o hai thar. I'm an old UT player who's been out of the PC gaming loop for a while, and decided to poke my head in here to see what the general consensus was on UT3. I just stumbled across some vids on Youtube, and my reaction was basically "these graphics are awesome, but why should I upgrade my CPU to play it if it's just UT99 reskinned with a new vehicle mode?".
The other thing that occurred to me is "wow, this is slow". For reasons that I may or might not go into later, I've been on a Halo stint lately, and then seeing some CPMA match videos recently reinvigorated my enthusiasm for PC/DM shooters. Then I loaded up some UT3 videos expecting to see some fast-paced, kinetic action, and what I saw was like a slightly faster version of Halo.
Don't get me wrong, UT has always had AWESOME weapons, but the movement's always been a hop, skip, and a jump behind Quake (puns not intended). UT2kx was a step in the right direction with the additional moves, even if they weren't perfect and I occasionally got nostalgic for UT99's movement. Now I look at UT3 where they took out most of the new moves from UT2kx, and it just seems like a huge step backwards. I thought sequels were supposed to improve, evolve, and add to things, not subtract, so why is UT3 leaving the series even further behind Quake in this area?
I think the future of UT movement would be a movement system that provides the kind of speed and acrobatics of Q3 CPMA, albeit with moves that actually make some sense logically and aren't just a glitch exploit. This is a somewhat vague statement and I don't have any exact proposals off the top of my head, but I think you guys can catch my drift. However, at the very least, if someone were to just take UT's weapons and map and stick CPMA movement into the formula, it would still be awesome and much better than Epic's aproach of "uuhhh....not everyone liked dodge jumping so lets just not bother".
Anyway, the next topic I'm gonna touch on is this...If everyone is so disappointed with UT3, why doesn't someone do something about it for chist's sake? It seems like in many cases, you guys seem to know exactly what you want instead, so just do it up, mod the game that way! UT is supposed to be one of the best series for modding in gaming, why are people so content to just sit around whining instead fixing things themselves?
Back when UT2004 was relatively new, I had been playing a lot of Quake, so when I first started playing UT2k4, my first reaction was "this isn't enough like Quake", so even though I had 0 programming knowledge, I figured out how to make mutators and went to work. Despite having tons of work IRL, eventually got pretty extensive with it. I actually posted versions of it here, got feedback on it (mostly from Aenubis) and kept on refining it. Basically I would spend all day working on oil paintings, doing 3D modeling, and writing papers for school still late at night, then I'd come home and work on my UT mod often till 5am or 6am, go to sleep, then get up at 8 or 9am for class, and start the process all over again.
Then I went home for Christmas break and while I was away, my apartment got broken into, my PC got stolen, and I lost all my work.
That's why I ended up trudging through console shooters for a time; I couldn't afford a new PC immediately and by the time I could the UT2k4 community had fizzled out along with my own interest.
But the story doesn't end there. I ended up playing Halo 1 with my friends at college, and being used to PC shooters, I was frustrated with how crappy it was. Then when my PC got stolen I was stuck with console shooters, and quickly found that the best console shooter out there was Halo 2, which sucked even worst than Halo 1. In my frustration I eventually just decided to mod Halo to not suck, evolving it from some random crappy console game into a slower-paced more "tactical" version of UT or Quake. Now mind you, this is on consoles. You have to mod your goddamn Xbox to even begin modding the game, and Bungie doesn't pack the game with ****ing HaloEd and a full mutator/mod system geared towards user generated content. You have to work your way through 3rd party modding software which crashes on you every 2 seconds, doesn't give you access to everything, and generally it's all much messier and more of a pain in the ass than with PC game modding. But I did it and I'm happy enough with the
end product to continue refining it.
So when I come back to the Unreal community to find everyone disappointed with UT3, where all the modding stuff you need comes in the box and Epic invites user-generated content with open arms, I have to wonder why all you "dedicated" UT fans which won't suffer any alternative are just sitting on your asses doing nothing.
The movement's too slow and unskilled compared to Quake? Fix it.
The Enforcers suck almost as bad as the Ass Rifle? Fix em.
Rockets don't have enough splash damage? Fix em.
I swear, the power is right at your guys' finger tips. CPMA wouldn't even exist were it not for modders who thought Quake 3 sucked taking a stand and doing something about it. I'm not the only Halo player to try to fix Bungie's mess either as projects like
this exist and are popular despite what a bitch modding on consoles is. If Unreal fans are so damn loyal, why don't they get off their ass and do something?
Honestly I'd help were it not for the fact that I already have too many projects on my plate, plus my cpu can't run UT3 anyway. Maybe later.
