Will there be another patch/mega pack?

I wouldn't expect Epic to drop support for the game given that it's not even out on 360 yet.

My two cents: Even though Epic has no obligation to provide continuing support for UT3, if they don't, what exactly would that say about Epic? That just because they (& Midway) screwed up the launch of their game that they wouldn't be willing to put in the extra effort to correct their own mistakes and provide the product that everyone wanted at release.

It's an easy decision to continue support for a hit product; the decision that shows integrity, dedication and a willingness to support your community (and thus customers) is in supporting a game that's not all that popular. A lot of people have already been turned off by the state of UT3 at release. Naturally some people blew minor things out of proportion, but at the heart of those complaints are legitimate issues. Prematurely ending support would pretty much turn the rest of us off to Epic games, and pretty much prove all the trolls right.

Maybe UT3 is a sunk cost, not popular enough to warrant it, whatever you'd like to say. I can agree with that sort of assessments if all we're looking at is the here and now. But compare that to the long term costs of disappointing your customers, turning them into people who actively badmouth your company, and abandoning the mod community (which itself is an added value to licensees in many ways, whether it's showing off what your engine can do or providing a ready pool of talent from which they can draw). In the long term, I'd argue those are a lot more costly.

Wail of Suicide said:

It's an easy decision to continue support for a hit product; the decision that shows integrity, dedication and a willingness to support your community (and thus customers) is in supporting a game that's not all that popular.

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I'd like to see some of that integrity and dedication. I can't help but think Epic is just laughing at us PC gamers. They care only about the customers that can make them profitable and that is NOT PC gamers anymore...

You know -- I don't think people realize -- that being whiny ungrateful... you know...

Probably not the best way to get a bonus pack.

You got two patches for a game... that's nowhere near enough for Epic to do for Unreal Tournament 3... but nowhere had they said they're dropping support. Halo 2 Vista on the other hand dropped support before even a single patch.

My point is: The more you bitch, the LESS LIKELY Epic will be to support you.

Everything *has* to be an Epic hates PC conspiracy because everyone's out to get you...

The sky is not falling chicken little!

sc said:

If they don't release something extra, I'll eat my copy of UT3.

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Hope you like silicon. Do you think Epic gives two squats about UT3 on the PC at this point? Perhaps once they finish the XBox version they'll have more time for that, but I don't see why they would want to invest more time in a game that few people are playing online and that appears to be a failure.

What I'd like to see them do is to work on either a UT4 (that UT3 players could patch up to) or a UT3 re-release. They have to fix the user interface the server browser, and the files/folders organization. They could call it Unreal Tournament 3: Online Multiplayer Extreme Edition or some such and start a fresh marketing campaign for it (perhaps mentioning how smooth and fast the fixed user interface is).

There's nothing that needs 'fixing' in the user-interface.
Perhaps the server-browser could use a few tweaks, but that's about it.
To expect more than that is to expect the moon on a stick for free ...
A complete re-design of the UI would effectively result in UT3.5 ... and just like UT2k4 it will be a full-price game.

I pretty much think we can forget about that discount.

This candy I'm chewing, very strange. It's a gum inside a fruit shaped sort of thing. Oh, were was I?

Epic is also working on a X360 release of UT3, perhaps there will be more contents this summer after all. As motivation for the X360 version and then it will be ported later on. It still seems minor and a little far away in time too.

This Epic paying no attention to whiners should not be taken as leaving the PC market. You still need an up to date machine to really enjoy the game. It's a blast, I've heard.

At least we can be glad that the game doesn't require a monthly fee just to play it, but that could also put a spanner to the works. Lot's of servers, players, new official content every week or month. That could be a good commercial idea, but I rather not pay that much anyway.

Why are there no upcoming modifications for UT3?

360 will die out way before the pc version since microsoft doesn't allow user content...

Fuzz said:

...
Why are there no upcoming modifications for UT3?

