Unreal Tournament 3 Tanks

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/17/hardware-geeks-fail-bump-crysis

This article is interesting but the author's thesis that hardware requirements are causing low sales is erroneous. The system requirements for UT3 are quite low. Crysis has much higher system requirements, and has sold nearly three times as many units. The article also suggests that Crysis will only run on a system that costs $5000, which is such an exaggeration it makes me think the author has an agenda.

My reason for disinterest in Unreal Tournament 3 is all the groundbreaking engine demos we saw a few years ago were not representative of what Unreal Engine 3 actually turned out to be. I also was turned off by what I saw as the dumbing down of the game for port to console systems.

I wonder what the expected sales for both these games was?

He doesn't say that hardware requirements are causing low sales. He says that samey gameplay is causing low sales. His only reference to system requirements is that people with high end rigs are buying the games despite the samey gameplay because they need something to justify the huge hardware investment.

I don't suppose the guys at Epic will be crying in their beer for too long, because they've been raking it in from all directions lately as their engine has become the new standard on most formats. The Crytek guys, on the other hand, well yeah, 87,000 copies does sound pretty dismal for them. I can't say I'm surprised though.

Quite aside from the awful gameplay, they're aiming at a market which is predominantly made up of young males, by far the most likely to be downloading pirate versions. They might be desperate for something to show off their $5,000 rig, but even they're not daft enough to pay for a glorified screensaver.

at first i thought this was some thread about tanks in urt3 :))

I'll be getting it for the Mac, as it has a coop mode...

heh, I can't say I'm surprised. I enjoyed the original UT but nothing since. The whole series seems kind of stale and overdone to me. We've played it to death in one version or another, and they need to start singing a new tune.

I also feel that their characters are boring,very shallow and lack any character that I can or want to empathise with. I had the same problem with Gears of War too. I didn't care about their fight because the characters were dumb grunts with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

I just think games have moved on and gamers expect more and just arent getting it from the Unreal Games.

I was a little surprised by crysis, since it is a step up from other FPS games evolution wise and even runs fairly well on my 4 year old system with your (Leadwerks) old AGP vid card first release 2 years ago, even with mostly medium and high settings.

Unreal games have never been satisfying, for me. It's all about killing the opponents, but as soon as I've killed them (sometimes before their past instances appear to be dead!), they've rematerialized behind me and blasted me into 50 pieces. (Oh, five hundred now? Exciting).

Something about sci-fi weapons in games is just broken, too. They never make nice noises, and they have absolutely no recoil; it feels like I am shooting either a nail gun, a stapler or a leaking battery. Even so, the things are enormous! Big guns should make big noises. Furthermore, they should make big recoil. UT is intent on making these guns look like ultimate tools of death, but the only thing that makes them look that way is the various particle effects.

Come to think of it, that seems a problem with many graphics-centric games that turn out disappointing: A complete disregard for the importance of sound and the feel of controls.

I liked the node game in UT2004...i cant stand the normal death match games.

I liked instagib in UT, that's about it, since you didn't have the option of relying on blast radius or ricochet to hit a target. It basically made me impossible to hit with my 56k connection.

I have been an fps freak for years, I tried the unreal demo and it was beautiful and smooth but I immediately rejected it because to be honest, it is identical to ut2004.

There's no real difference. Even the visuals aren't any different when you are moving at speed.

It is "more of the same" and that market hasn't changed since 2004. Its the same players from 2004. We dont want more of the same, we want crysis and something new.

I hope they'll stop making this rubbish now. Totally underwhelmed by the latest UT offering.

Well it's "the Inq" - ANYTHING you read from there is biased and twisted information usually. Worse than "the Sun".

As for those two games, both are tech-led ones, not gameplay-led... IMO. They hope to sell the engine for gzillions and what they have now is basically overblown tech-demo for the engine, not a game really. And certainly nothing new concepwise.

The demo put me off UT3. I may give it a download to see how nicely it runs on my laptop but I'm only interested in it as a tech demo, not the actual game.

Sad, really.

F.E.A.R, Jericho and BioShock (for all its faults) are providing my gameplay needs right now. The Xbox 360 is sitting idle.

How's Jericho vp? It got somewhat negative reviews - but when you get into it, is it worthwhile?

Regards the low sales of Crysis - perhaps it's like the special effects Hollywood juggernauts in the late eighties/early nineties (anyone remember Twister?). Audiences were hungry for cgi spectacle for a while, but soon began to demand more than just empty spectacle.

I enjoyed the Crysis demo, but have spent more time just tooling about looking at the graphics. I have no real desire to see the rest of the game and am expecting to buy it when its half price in 4-5 months.

