Unreal Tournament 3 is a blast to play. I dont care that it got mixed reviews and a less than stellar welcome by UT players across the world. Unfortunately, many stupid decisions on Epic's side with the release and the game itself set it up for failiure. Many people complained of glitches in the demo when it was released, glitches that took a little time for Epic to submit patches correcting them. Notable complaints when the game was released were about it's "dumbed-down" made-for-consoles UI, which to UT fans, some of the most technically savvy computer users took as a kick in the stomach. To them, Epic which made UT what it is today thanks to its hardcore pc enthusiasts, was now telling them to take a hike, favoring next-gen consoles and the juicy deals that come along with them. One very noticeable example of this was their initial announcement of a native Linux client that was supposed to be shipped shortly after the game was released. It's almost 10 months now, and the FAQ section where it states that hasnt changed since it was published shortly after UT3's release. A few spokespersons from Epic kindly appeared to public debates, where conspiracies of deals with the publisher of one of their titles, Microsoft, as the reason of the apparent cancellation of the Linux client were brewing, stating that work was still being done on the client. A quick statement, completely off the record, with no possible accountability. A 2 week delay of the windows client o a AAA game title would be unacceptable, a 10 month delay would be simply disastrous. Every previous UT game had a native Linux client shipped with it either on the DVD case, or available for download shorty after it was released. The Linux gaming community wonders about the delay, their interest in ut3 waning with each passing day.
Many of these mistakes can be corrected easily by Epic, it only takes the will to do it. However, if the main reason why their latest UT title is the way it is not because of erroneous decisions, but by "design", the design of console gaming, their problems are indeed bigger. They might be getting a whole new audience of console gaming players, but at the expense of alienating their dedicated player base, the ones that upgrade their computers to play their games.
It'll never be updated IMO, from a business standpoint they most likely have washed their hands of this product already.
If you check the stats www.gamespy.com/stats you'll see that there is a very small amount of people that play the game online. In fact the game regularly falls off the list with less than 100 players online playing most the time. Since this is primarily an online game, it can only be reasoned that sales were extremely low and then there is no compelling reason to spend anymore resources on this in the hopes of increasing sales.
I hope they manage to fix all these issues and have a new release, like UT2K4, someday in the future.
Very good insightful points raised here, I would say epic was probably too busy polishing up Gears of War for microsoft to actually make a good follow up to ut2k4. The fact that it got high reviews and a cold reception from the gaming audience reflects the complete disconnect between the "media authorities" and what gamers want. Or probably more time was spent on the unreal engine 3 technology rather than on the game itself. The mistake came back to bite them where it hurt, in the bottomline. And i agree, piracy is the gaming industry's favorite scapegoat. OTOH, MSU contest has been launched already, hopefully more than a few groups of talented modders will be able to make something "unreal" with unreal tournamet 3, or, pardon the pun, actually make it "unreal". Pity that the linux crowd wont be likely to participate, given they've been left out in the cold.
I was thinking to put a picture of CliffyB to go with your comments! He's the media darling of the game industry.
In fact the game regularly falls off the list with less than 100 players online playing most the time.In previous UT's, you had plenty of options, UT3 removed most of them and changed UI to boot, infact I hear it's impossible to change the menu's to a custom one ,although I haven't seen the latest progress on that though.
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Alesianlarken
foreclosures
I bought UT3.
I played UT99 for about 7500 hours.
Ut2004 for about 3000.
UT3 about.. 20 hours.
I want my money back honestly.. It wasn't worth it.
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