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Because the engine and audience pretty much demand that you use a high-end/e 3D design applications for a simple character.

In other words : if it doesn't have the same level of detail as a retail-game then no one will play.

Besides ... why design a free game, when there's money to be made by selling small games to Microsoft & co ? (an extremely realistic option in the near future!)

WHIPperSNAPper said:

What I'd like to see them do is to work on either a UT4 (that UT3 players could patch up to) or a UT3 re-release.

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why do you think there will even be a UT4?

To compare the launch of UT3 to any previous UT is to ignore the hugely different circumstances that dominate right now.

I posted a thread on their forums to the effect that they were using UT3 more as a tech demo than as a game they felt passionately about as an end product. The thread was deleted by the gestapo, of course, since, according to their forum rules, we the consumers have no place discussing or speculating about their business practices. About two months later, a transcript of some event Mark Rein was at showed him saying exactly what I was saying. So: Epic does "Games" that are designed as demonstrations of what their latest engine can do, so as to attract licensees. Once the tech demo is out, companies don't see a profit in supporting the end-user of that demo. Everything Epic has done with Ut3, from the haphazard beta-demo, to the half-baked UI, shows that their focus has shifted away from us, the players.

UT was their golden release, the product that put them firmly in the throne occupied by Id for so long. to develop for that game was easy, since they were having as much fun with it as we were. 2k4 was a positive experience because it redeemed the stumble of 2k3. But UT3 has clearly been a different sort of product launch for them.

A two-year hype-cycle hurt them, building community anticipation far in excess of what the game was going to deliver. While Epic admits they screwed this up, patting themselves on the back for years about things that were not going to end up in the game, there doesn't seem to be much indication they realize how damaging UT3 has been to their fanbase. Most of what was promised in the game was quietly dropped, which isn't a good policy when the features were so loudly proclaimed, and every aspect of the game unrelated to actual in-game time was a terrible rush-job. The lack of things that were standard in every Unreal game for the last ten years made people wonder if the hundreds of man-hours worth of demo footage and tech levels couldn't have been used in actual game development.

When it finally arrived, the demo clearly caused a disappointing reaction from the community, far lower than what they anticipated, based on their pre-release press statements. Judging by their public comments post-release, and the hard-core message control they've instituted onto their forums, they aren't happy with the full game either. Now, saddled with a multi-platform launch staggered across almost a full year, Epic will have little time to devote to any one platform's flaws, much less considering new content.

Lastly, their "postmortem" breakdown of UT3 read more like an autopsy. They knew the community had branded UT3 damaged goods, and it sounded to me as if Epic had washed its hands of the title. Disappointment on the scale this game surely caused for Epic and their fans won't make them want to do more with it. We'll get a patch or two more, and then Epic hopes we'll begin salivating over the Gears 2 hype-cycle, and forget UT3.

Maybe I'm wrong, but Epic isn't a game development company anymore. They make an engine and tech demos, and unless you've got a license, they aren't listening to you.

Epic only made one mistake ... and that is that they thought the people would understand what "work in progress" meant.
You're all screaming for 'more info' on stuff that Epic is working on and when you do get it and it is dropped from the game (for whatever reason) then you start accusing them of making false promises.

You seem to have forgotten that UT'99 was supposed to be an add-on for Unreal.
(OMG ... another 'broken' promise by Epic)

I think that the only reason UT'99 was a success at all was because at that time there was no internet/community.

And it does in no way surprise me that your thread got locked, because it had nothing whatsoever to do with UT3. It was a mindless rant by an ungrateful little baby who thinks that buying a product after having seen a demo which demonstrated that product gives him a right to complain. I really wonder why people like you even bother to visit a forum for a game that they so clearly hate.

They had to institute hard-core control on their forums because of little sh*ts like you kept posting the same old **** in dozens of threads over and over. As if the ffing horse hadn't been beaten to death years ago.

Consider yourselves lucky that the moderators for this forum are so lenient that they're willing to let this sub-section of their forum degrade into yet another whine about how crap UT3 supposedly is.

