Make People Like UT3

I thought it was "common knowledge" that UT3 was released prematurely. I Guess not??

DGUnreal said:

Unfinished means unplayable... entire missing components.
Just because a UI doesn't reflect the number of exposed options that some people think it requires does not mean it is "unfinished".

None of the things you have brought up stop you from playing the game the way it was designed and meant to be played. Can you not launch a game? Shoot a weapon? Drive a vehicle? etc.?
If vehicles didn't turn or some of the weapons were not skinned or didn't shoot, then that would be classified as unfinished.

Don't equate your idea of what optional or extra or enhanced feature items you think the game should have to its being "unfinished". There is a massive difference.

By your definition many other games also fall into the "unfinished" category. As an example did you ever play Q3A? It's menu and setup screens are thinner and more poorly done than UT3 ever was. So I guess it is unfinished as well and id ripped us off... I have never seen people whining about its UI.

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Maybe I'm using "unfinished" incorrectly. I think you're taking issue predominantly with my usage of it. Of course I don't mean that the game is unplayable. I have played the game a lot myself. Let me provide an example that (hopefully) better explains where I'm coming from:

Let's imagine that it's mid September of last year and Epic is nearing the end of it's alotted development period for UT3. Intending to create a new UI to take over a placeholder they already had in place, under tight time constraints they made the current UI, which worked, but suffered from a lack of options and relatively clunky feel.

Instead of creating a server browser with some advanced and convenient functionality (such as the ability to right-click on a server and copy it's ip) we have the current implementation. We still can't even see who is spectating in the server (or, in the case of duel servers, the 5+ person in queue.)

Obviously, this UI is not "broken" or "unusable." But I'm not going to call the game "finished" in the UI department because "it has one that gets me in the server" or "starts up the instant action match with the settings I told it to use without crashing." It's clear from Epic's past works that such features are desirable, considering they made the effort to include them. If it makes you happy, I'll call it "unpolished" but that's being generous

DGUnreal said:

If that were the case, then lack of AA means it is unfinished also.
Does no AA stop you from playing the game?

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No, as I have said I don't mean to imply that UT3 is unplayable.

DGUnreal said:

UT Community: "Where's the game, I want the game, it's been long enough already"...
Epic: "Ok but a lot of the optional non-game stuff won't be finished by then"...
UT Community: "I Want The Game!"...
Epic: "Ok, here"...
UT Community: "Why doesn't this work the way I want? Where's this? Where's that?"... waaah!

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Agree with the point you're making here.

Electrolyte said:

So you're saying all the other PC games out there that have problems on many configurations are unfinished?

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Nice extrapolation.
I never implied that a faulty configuration for most people makes a game "unfinished." Read more carefully.

Sir_Brizz said:

Wrong. That IS the point. Epic can't fix a problem that they don't have any control over. This is like saying that if GameSpy goes down they are responsible for it going down. This is a stupid point of view and incredibly ignorant. They are at fault for implementing Gamespy but not for GameSpy going down.

Same with OpenAL (though without OpenAL you would have NO surround support ).

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You just asserted that epic's involvement in the problem was unkown, and now you're implying that they're completely separated from it. Which is it?

OpenAL crashes the game with X-FI cards, but openAL's problems don't end with creative products. When I enable openAL with my onboard realtek the sound is horribly over-modulated and loud. I don't experience this problem with UT2004.

Are you going to claim that it's a problem with openAL itself? D:

Sir_Brizz said:

No, it's not at all. It is a feature that was not important to them at release and is clearly not important to them now (thus, unsupported). You can't just make things "required features for the game to be finished" at will.

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I never decided that UT3 would be "unfinished" if it didn't come out of the box with client-side demo recording. They did by including a stripped down, buggy version in UT3 while having (relatively) smooth incarnations in previous UTs. The natural progression from that is to conclude that client-side demo recording was abandoned before it was finished, which is why I claimed it was "unfinished." And if it's not supported, why is there a UI option to record demos?

Sir_Brizz said:

I was obviously talking about your final paragraph, which did not mention the server browser. And the game does not lack modding capability, it just lacks the modding capability of UT2004, which is not the same thing.

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Again, I could have worded it clearer, but now you're just picking apart words. You know what I meant when I said it lacked "modding capability."

Aren't you the one that likes concentrating on someone's overall message and not each individual word they use?

