Frankly, the arguments people are making are so ridiculous that I'm not even really defending UT3.I find it interesting that when it comes to UT3 you defend it to the death, but when it comes to any older title which actually enjoyed a greater degree of success than UT3, you seem to be saying they sucked. UT2003 or UT2004 may not have been the games I asked for but even as rabid a UT fan as I was, I learned to appreciate them and actually got immense enjoyment out of ONS for a good 3 years and Assault for another. There were plenty of servers here in EU with good games full of good people. My clan had 2 ONS servers, 1 of which was completely vanilla ONS with custom maps, and customs got played a sh1t ton and almost always full from afternoon to early morning. There were lots of other servers like ours as well. I only played American pubs on the rare occasion but most of the time I dominated even the 32p servers by about 100 points - so I guess I can understand what you mean about "morons".. even so, it always seemed to me that there was far more selection state side and I did not find that demo servers became an issue until around 2006.
Also, I'm pretty sure that retail and demo could play with each other from release. But even if not, here is a demo package from 6 months after the game came out that indicates you can.
And you know what? I enjoyed UT2003 and, to a lesser extent, UT2004. But really, they were terrible games. They had awful gameplay and I'm happy to see them go.
Having good times with a game does not make it a good game.
...
I guess you've never played it competitively then. Pew pew pew.UT2k4 had so much of a lasting enjoyable factor that its flaws became unnoticeable to me; in fact UT2k4 would not have been UT2k4 without those flaws... WadR (With all due Respect)
I guess you've never played it competitively then. Pew pew pew.
How about actually playing the game instead of hanging around here?
Really it depends on how much each respective game makes, right?Good game, great game, "really terrible" game, blah blah ... opinion this, hyperbole that.
UT3 is a fine game IMO. I may know 0-1% about anything, but nonetheless I attribute whatever greatness it may claim to the fantastic work of supremely talented artists, designers and programmers—insofar as their work actually went.
Fine as it is though, as everyone knows, UT3 is also a barren wasteland in terms of its multiplayer community, the consequence of a whole host of unmet deadlines during its development. Fully realizing in my own retarded way that I am certainly 99-100% scarcely hominid knuckle-dragger, I attribute its gigantic fail and waste of aforementioned fantastic efforts by supreme talents to filthy incompetence in terms of project management, oversight and leadership.
Indeed, after a full year of bad post-release PR, a mediocre overall reception, devaluation of the franchise, and the comparatively infinitesimal multiplayer community following—if I had any kind of significant vested interest in the company, you can bet I'd have been calling for the heads of one or more project leads already. That is, at least a 0-1%-sized chunk of their heads—owing to my spectacular idiocy, of course—and preferably from the section of the brain that controls prickish arrogance.
Moral of the story: a "great" game that doesn't get played is worth no more—in truth less—than a "terrible" one that lights up a server browser.
Wanky tough fact of life ain't it. Let us cope.
That said, probably every game that comes out these days comes out earlier than it should. If they didn't, there would be little point of post-release support.
I tend to agree with you to a certain extent, but I also think Epic was under pressure to get UT3 out.
Everyone reading this section, thread and post is obviously interested in UT3, therefore you should get out and play the game instead of just staring at this. It will work, trust me.
I think all of those probably contributed to it as well.Weren't they also trying to shove UT3 out the door in time for the 2007 holiday season? All three versions if I remember until MS threw a monkey wrench into the 360 plans. Plus as we all now know, Midway's financial situation hasn't been very hot for a while so there was more than likely a lot of pressure from them to kick it out the door. Especially when you consider that the average development time for a game is 18 months, and UT3 was well past that when they released it.
Which reminds me, $5 says the expansion includes the 360 bonus content.
so I don't think it can possibly all be Midway's fault.
How to get more people hmm ...
Release a "good" 1.4 patch that fixes all bugs (or at least 90% of them) and improve UI
Release the expansion with assault gametype back + more VCTF maps
Release all above before year 2010 (or else people will leave and play other game)
Or much better make a Final-Bug Free-Not Beta UT4 game