UT3 has failed to innovate (again), the technology is definatly a barrier to entry for Crysis. Crysis is definalty a lot of fun to play but anyone trying to do so with a Geforce 8800GT or less is going to suffer, that's setting the bar pretty damn high right now, as probably less than 10% of the public have cards like that.

Darkheart

MadJack: The demo doesn't do it justice. The cutscenes are cringeworthy (though well put together) and the storyline is as followable/believable as some weird Japanese thing (if someone can unravel the stuff going on in Akira and explain it to me...?).

Look past the fluff and frippery and you have a very good shooter with some excellent unique points that really make you adjust the way you approach it.

It's a bit Painkiller-esque in the way enemies come at you. Some of their attacks appear devestating and unstoppable. Then you realise that backing away and firing at an enemy is not the best tactic because you move a lot slower when moving backwards! You have to pound the crap out of an enemy, turn around and run away, then turn back and let him have it again.

It only turns into a squad-based FPS after a good amount of time spent playing. Not to give too much away, you switch between characters during play and take on their sepcific fighting/defense attributes. Each character has very limited weapon selection and a special ability. Changing characters in Jericho is a similar gameplay tactic as merely changing weapons in every other FPS.

It's the most innovative flair I've seen in the genre since Half Life came out.

Give it an hour of your time and you should not be disappointed. It's so good I'm actually going to buy an original of it in the January sales!

vp

Thanks for that - good info. I thought the reviews were perhaps a little negative, but it sounds like if you take the game on its own terms, it can be fun.

I finally got around to playing Unreal Tournament 3. Really, really unimpressive UI design. The menu not only is so slow that it needs its own loading screen, but it also is horribly designed. It seems that I must log in to a profile in order to exit the game. The game itself has some really cool things (that big two-legged walker, whatever it's called, is deadly!). However, the big scenes, while filled with amazing potential, consistently left me unimpressed because of the completely lackluster sound design. That big walker thing I mentioned made one noise that I noticed: the muffled leafblower-like sound of its main gun.

Ageia bothers me by being one of those irritating pieces of middleware that sees itself as God's gift to gaming, thus littering the Start menu under some stupid assumption that the end user actually cares in the slightest. I, for one, couldn't care less that the game uses Ageia. I have yet to see a solid reason for why it should, anyway. The vehicles have some neat dynamics, especially spinning out of control when damaged, (again, could be cooler with some sound effects) but there are no particularly neat bulk physics which is what the engine seems most intended for.

The graphics end of things run happily at highest settings for me. Unreal 3 engine is very smooth.

I had UT3 for Christmas and I love it! I'm a fan of UT2004 and accept that this is really an evolution rather than a revolution. The UI is naff and feels like it's been designed for consoles, but I read in there forums that this will be addressed in a future patch.

It is what it is, and I think it achieves most of its goals.

I tried the Crysis demo, and didn't like the gameplay at all - no purchase from me (even though I have a very high end computer). The opening sequence with the parachutes made my jaw drop though, but I want a game, not just pretty pixels.

I haven't tried UT3 yet, but will give the demo a whirl. Didn't know it was out yet, as the release got drowned in all the usual promotion, so I thought they were still just hyping it as usual.

Visuals are too grey and dark for me in UT3.

Yeah, they are a little greyer than previous UT games, but I think that one of the alternative post-processing options brightens things a little. Try "vivid" or "intense".

Epic could probably care less if UT3 sells well. They have already licensed it to practically everyone making games on the 360 and PS3. UT3 doesn't need to be a tech showcase anymore. Other games ie. Gears of War have already done what UT3 should have done 18 months ago.

Have tested TF2 over the weekend and COD4 and UT3 is still the game I prefer the most. Hopefully more usermade content will make the game more attractive to the masses.

If you like the Unreal games you definately won't like Crysis. Crysis is less about graphics, its the gameplay style that you will either love or hate. I like the gameplay style, but havent bothered to go further than the alien ship, I just like slow paced tactical FPS with stalking and sniping, and thats the kind of gameplay crysis is good at.

I've been really happy with Call of Duty 4. It is just tactical enough. Visually, it's near Crysis except the levels aren't nearly as physically interactive. However, the story is much better and it runs at 60fps. Top it all off with great multiplayer and I think this is quite possibly my favorite game of the year. Of course I don't usually pick favorites and this year has been excellent. Call it a tie:

Super Mario Galaxy
Call of Duty 4
Halo 3
Assasin's Creed (got mixed reviews but I think it's pure work of art)
Crysis
The Orange Box (Portal most of all)

Seriously? damn

UT3 demo ran only at 640x480 with no details at all on my iMac Core Duo -- it obviously did not like the graphics card.

