On the day immediately following the release of Unreal Tournament 3's second bonus pack, the Titan Pack, the Unreal Deal will be the center of the Weekend Deal on Steam. Justly so, an irreversible number of new customers will purchase the game at its discounted price and begin to grow a new community founded by the premise that all gamers are initially created equal.
Though, in time, many of the new gamers within the Unreal community will diverge on paths dictated only by their personal preferences in what a first person shooter should accomplish for its customer. What the community will have then is an onset of new players, alien to the inner workings of the franchise and its rich, lavish history, providing an even balance in skill for just about every sub-community within the game.
Instagib will be a pick-up-game player's delight as fresh, young competition will flood the servers and haphazardly shoot their instagib rifles while running in straight lines and double-jumping on rare occasions, usually brought on by accidentally pressing the jump button twice in direct sequence.
Warfare will see a new community defined by leaving entire nodes unprotected, unguarded and uncaptured. Unknown numbers of players will rush to their enemy's core and attempt to attack the rotating giant without properly established power flow extending from one core to the other. The team fending off the most unknowing attackers will steadily attempt to heal their core with shock rifles and link guns, assuming that because their core is still at 100 percent health, their valiant efforts in team-based defensive strategy are far superior to the attempts made by the daring attackers.
Capture the Flag will see a different kind of community. A majority of the players in this sub-community will work tirelessly to telefrag enemy players and teammates using the Translocator. In Vehicular Capture the Flag, most players will hold hoverboarding contests in the center of the map as a single player, having discovered the Redeemer for the first time, will either kill everybody or knock everybody off of their boards with the concussion of a small nuclear warhead.
Deathmatch will be like picking apples off of the ground. Most players in the gametype, not familiar with the functionality of Unreal's broad weapon base and the arrangement of pickups and powerups throughout Unreal Tournament 3's many arenas of competition, will be nothing more than the surprised recipients of the flak shells and shock combo's of the seventeen players that have played Unreal Tournament 3 from the beginning.
And to this regard, the rush of new, young blood in the community will tragically bring about the end of the community as well. The expert players, living in the memories of what great times they had playing Assault in the original Unreal Tournament from ten years ago, will return to the game once they see that people still take that game seriously. The new players, if they out-last the waxing and waning interest of the more versed players, will find themselves in a new, non-challenging community where everybody can feign death down staircases and launch themselves to improbable heights using the Impact Hammer.
Following the success and dumbing-down of the Unreal community, Epic will sever its ties with Midway in the third quarter of 2009 and either approach Electronic Arts to publish the next four Unreal-franchise titles, all set to come out within six months of each other, or the Epic Games that we have grown to know and love will become one of the many independent game developers found on Steam.
