Well, I read through 170 posts in this thread... and this is the only conclusion in my mind:
I've said my thoughts before in a bunch of other very similar threads, so I'll
TRY (and probably miserably fail) to keep it short.
- UT3 was a failure only at one level, the community of players. Critically and financially, it at least broke even, if not profited. The last reliable sales figures we have are something around 1.5 million copies, and that was before Patch 2.0 and the steam sales. It wouldn't be surprising if Epic tacked on another million or so to that, which even at Steam's $13.99 sale price, would've netted them nearly another 14 million dollars.
- The game had VERY stiff competition. Three very big-name shooters (Crysis, TF2, COD4) all came out within a month either way of UT3, and of those, two competed directly with UT3's MP segment. They included a lot of things and features people looked for, while UT3 did not, so people jumped ship.
- The game did come, admittingly, with a bunch of really silly bugs and issues. Most of those got fixed by Patch 1.3 (and the ones that remained mostly got fixed by 2.0) but by then, most people had abandoned the game.
If Epic really didn't care about UT3, do you think they would've bothered getting to even Patch 2.0? Would we have had free weekends to get people into the game? Very few games that aren't Valve tend to have free weekends. When's the last time COD4 had one?
They're still running the MSUC. They could easily say "**** it, nobody wants to play the game" and cancel it. But they're not. Why? Maybe because... they actually care?
Unfortunately for us, we now live in a world where PC games simply DO have to compete with console brethren, and to minimize costs, a lot of developers will design with multiple platforms in mind, and it's something we simply have to deal with. Nobody WANTS to compromise, but simply put, I'd much rather take a few compromises to have a product on the PC than to not accept any at all, because quite frankly I have neither a PS3 or a Xbox 360, and I'd rather not get one because one is still too ridiculously pricey, and the other I'm still wary of with its historic high failure rates.
If there were any mistakes they made with UT3, it were these:
- MIDWAY. Epic has had horribly ****ty publishers ever since Atari. The only ads I EVER saw for UT3 were ones of TV for the 360 version, and one German magazine ad. Literally, that's all. Hopefully EA Partners will give them FINALLY a good publisher, because after all, if nobody hears of your game, how are they going to buy it?
- The launch was pretty bad. Bad timing, as I said above, but also lots of silly things. No dedicated servers for a month after launch; no dedicated LINUX servers until a couple months past that as well. By the time these things came around, a lot of people who would've been interested, simply weren't there anymore. TF2 and COD4 snapped up a bunch of them, and there was a little game called L4D looming on the horizon. There were a lot of features these games had that UT3 didn't, and it simply couldn't compete. PC gamers, at least, expect these bells and whistles. (Although COD4 has an even worse server browser than UT3, somehow. Not to mention Punkbuster... something that makes Gamespy just swell in comparison.)
- Talking about stuff that ended up cut from the game. There was no Conquest mode, and Warfare mode was basically a tweaked Onslaught. Simply put, the "new" things weren't terribly new, and the new vehicles often trounced the older Axon vehicles in terms of balance. For those of you who've played in an Axon vs. Necris map, how often has the Raptor won against the Fury? Not very often, would be my wager. If you need further proof of this imbalance, check out VCTF-SuspenseNecris sometime.
- Going hand in hand with the above, there was really nothing new. You know what I'd love to see come back? XMP. Don't be afraid of something class-based; XMP was fun as hell, and I really hope some of the people who have read this have played it and will happily agree. I think gamers who like the Technical details that are UT wouldn't mind a game mode with slightly complex rules. Another good idea would be a mod I saw for UT and 2kx called "Siege" which centers around building things (such as weapons suppliers) and this really changes how you play the game into less of a "run around and kill the other guy" and more of a "build your stuff in a secret location, protect it with buildings that'll hurt your enemies, blow his buildings up and oh yeah, kill the other guy."
- For once, something the community has to accept - Vehicles are here to stay. They're not going to go away, whether you want them to or not. Splitting the game into a vehicle game modes only and a classic modes only two-game set isn't going to work, and is just plain ****ing silly. I know a lot of UT players avoid vehicular game modes like they're some sort of Stygian plague, but the simple fact of the matter is if there's one game mode that's going to draw new players in, it's something with vehicles. Why? Simple. Would you enjoy trying to kill a guy every time only to get a shock combo to the face? No, you wouldn't. Vehicles even out the field in the sense that they allow anyone to get a few kills, and killing someone who's kicking your ass even once can make you feel a lot better, and encourage you to stick around and eventually learn.
This post ended up a lot longer than I'd have liked it to be (to the point it logged me out while I was typing it... grrr) so I'll cut it off here. But I'm pretty confident that even if you THINK they don't, Epic has learned plenty of valuable lessons from UT3, including what went right and what went wrong. They know games have changed, especially PC Online FPS games, and so their news we won't see a
retail version for a couple years can actually be a good thing.
Why? Simple. It means they're going back to the drawing board, to square one. They're going to make it from the ground up, and throw things out the window.
Don't be surprised if the next UT has some light class-based gameplay to it, especially if stuff like XMP returns. At the same time, don't expect to transform into a full-blown class-based shooter. It wouldn't feel like UT anymore.
What they're doing is they're going to carefully evaluate, plan, conceptualize, playtest, and if it's good enough to definitely get into the final game, then, and ONLY then, will we ever hear a thing about it.
Don't put it under them to take one step back to take two steps forward. Sometimes it's what has to be done.