Sir_Brizz said:

You can join the loving ranks of other people on this forum who don't care about my arguments (or tend to not want to or care to try to understand them) and instead attack the delivery of the arguments.

Fun times!

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Lets not forget people dont always like something because they actually like it and find it good fun. They sometimes play things just because other people are and for no other reason then that, ofcoarse maybe they just have fun playing with their friends so really the game they are playing doesnt matter to them. In that respect alot of it might be trends, someone might not play games that dont have x feature and others will only play games without x feature. Like myself I dont like eye in sight or whatever you want to call it, I dont totally avoid games with that feature but when I play those games I rarely use it.

Ive said this before but since Sijik brought up UC2, thats about as far as you could take 2k4's gameplay and I enjoyed that more than I did UT2k4. Only reason I bought an xbox was to play UC2 actually, glad I did because since playing that and Q4 I never really had the same view of 2k4 that I had before hand.

So moving fowards isnt working, moving to the side isnt working and probably a complete step backwards isnt going to work either. Can Epic really get a UT game right by the fans now? For me there is alot of I liked x in this title but didnt like z, yes that even applies to UT3 but overall there is less z's vs x's then there has been for past titles. Ive found all UT games fun at some point but alot of the time as with other online games it depends who Im playing against, some matches will always be more fun than others.

Ive always had this strange notion though that gamers dont always know what they want, so while a game might be popular you could replicate it with a few differences and no one would like it. You give them something totally new and theres a possibility for it taking off in a big way or on the flipside it might not even make a ripple (wether its a step forward for gaming or not). Even a game made from pure marketing data on what fans want would be a hit and miss.

One of the reasons I just trust in the developers to do what they do, win or loss. Sure gamers know games but do they know what makes people like games? It surely isnt the fact that x people like the same z feature that causes a game to be popular, or maybe it is the whole perception of a franchise for sequels. As mentioned even a well established franchise can hit or miss, its just a risk developers take.

I think Epic has always taken risks with UT and UC though, some paying off more than others. While UT3 might be seen as a step backwards by a few that just shows how narrow minded gamers can be when it suits them, even then UT3 aint no UT either so take that which ever way you want to.

Maybe its just time for a fresh multiplayer FPS to hit the PC gaming scene to end the days of doom, quake, halflife, team fortress, battlefield, medal of honour, unreal, counter strike, fear, call of duty, enemy territory. Still if its fresh enough you probably wont pry people away from their most beloved IP's (and in there their specific games of choice), just the way it goes I guess.

Classed based play does seem to be pretty popular but when Epic tried it, it didnt go so well, oh but dodge-jump was the step forward right? Does call of duty 4 have vehicles in multiplayer? So what do you want gamers? meh I'll ask developers what they are willing to give instead

hilo_ said:

Nice extrapolation.
I never implied that a faulty configuration for most people makes a game "unfinished." Read more carefully.

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But you're saying something is unfinished implementation because it's not fully supported. Did you ever realise that it could be the sound card company causing the problem? I would say this was more of Creative's fault as you don't see many people with onboard, Creative Live and Audigy cards having this problem - it's mostly the X-Fi that has already been shunned for cruddy drivers.

Problems like this occur in 100% of other games, either because the hardware company can't code a driver properly or because an API the game company has used isn't compatible with all hardware, so why pin this on UT3 and Epic?

Some franchises just come to the end of their lifespan and I suspect UT is probably at this point right now because for me personally, I honestly can't see where they can take it or where they're going with it.
Sure, UT3 works but the product should be more than the sum of it's working parts.
If we bought a 200mph sports car off Epic, took the keys and started driving off only to find that the stereo hadn't been fitted, the back seats were missing and the wheels were falling off 20 miles down the road, then that customer is going to be mighty pissed.
No amount of cutting edge tech is going to save that if the hood is flapping about on purchase and back in the garage a day later.
Epic management will be taking a long hard look at this release and try and figure out where to go from here and probably asking themselves the very question this topic suggests "How can we make people like this game?"
I think financially they can handle this because the engine licensing will be generating a lot of revenue for the company but I don't know if this could be a case of being able to pay the price but not being able to count the cost.
I've been around long enough to know the Unreal series has been good ride and I've given up a lot of years contributing to what the community was in it's prime.
I still visit this site on a daily basis and am always interested in what's going on in the Unreal community but I'm just not buying UT3 because I just don't like what it's become.