So what if Epic/UT3 sucks ... get a life and stop posting already.

Hedge-o-Matic said:

A two-year hype-cycle hurt them, building community anticipation far in excess of what the game was going to deliver...

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I'm going to have to disagree with you here. There was so little hype about UT3 in comparison to other games that no one even knew when UT3 was set to be launched. Starcraft 2 is still probably a year out from actual release and look at how much information they've divulged. UT3 had, what, one preview video at E3 2006, one preview video at E3 2007, a cinematic trailer (voiced by Don Lafontaine), and a handful of screenshots. Had there been a real buildup of information about the game, people would've realized that some of the wild features talked about two or so years earlier weren't in play anymore.

So little hype..thats why a lot of people seem to wish there was more? face it they promised big open areas they gave us corridoors

hal said:

What he may be saying is that the game was announced far too early (2005 iirc) and stuff that they were talking about just ended up never making in it in - mostly because it just turned out not to be fun. Hooray for trimming the bad stuff, but it probably shouldn't ever have been mentioned in the first place. This is something that Epic has already acknowledged as being a mistake.

I think the real problem is that the way they developed (get basics up and running and then complete the assets) meant that the actual period of time they had something they could show was relatively short. Contrast that with the extended amount of time they had to talk about it. The result being that they talked a lot about stuff that ended up not working out, they had precious few new assets to show throughout the known development time (relatively speaking), and they ended up just repeating a lot of the same stuff that did make it into the game as the release date neared.

At least, I think that's what he was saying.

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Right, well, we can probably agree that it wasn't a good idea to be talking about it as early as they did. But at the same time, what happened was you have these statements from 2005 and 2006 about morphing terrain, levels ten times as big as existing levels (always struck me as a bad idea given how boring some of the larger ONS maps were), entire worlds created from seamless travel between maps ... And then by the time 2007 rolls around, the only new information you're getting is a cinematic trailer and some new screenshots.

Now, to me, it was obvious that things they hadn't talked about for two years weren't going to make it in the game. But the lack of information is what caused people to build up their expectations on that front, because the paucity of substantive information released allowed them to hold onto these hopes that these fantastical features they talked about three years ago were going to make it in.

JaFO said:

I think that the only reason UT'99 was a success at all was because at that time there was no internet/community.

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For you to say that at this site, of all places, is laughable...

I wonder what QAPete and the rest of the guys that have been around since Unreal would think of a statement like this.

UT'99's success was a DIRECT RESULT of fan-sites like this very one!

I remember a later quote from someone at Epic that they ahd experimented with up to 64 players on incredibly large levels and they said it just wasn't UT anymore.

JaFO said:

Epic only made one mistake ... and that is that they thought the people would understand what "work in progress" meant.
You're all screaming for 'more info' on stuff that Epic is working on and when you do get it and it is dropped from the game (for whatever reason) then you start accusing them of making false promises.So what if Epic/UT3 sucks ... get a life and stop posting already.

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Chill, Jafo. No need to take this all so personally. My post was not a rant, nor was it some sort of shrill hate-on. Like I said, I posted observations about the game and why I thought Epic went the way they did. My thoughts were borne out by later press from Epic, wherein they basically agreed with my assessment. I don't feel this sort of discussion should be out of bounds, since it wasn't insulting in any way.

I also repeatedly say I'm not a "tell me more" sort of person. I don't watch any pre-release video, don't look at pre-release screens, and try to avoid specific detail about upcoming titles.

If you've read my posts, you know I don't do the emotional thing, and, while I love the gameplay of UT3, I try to address the things I disagree with in an upfront way, and discuss why I think Epic may have gone the route they did.

I also don't do personal attacks, so I'd appreciate you returning the favor, if you don't mind.

hal said:

What he may be saying is...
At least, I think that's what he was saying.

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Thanks, Hal, I couldn't have said it better myself.