But I'll get it for my Xbox 360 as soon as they ship it. The Xbox didn't cost 5000 USD, but it runs Bioshock at 1920x1200, and that game uses the UT3 engine. So that'll be more fun than running it on a PC or Mac. ;-)

Bioshock doesn't have very high system requirements. Runs well on a 4 year old CPU and 2 year old GPU at 1280x1024, not as good as a 360, but it is pretty respectable. It's a shame bioshock isn't that great a game. Once you get used to the quirky visuals, the gameplay gets overly repetitive quick.

I think that, generally speaking, people have simply grown tired of generic sci-fi multiplayer shooters. I also think that there has been a resurgence in interest in the single player component of games, which is obviously a weakness of the Unreal Tournament games.

I read an article, over Christmas which I cant find now, but it may have come from the Register or some other news/blog type site.

Anyway, the article had charts and quotes to backup what he was saying, which in short was that sales of High End, PC games were way down on what was expected of them. quoting crysis as one of the games that didn't ship nearly as much as (and he quoted one of the developers) they were expecting to.

The reason he gave for it tho was not so much hardware, and the lack of people with high end systems, he attributed it to less people looking for what he called small multi player base, in a nut shell the guy was explaining how that with so many people now on fast internet connections, gamers were seeking out the MMO feel to games, and old style games like HL2, Crysis, COD4, while awsome games, were not offering that MMO feel.

He also went on to explain the numbers behind the top 10 MMO's and just how big a chunk of the gaming market they made up, I dont recall the numbers but it was a HUGE %. something like 11 Million in Europe playing World of Warcraft, Another few Million were playing EQ-EQ2, around a Million Playing EVE, and those were just the Pay to Play games, Guild Wars Rivals WOW and its free, he also listed about 10 complete FREE mmo's like WOW,EVE etc. that also have HUGE player bases.

The final thing he explained was that due to the nature of character development, 90% of the people playing MMO's invest a large amount of time into the game, to the exclusion of all other games, kinda like if you play WOW, then you dont really have time to play anything else, I know that happened to me so it seemed to make sense.

Anyway. MMO seems the genre of the future, and small networked games of 20v20 10v10 etc seem to be set to be console domain.

My View on read this guys article is that he hit the nail right on the head, there are now so many new MMO's coming onto the market to try and grab some of the BILLIONS that world of warcraft is raking in, that its becoming the gaming norm.

Broadband Internet connections also cost money. Add to that the subscription fees of MMOs, and you have the reason why most of those things (exception being ad-supported) will never penetrate a majority of the market.

Interesting, though. I thought that the MMO-craze had died out, but you may be on to something there.

I thought the MMO craze was on its way out too. Still I've always been more of a solitary gamer. They don't make the multiplayer coop games that I used to enjoy anymore. What I'd really like is a Single player game with a good story that my wife and I could play coop in the study.

She spent a good 40 hours looking over my shoulder watching me play Witcher, and over 100 hours watching me play oblivion. Would be awesome if we could just both play as a team.

MMO's are all pretty rubbish, the MMO nature of them simplifies the gameplay too much. The best MP game I ever played and the last one I really enjoyed was Settlers II on the amiga, where you and your buddy played an RTS game on the same computer split screen with dual mice, one each and half the keyboard.

I'm still trying to figure out why the 4rth incarnation of UT is called UT3?

Unreal Tournament - the 1st
UT2003 - the second
UT2004 - the third
UT3 - 4rth?

I know, I know, the engine is Unreal 3 but still....

It was originally going to be UT2007, but I guess Epic went for 3 as it truly is the 'third' UT game. Many people I know consider 2004 the true #2, as it basically added everything 2003 should have had to begin with.

Yeah, 2004 was basically a revision of 2003 - basically the same game with new features/modes. You could even send your 2003 disk(s) back to get a refund for purchasing 2004. I guess a lot of people didn't at the time because there was a lot of content to be had for 2003, like the Community Bonus Packs. Of course, a lot of those have been converted for 2004 now.

So yeah, UT3 is essentially the third instalment of the game.

There's no difference between this and any other ut game. Thats while sales have tanked.

I think you'll find the Xbox runs BioShock at somewhere equal to or less than 1280x720. The only game I know of that plays at 1920x1080 (interlaced, so equivalent 1920x540 in terms of processing power) is Dead or Alive 3.

**EDIT** Virtua Tennis 3 is the first game to run at 1920x1080p