Most folks know me as a decent UT/UT2004 modeller. So I speak with some experience in Unreal gaming, having followed the franchise from regular Unreal. And I have to say, I get the same feeling from UT3 that I did from UT2003. Namely, that it's just not fun.
Before anyone flames, let me add the caveats. It's extremely well-made and a lot of work and effort obviously went into it. It looks dynamite. But that's the thing. Fun is an intangible. A game can have dynamite sound, dynamite action, all the bells and whistles you could ask for. And yet sometimes you can play that game and it just isn't fun.
I felt nothing new when playing it - even after getting the collectors tin edition. It was UT2004 - with less game types, but with normal mapping. To me, not the best of trade-offs. In return for the normalmapping and extra physics capability, I had to give up lots of things, namely:
1) fast load times - the criticism about having to 'load' the menu because it's a 3D map is well made. I'd rather jump right into the menu and start making choices than have to 'wait' for it to load just so I can have a blurry 3D map sliding around in the background.
2) The UI is terrible. Face it - it's terrible! If it was made to please the console people, then it serves as a stark reminder of why I hate console games. Having to jump from screen to screen to screen simply to find nothing that I can REALLY customize is like being led by PT Barnum through a promising maze to 'see the egress' only to find myself outside the circus.
3) Custom character creation. Alas - UT2004 was just so much easier and BETTER. You could bring in all kinds of creatures, but now we 'have' to glue them to the UT3 bipeds or we get nothing. So all we can do is make some different KINDS of bipeds - we can't make raptors or junkyard mechs or anything really cool like we used to. We're stuck in space-marine purgatory with no hope of escape.
4) Support from EPIC. I would like to have participated in the Make Something Unreal Contest, like I did last time. But Epic has been very slow in providing support to the user community, especially in the matter of player model making. The files they supplied will not work in Max8, and that's what I've got. Why they can't make Max8 version of the skeletons we're supposed to use as the templates is beyond me, but for whatever reason they just won't do it. I've sent several emails and made many forum requests, but none of them help the poor folks with slightly older versions of 3Dmax. So I've had to sit this contest out. Not to mention that the Tutorial DVDs that came in the collector box seem to only care about the map mapers. The player model makers are left out in the cold.
I could go on, but right now those are my major peeves. I played UT2004 all the time, even off line in bot matches, because I could customize my team and make my own bots with their own names and everything. Not anymore. It takes so long to navigate the UT3 menus, and the directory file structure is so convoluted that it's just not worth it.
As it stands, I'm gearing up to remove UT3 from my hard drive and reinstall UT2004 - unless someone can help me find Max8 versions of the UT3 skeletons so I might try my own hand in modeling a custom character....?