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Friday, 19 October 2007

The UT3 Demo sucks! [Beej]

Posted by Dave



ut3

Finally bothered to install/play. I tried out "vehicle ctf" whichfeels fairly like Onslaught.

Things that are teh win:
  • the engine, verrrry purdy and fast
  • the landscapes rulio, anything with rocks or water
  • load time to get in-game was quick
  • has some of the stuff that works from UT2k4

Things that are teh suck:
  • BLUE and RED colorising of everything hurts my eyes!
  • ...but still can't really see what's going on
  • stupid explosions
  • stupid textures on things, eg. bricks, burned metal
  • they made the redeemer shit!
  • awful main menus
  • shit map tbh, a giant bridge and some brick dojos?!

Remember when you'd buy and play UT, it was shiny and colourful (notbrown) and you'd have easy fun? This game doesn't seem to be that.Didn't try online. Suspect its a bit like playing UT2k4. Overall, I didn't enjoy this demo at all.

Posted by Dave at 13:44
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9 comments:

  1. Well, I faithfully leeched it on the night of release and foolishly stayed up until 2am to install and try. I was never a massive fan of the UT series, I've never liked the feel of the engine. From the moment I had to open up Notepad to copy and paste the @ symbol because it wouldn't allow me to enter it into the text field, I knew I was in trouble. The menu system is *awful*. I can't stress this enough. It looks like a bad Xbox Dashboard. I played it online. Character definition against the background maps is terrible, you're basically looking for movement to identify other players. Someone standing still can pretty much hide. There's no ping value in the scoreboard. The server I joined said 150 in the browser but it felt more like 400, no way to check. So, I played it offline and it wasn't much better, just less laggy. The weapons are identical, there's nothing new which is hideously disappointing. Just one new one, in place of the traditionally useless BioGun would have been nice. The weapons do feel solid though, the rocket launcher is old school in the pace of it and the splash damage and as a quake1 veteran, I like this at least. I'm not very good with numbers, but the UT series has spawned somewhere in the region of 87 thousand maps over the various retail releases and mission packs, and there's perhaps two good DM maps and one CTF out of all of that. No good duel maps. This trend continues. If I was shipping out a demo of a game, I'd make it as attractive as possible to hook people in. If these really are the cream of the UT3 maps, then they're fucked. I'll buy it. Mostly to give Onslaught a chance and on the offchance that the single player campaign is enjoyable. It's also probably going to be a staple of any EED lans over the next year or so. But it smells of old man's wee
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  2. I have to say, I'm with you on this. I am incredibly disappointed by this demo. The visual overload makes it extremely difficult to work out what is going on; and there are a couple of things they've added in that suggests they know this is the case too. For example, enemies are covered in a kind of blue/red glow (like some sort of weird Jello Suit) so that you can actually see them against the over-done environment, but as a result you can't actually hide anywhere. There is also this strange 'path indicator' stuff that builds in front of you following a spawn which shows you where to do - again, only needed because its virtually impossible to distinguish between floor and ceiling in some circumstances. The AVRIL for example now has a 'laser designator' attachment on it meaning that anyone using that particular weapon gives their precise location away as soon as they fire it up; so you have a lifespan measured in nanoseconds - which means taking out the beefed up vehicles becomes a right chore. I honestly don't see this as any big shakes and definitely no improvement over the previous iterations of UT; and I certainly won't be buying it any time soon - bargain basement offering might grab my attention if I ever see it.
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  3. I don't want to compare this with TF2 because obviously they're very different games and there's clearly room for both. However it's interesting to compare the overall approach to visuals from Epic and from Valve. Epic have basically just ladelled on the eye candy and remember at one stage in the past they made a game that was so loaded it ran like a dog on anything anyone owned, UT2k3 I believe. Meanwhile Valve make TF2 graphics cartoon like and you have no difficulty seeing anything at all and in a frantic multiplayer game, I'd say that's more important than your glowy shader shiny floors bullshit myself.

    The UT2K4 demo does, thankfully, seem to run fast enough on my rig (fucking wanna with an 8800GTX eh?) but you just can't SEE anything. I don't think maximum detail, maximum shader bollocks, maximum glows yadda yadda is an approach which is better graphics. It's just more. I found it just getting in the way. I couldn't tell stuff apart, running down a coridoor was just annoying.

    I don't think UT3 needs to be revolutionary. Evolutionary is fine, however what it most certainly shouldn't do is go backwards. The menu system is a fucking joke. Epic created a bloody amazing proper PC one with UT2K3 and they threw the whole thing out just because they're doing console ports? That's just throwing the baby out with the bath water. If you really want us to play another game other than yours, fine.

    I'm reserving judgement despite the lackluster demo (not being able to type @ was fucking hilarious eh?) because I suspect it might still be good at LANs. We get UT2K4 out at LANs every year and it's pretty good, onslaught rocks. So maybe there's some playability there but it's not going to be a big online game. Epic just don't do enough actual polish to gameplay, they aren't focused enough on the whole experience these days.

    It seems a shame really. You look back and the original UT was a great leap forward. They just seem to be spending more time buying their own bullshit when it comes to engine shit yadda yadda than actually making an uber game. Probably the next big game they do will be some console thing just like GoW. Oh well.
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  4. Well yes, I'd agree with the above & join in everyone's dissapointment. However there is one thing to remember which seems to get lost. This is a beta demo. I'm hoping there's a chance it may address some of these issues.

    Not being able to see stuff is the worst crime & seems to be a universal complaint over the interwebtubes.
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  5. not being able to type @ was fucking hilarious eh?

    Whichever monkey in QA was responsible for letting that go through should be publicly flogged. Literally one of the first most basic user interactions after installation and the user cannot proceed without copying and pasting from notepad - that isn't an oversight, thats just inexcusable turd.
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  6. It would have been yank keyboard testing eh?
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  7. I was distinctly underwhelmed in the first instance but as I spent more time with it I grew to like it. I suspect the maps to come are a lot better and I fully expect this to become another Lan stalwart with much shouty shouty behaviour aka yelling 'eat my #*!#ing s*#!' at such a volume that a visiting engineer from British Gas dropper his spanner even though he was upstairs and about thirty feet away when the heating failed at one of the early AmLans..... (a failure might I add that was caused by Brit's whole-of-car-filling tft causing a brown-out all over Kent and fritzing my electronic heating panel with it! *#$!'
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  8. Lies. Damnable Lies.What Am fails to mention is that the first AmLAN had little in the way of 'lektrik planning. Hence, upon the arrival of the attendees and the ensuing mass pluggery, things went a little wobbly. And by "a little wobbly" I ask that you imagine Heather Mills McCartney, trying to morris dance on ice. On stilt.
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  9. Subsequent control experiments have shown that the net of effect of a Brit at a lan is +Crunchy Roast Potatoes +Assistance in the kitchen in general (the picture of Muz and Pod looking at bags of salad like just utterly lost sheep (picture Prince Andrew with an electric kettle) and literally shovelling great handfuls into two bowls with not so much an absence of a clue but the the tangible presence of a physical anti-clue will stay with me for ever), +++electricity bills and +complaints about the length of your beds. However it is also true that the control experiment was also notable for -Monitors the Size of Jodrell Bank, -general snaking extension leads all over your gaff to cope with Monitors the Size of Jodrell Bank, -Extreme Voda Processing, -smack down delivered from altitude and ---Mugabe
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