Lruce

everytime i take a look around, like, at my buddies who used to play UT/Quake religiously every day, i think i just found out what's wrong. to me it really seems like people are growing out of this kind of game.
sure, there are communities around them and they will continue to exist but i think this style of game is just not as popular as it used to be. i (and many others) have said it before but nowaydays people really seem to prefer other types of games. (and that's fine - at least as long as the aforementioned smaller communities are still getting their games every once in a while )
and it's kinda strange, each and every time i think about this i suddenly feel very old

Sir_Brizz said:

As DGUnreal said, it's not like they took UT2004 and started chipping things away from it. This is a new game on a new engine. Those features never existed, and any implementation of them in UT3 is what was WORKED UP from nothing.

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That's no excuse to make a bad sequel, the title on the box clearly reads "Unreal Tournament" 3, that means it is part of a long running series of games, and fans of the series have come to expect certain things, and a certain level of functionality, its is something they must live up to as a bare minimum or fans wont like the game, and we dont care if its a new engine or not, we dont play an engine, we play a game.

And yes, i understand thats alot of work, but that is the situation Epic is in with this title, and if they want to succeed, they will have to put in the effort and the man houers, allow more time for its develoment or outsource some of the workload, you just can't make a skeleton crew followup and expect it to be liked, 2K3 showed us all that, and Epic should have learned from its failure, but here we are again..

But really, my argument makes itself, go look at the server browser, on this very forum, on any forum where people talk about UT3, go look at Steam and see how fast it hit the bargain bin, and it should be self evident that Epic did not make a smash success here, their strategy did not work (again), and thus, your arguments fall on deaf ears, you just cant argue against a bottom line like that, its like trying to ward off a tidal wave with a stick, people are not willing to forget that past UT's ever happened and accept a new skeleton crew version just because its on a new engine, they have to do better than that, and don't tell me they cant, others are succeeding at it.

Sir_Brizz said:

Others have? What other successful Sci-Fi FPS has come out in the past several years? And don't say Crysis, because, for all we know, it has done exactly the same as UT3.

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We're not comparing games here, it doesen't matter if its a sci-fi FPS or not, or even an FPS for that matter, we're talking about sequals, and moving to another engine.

Other games/franchises have managed such a move just fine, and still kept all their well known features and game modes, and still came with a good selection of content and som new innovations, lots of games have had to start over from scratch when building a sequal and done well for themselves, but UT has suffered greatly every time, beeing released with many things broken and missing that we where used to from the past games.

I don't know what it is.. but Epic consistantly manages to cock it up when porting the game to a new engine, do they not understand that we want the features we are used to having? that we want a "new and improoved" product and not one with half the bits missing? do they allow themselves way too little time to build an UT game? are they too buissy making the engine to give the games the attention they deserve? do they just not care and considder UT as a tech demo for their engine? or have they been consistantly screwed over by their publishers?

I dont know what it is, but they seem to have established a pattern that says "2 UT's per engine, the first one will be bad, and the next one great", which beckons the question.. why bother with the first one at all then? why buy it? why even release it?

Pull it togeather Epic, you can do better than this, and UT deserves better.

Sir_Brizz said:

I wasn't trying to argue that UT3 was a glowing release and has no problems. If that's what you got from my posts, you need to go back and read them again.

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Thats the problem though, i get extremely mixed inputs from one post to the next, i often dont know where you stand on anything, one minute we can have a perfectly rational dicussion about good and bad things about the game, that actually leads somewhere, and you have some good and usefull things to say, but the next minute you go into defensive mode, and anyone who says anything about UT3 gets a face full of flak, and all of UT3's problems are the community's fault.

Epic screwed the pooch when the made the PC game a port from a console. I called it long long ago, low and behold I am correct.

Sir_Brizz said:

And don't say Crysis, because, for all we know, it has done exactly the same as UT3.

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Well, since no one can provided accurate sales beyond physical NA ones, we can let the pirates do the talking (to demonstrate the appeal/demand of the games).

Well that doesnt really say much, for all we know UT3 could be selling better than crysis because less people are pirating it

Perhaps a combination of piratedness and retail supply and demand is enough.

