even #7 for that long.
I loved it, but I love 2k3 better for some reason. Can't remember the specifics as to why though.
Meh, like I said, the team stuff never really did it for me (or most team based stuff in FPS multi games). This applies to the base-taking stuff in the original UT and the Onslaught or whatever in 2k4.
The only times I really enjoy team based FPS stuff is with a bunch of friends at LAN parties, but unfortunately just about all of us have stopped much playing PC games and our PCs have become too outdated to play newer games, esp. FPSs.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
That'd be a retardedly expensive ploy. Do you know how much the game cost to develop?
Same shit, different bun.
UT99 is still my favorite because the game speed wasn't cranked to 300%. I mean do you really have time to make a strategic attack in Assault or Onslaught when the game is that fast? No. All Assault really amounts to is rushing in wave after wave until you get lucky enough to break through the other team's defense. And straight up deathmatch is just boring.
So I play TF2 instead.
They are just that evil.
What purpose would it serve to purposefully bomb a game that probably cost $10M to develop just so that you could say that PC gaming isn't viable?
Even if we were to assume that it isn't viable, a company doesn't need to purposefully sabotage one of their one major projects to switch over to console development. They can, you know, just choose do to so without wasting millions of dollars to do so.
Also, just to point out another flaw in that logic, it's not like Epic had shitty marketing for the PC version of UT3. They had shitty marketing for both the PS3 and PC versions. Both had pretty weak sales. They could hardly say that it was merely a flaw in the PC gaming market when the console version sold pretty crap for a big budget console release. (although the PS3 version did sell a bit more than the PC version in the USA, I don't know about worldwide comparisons)
CliffyB said this: When developing a game, you aren't ultimately just leading things up to its release. The game's release has to be an event. Something big, that people know about. There's got to be hype.
With UT3, they started the hype train a year or so before its release. Then it stopped. We didn't hear much of anything about it.
Then one day it came out. And even gaming message boards that follow the industry were like, "Wait, what? It's been out for a few days? Huh."
I'm sure the reaction (or lack thereof, rather) by the majority of the market was even less aware.
No, UT3 didn't bomb because Epic wanted to "screw the PC version" so they could say that the PC market sucks.
It bombed because a) it's marketing for all versions sucked, and b) people are getting tired of the same stale Unreal Tournament gameplay iteration after iteration.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
And I didn't care.
Unreal Tournament 3, PC - £11.99 delivered
I honestly think that UT is getting kinda slow but I like to play with speed mutators. UT will forever be my practice ground for other fps games. Aim sucking? Skeet shooting map. Can't twitch quite right anymore? One shot kill hard bots, fast forward.
Wonderful games for practicing. Too damned easy to lose the edge by playing a slower game, though.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
huge difference in movement, for one UT has no strafe jumping.
Pretty much. They're trudging on with the same model, but the players and the industry have moved on. It's no use saying that the UT franchise was one of the classic three of PC FPS multiplayer with Tribes and Quake III. You're right, it was, and now that market has shrunk to a small hardcore whilst everyone else is interested in other things that are done better. And by 'better', I don't mean just throwing production values at it until every rivet has its own unique pixel shaded rust and grime. The Tribes franchise died a while ago, Quake, well, let's not even go there.
Watching the 'making of' that came with the SE of UT3 just made me feel sad for them. They spent so much time and effort on ridiculous amounts of detail that nobody was ever going to pay attention to, crazy moving parts on weapons that you never really see (you're focussing on the centre of the screen where your crosshair is in a twitch shooter for crying out loud). I'm not saying that they shouldn't have made the effort to make it look good, but there's no point in that kind of detail for it's own sake.
Compare it to something like TF2's big and bold art style and design, everything comes through and at the same time it's functional in the gameplay. They didn't NEED to have players glow blue or red in the distance, because you can instantly tell by the colour scheme who's on what team. And even the complex information of what class everyone is is easily and visually portrayed, whereas in UT3 you'd be fortunate to spot what species that guy is over there, let alone care about the details in their armour. It was just so much visual minutiae for things you were never going to see. Even in Halo you can make out different armour types better. Maybe it's just that the art style itself isn't really conducive to visual detail in such a fast paced game. But I mean, look at the original UT, it was FAR more day-glo and sci-fi and crazy, back in those days it was Quake that everyone said was brown and rusty and uninteresting. To me the art style of UT3 was pretty much Gears of Unreal, all darks and greys. The art scheme worked for Gears, but that was actually a FAR slower paced game where you could actually appreciate a good view (like the rivers of Emulsion underground).
