The artistic look of the UI is fine IMO, but art being the subjective thing that it is, it's fairly inconsequential as it concerns the "Would you play more?" question. The functionality, however, is crucial, and on that score, anyone who's familiar with previous UT games can only find it to be lacking. It would seem there's no doubt that at least finishing the UI work, if not necessarily redesigning it from scratch, could only serve to add more fishies to the pool.
The real question though, is does Epic care? You'd figure they would only be satisfied with their work when there is improvement from one generation to the next. But here we sit nearly five months in, still lacking such basic features as Ctrl-X/C/V cut/copy/paste, mid-game voting, a drop to spectate option, a direct Add to Favorites command, a right-click menu in the server browser, or just the simple ability to view the server browser without first disconnecting from a game ... god how the list just goes on and on ... and on.
They're all so terribly simple, many of them no more complicated than wiring a GUI element to a console command, which makes their absence all the more glaring, and not to mention, all the more telling about Epic's concern about the issue. But hey, we really should understand when they dump the PC work off to the side while readying up the 360 port, shouldn't we ... gotta rake those quick easy millions, after all.
Funny to hear the boasting about all the masterful multithreading capabilities of the new engine, while the UT3 folks themselves get totally crippled with thread-block when it comes time to push out another console port as the PC version continues to sit there unfinished. Almost as funny as hearing the boasts about the game having "already" outsold UT2004, as if that incongruous comparison were the least bit valid.
Now, having ranted all that ... I can only hope they'll make a fool of me tomorrow with a Patch 1.3 release.
... tick ... tock ...
start.