UT3 is $30 new; Crysis is $40. Crysis is in more demand and thus brings in a higher price point. CoD4 is still $50 even after all these months because it's extremely popular. D:

Fuzz said:

From the creator of the Official UT3 Loving Thread comes a new thread for you to post in.

What if we all could make people enjoy UT3 more and more often?

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It's too late. Most of the people who bought the game have concluded that it just doesn't "grab" them. Speaking for myself, I enjoy UT3 Warfare and I would play it in competition for my time with UT99 CTF pug matches and UT 2004 Onslaught and Invasion-RPG, but I recently purchased a game that does "grab" me (Sins of a Solar Empire) and now I'm putting about 95+% of my gaming time into it. I'd play UT3 if I didn't have any other games competing for my time. I'll probably play it again once the Domination mod comes out, assuming that other people play it online.

Grobut said:

That's no excuse to make a bad sequel, the title on the box clearly reads "Unreal Tournament" 3, that means it is part of a long running series of games, and fans of the series have come to expect certain things, and a certain level of functionality, its is something they must live up to as a bare minimum or fans wont like the game, and we dont care if its a new engine or not, we dont play an engine, we play a game.

And yes, i understand thats alot of work, but that is the situation Epic is in with this title, and if they want to succeed, they will have to put in the effort and the man houers, allow more time for its develoment or outsource some of the workload, you just can't make a skeleton crew followup and expect it to be liked, 2K3 showed us all that, and Epic should have learned from its failure, but here we are again..

But really, my argument makes itself, go look at the server browser, on this very forum, on any forum where people talk about UT3, go look at Steam and see how fast it hit the bargain bin, and it should be self evident that Epic did not make a smash success here, their strategy did not work (again), and thus, your arguments fall on deaf ears, you just cant argue against a bottom line like that, its like trying to ward off a tidal wave with a stick, people are not willing to forget that past UT's ever happened and accept a new skeleton crew version just because its on a new engine, they have to do better than that, and don't tell me they cant, others are succeeding at it.

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Who's arguing that UT3 was not a big success and that it didn't have a few issues? Other than that, your argument is skewed to your own outlook.

And as far as sequels that were released on new engines, look at Unreal II, it also was not as popular as Unreal I either.

A lot of the entire point that many of you are missing here, and it is really getting my goat that the point just isn't sinking in, is that you are comparing UT3 to UT2004 which was a game on a mature engine. UE2 at the time of UT2004 had many years to mature and have bugs fixed and features added, there were numerous released titles on the engine prior to the last UT2004 patch.

So let's take your time machine back to Unreal II and look at its feature set and editor, now compare the current state of UE3/UT3 to that -- UE3 has significantly more functionality for an engine at the comparable infant stage. If you don't own Unreal II then download a copy of the Unreal Engine 2 Runtime and have a look at that.

Also if you own GoW PC, fire that up and compare it to UT3. Even the time difference between the two of those UT3 is much more stable and has additional features completed. As this year carries on, we will see even more of the engine featues and bugs completed.

If you really don't understand the development of engines and games, then please do not post what you feel your version of reality should be. Reiterating the same comments over and again doesn't mean your reality will become substituted for the real one.

To state that UT3 should have everything that all of its predecessors had and more is silly. Nothing in this world is like that. And to state that we have come to expect a certain level of features is also your opinion only, I have no need for demorec and never did and I don't miss it. Same with the OpenAL issue.

If Epic had waited until everything that can conceivably be written and added to the engine was completed, UT3 would have been another DNF.
And instead of a three year wait between titles it would have been five or six or more.

Comparisons to other game studio titles and engines is also totally invalid. No other game series gives the degree of mod'ability that Epic does with UE, and all of that takes a significant amount of time to complete.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. There comes a point where a new engine can be used to release a working title and it has to be used as such to recover the investment cost for development. After all they have to live too.
And you can't compare UE3/UT3 to most other titles since most other studios developing their own game engine are doing it for a single platform. So Epic's development cycle is longer. Plus my previous comment on mod'ability.

Your choices would have been: UT3 now, UT3 years from now, or no UT3. From a completely objective opinion which would you rather have? Personally, I'm fine with now.
Epic made some decisions on the game structure and feature set, decisions were also made on release date (which I feel was six months too early). Not everyone liked all of the decisions.