Anyway, that's enough ranting by me on the aesthetic qualities of UT3. All in all, it's not a bad game, it's just that the games industry has pretty much moved on from that gameplay by this point. Anyone still interested in that gameplay can still happily play UT2004 and it STILL looks good, AND has loads of mods, AND has lower system requirements. UT3, if anything, is competing with UT2004 for the same audience. And it's losing because it doesn't really offer much of a compelling argument to switch over. UT to UT2004 had a lot more going for it, it was a pretty major step up with the updated Assault mode, Onslaught, Vehicle maps and HUGE levels with warfare raging across them, heck even something simple like cool ragdoll physics. All I can really see in UT3 is the ability for your text chat to come out speaking like Stephen Hawking, which whilst admittedly cool doesn't do much for the game itself.
Yeah, agreed.
I also agree that the only market UT3 has going for it is the market that is being occupied by UT2k4; and there's not much incentive for that group to move over.
I think a great new DM game has a market, even on the PC. They just have to do something fresh, something special, and then they have to market it.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Possibly yeah. But it really does need to do something special. Things like realism and crazy sci-fi weapons have largely been tapped out and can't be your sole hooks anymore. Heck, I can have tonnes of fun playing FEAR combat, and that's free.
I just can't think of a form that competitive, free-for-all deathmatch can take that you could get people paying for in the market at the moment. Of course, I'm more of a co-op person, so that might be limiting my thinking. The FPS I'm most looking forward to this year is probably Left 4 Dead.
You need system requirements to not be too high because people are so used to playing with 60-100+ fps. I think the graphics should be pretty decent though as well or else you already eliminate one reason people would play it. At least for Quake4 performance wise, real-time lighting just didn't work in a game like that, it wasn't needed, the one benefit was shadows but everyone turned them off for performance. When using r_forceambient added later in a batch (using one single ambient light to light the entire map) the performance increase was astronomical. This is why pre-computed lighting should be used for DM games for one thing. Also, speaking of Quake4 again, the HUD caused a 25% decrease in FPS. This was largely dealt with in a mod (Q4MAX) but you can't have that kind of FPS loss due to something as simple as a HUD. With the various fixes from patches and Q4Max, plus the r_forceambient, you can play Quake4 pretty well on some old ass computers, although it can look like shit because of the single ambient light.
The game modes should be slightly expanded on too. Include stuff like Clan Arena (think Rocket Arena) and Freeze Tag out of the box instead of mods having to add them. People really dig these two modes and can keep people around. You need some competitive features as well, like brightskins, better or adjustable HUDs, force model, etc. all out of the box as well. I mean naturally people will probably gravitate to the "pro" mods anyway, but each game has had to have a mod that keeps re-doing the same features and people are/were pissed when they weren't included.
Interesting stuff. I've seen some broadcast footage of Quake tournaments and was surprised at first to see everyone running around with graphical details at the minimum, purely for frames-per-second.
I think the problem though is that if you're going to make a game like that, it's definitively for the hardcore audience, and you're not going to have as much profit out of it.
I think that's partly the problem. Epic wanted and expected a massive, market-wide hit and made a big investment to do so, but at the same time the gameplay didn't advance far enough to attract a new audience, and they didn't include the kinds of features that the hardcore would expect of it either. So it got stuck with whoever was interested in UT2004 still as an audience.
Incidentally, does anyone have the actual sales figures for UT3 on the PC and PS3?
there were additional problems too. Like autodownload not working initially (talking Quake4 here) so people had a very tough time joining servers. Also, there should be auto-updating. In Quake4 at least, there was a message stating that there was a patch available, but some people never updated so the player base got segmented on V1.0 and the subsequent patches. If you make it easy to get in and play, the people will stay.
The rotting corpse of that game is currently hanging from my ceiling, I'd take a picture but she hates bright lights.
UT3 has the unfortunate distinction of being a really cool, well done game that just can't quite click for me. It seems odd right until I wander over to TF2 and spend hours after the match thinking about how much fun it was. It's difficult for me to pick out memorable moments in UT3 because the character design is based around being big, burly and bump mapped. 2K4 was still fairly bright and cheery in comparison, and with TF2 I've simply fallen head over heels in love with the characters.
The more I think about it, the more I figure it was the fun deaths that made me love 2K4. The rag dolls were funny and the people looked somewhat like people. Seeing folks blasted through with limbs flailing was cool, and it was heart warming to see a sea of oddly shaped gibs spray all over the room when someone got really pasted.
Watching Juggernaughts uncle flop to the floor with arms as thick as my torso getting caught on his massive shoulder pads isn't so much. There's the satisfaction of a kill with none of the amusement.
Perhaps I shouldn't ramble on about comparative morbid humor in a discussion of game mechanics and horrible uis, but I honestly can't recall a game that I really enjoyed for days on end that didn't make me smile and laugh. And I laugh at the most terrible things!
I'm trying to pull them up right now.
UT3 on PC sold 33,995 copies for first month NPD. (released Nov 19)
The PS3 version sold 113,000 copies on PS3 in December. (Released Dec 10)
This only accounts for North America, and not sales in Europe (or asia)
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games