None of the current set of items that the bashers have chosen to bash prevent or severely limit everyone's use of the game. And those specific reasons are not the entire story as to why a number of people didn't play UT3.

You can live with it and play it, or you can move on.

*edit*

I can see why Epic would be moving towards console only titles, just like all of the other game studios. Personally I wouldn't blame them at all if they moved entirely to consoles and did only quick ports to PC.

With a console title you are creating an engine for a closed hardware platform. Considerably less bugs to squish.
You don't have to make it very mod'able if at all.
You don't have to develop tools that the user-base can use.
You don't have to document the tools that the user-base can use.
You don't have to supply extended options and functionality.

It really shows that a portion of the community doesn't appreciate what the cost is for a company to provide the tools to the user-base, so why should they do it. Supporting the community to the level that Epic does is not free.

I gotta agree with you DG, you pretty much hit the nail square on the head. All the list resources Epic has had working on Unreal Engine 3 and then UT3 is quite extensive. Heck, they even pulled in some of the Gears folks to help out with UT3. It was tit-for-tat, as some of the UT3 devs worked on Gears in the weeks preceding the Gears' launch.

But hey, even before the initial beta demo launch, most gamers in real life I spoke with never cared two sh*ts for any UT game and did not plan on even trying out UT3. Most gamers either flock to consoles or MMORPGs. IMO, UT3 never had that much of a chance on the PC. Although Epic has stated they will always do a UT, it would not surprise me if we did not get a PC version with the next release.

Arena shooters are going the way of space and flight sims methinks. It's just an evolution of the industry - they will keep getting put out by indies and the community will have one or two games that they will ride on for many years, but most AAA development will probably stop at some point down the road.

If you ask the UT players, UT2003 killed UT and everything since has killed any chance of it making a comeback.

My personal opinion of those few who don't play UT3 but keep coming back to the forums to check on new posts so that they can interject their views into...

They are missing the main reason why the majority of people who picked it up and didn't continue to play it, did so. And they are continually trying to find new and trivial places to poke at the game. "Consolized UI" becomes "OpenAL" and "Demorec" and on and on...

If there is any one main reason why people who bought it wouldn't be playing it, it would be because they didn't like the gameplay. This has been said before by others including myself. See my big WAR section in this post in this thread as one thought on this.

The vast majority of people who ever played a UT title from the first one didn't care about demorec. And if OpenAL has issues it doesn't stop the game from working for 99.9% of the gamers, and the bug doesn't make the game cease to function for the other .1%.

Your average gamer buying UT3 doesn't give a lick about demorec, and bases their decision on any technical troubles they run into during install and in-game, and whether they like how the game plays.
If they really like how the game plays, they won't care one bit if the UI doesn't have every option some other game has.
Plus there will also only be a specific percentage of people who even played UT2004 to even know what its UI was like in comparison.
For those people who came up through the UT franchise, if they like the gameplay and have a memory of the previous titles, they will stick around for the patches and bonus packs.

As one example, take Criterion's Burnout Paradise.
I absolutely love the gameplay in it. But the game startup just kills me every time. I detest Stunds and Doses, Axl Rose's "voice" is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. I always hammer on the controller buttons to get past the opening screens as quick as possible before I stroke -- seriously I'm not joking. If you ever want to see a calm person go ape and @#$% at the tv screen... Axl's singing makes me want to go drown some kittens.
But I keep coming back to the game to play it because the gameplay is awesome. I'm not going to chuck the disc simply because part of the "UI" I don't like.
UT3 is no different. The vast majority of the people who dropped it, it won't be because of demorec, OpenAL, or even the server browser.

As a second example look at GoW. No offense meant to Epic on this.
The gimmicks of the cover system were not enough for me. The actual gameplay is too linear and the map layout and spawns are too trite and telegraphed. The first few maps look really pretty, but there is not sufficient design variety for me as you go on. Plus the "cool" things that the console kiddies were on about are just recycled UT2004 stuff ("Hammer of Dawn" ).
I would take UT3 over GoW for gameplay in a heartbeat.
For a first-person single-player, FEAR is exceptionally better than GoW IMHO.

Same thing with Q3A.
It's UI is absolutely terrible, the right side of the menu is always partially off the screen, the console command structure is archaic, adding content is often painful, and you need a doctorate from id university just to do anything with it. But I still play the game even after all of this time because I love the gameplay.