Worst UT launch ever

[0r4ng1n4]

If the numbers aren't changed significantly after Christmas I will be surprised. Thats the reason I dont have the game yet (well, birthday on the 5th actually) and I think the number of players will pick up after the holidays. Like people have said, there are a lot of good games out right now, but UT3 is one of the few (with the exception of TF2) with a proven large multiplayer aspect to it. By the time Christmas rolls around people will have finished with the single player games and be looking to pick up a new game. I think UT3 picks up then, at least more than it is now. I really enjoyed the demo (and am still waiting for the game) and it would be a shame not to be able to play this game with a good server and player population.

[thinktank]

If the numbers aren't changed significantly after Christmas I will be surprised. Thats the reason I dont have the game yet (well, birthday on the 5th actually) and I think the number of players will pick up after the holidays. Like people have said, there are a lot of good games out right now, but UT3 is one of the few (with the exception of TF2) with a proven large multiplayer aspect to it. By the time Christmas rolls around people will have finished with the single player games and be looking to pick up a new game. I think UT3 picks up then, at least more than it is now. I really enjoyed the demo (and am still waiting for the game) and it would be a shame not to be able to play this game with a good server and player population.

It's people like this that are delaying the success, which is a good thing. I'd rather people get into it during/after the holidays when they've polished it a little more, than have a bunch of people jump in and judge it too quickly because of the flaws.

Once people get bored of the stuff that's already entertaining them, UT3 will come around

[Premonition]

I just hope it does not go the way of Quake 4 which when completed and fixed by Id was good but too late and peeps moved on.

Not to sound bad but these numbers remind me of quake 4s launch. It was about a 2:1 server to player ratio in the 1000 range. The wait and see approach could be bad as well. Its a gamble. But when you see other unreal 3 based games you have to wonder what happened to ut3 (was it dubbed down for ps3?). To be honest gears of war, rg:6 vegas and bioshock all blew me away. Then again games like bf2 graphic wise did as well. But ut3 doesn't remind me of the trailors and video that where released months back.

[Karson]

I will play this game and will adjust and its not that I don't like it. The main issue here is that the hype that has been building around this game for the past 2 years (since it was officially announced) has not been realized. We all bought and paid money for a Release Candidate (RC7 to be exact) which has significant, noteworthy and eye raising issues. The UI is a complete disgrace.

The lack of admin tools and basic options is a slap in the face of every server admin and signifcantly affects the current numbers in terms of both servers and players online. Given that the single player "campaign" is a too funny to actually laugh at, the only thing that will save this game is a solid online component. How Epic can release a MP game without these basic components is mind boggling.

Epic has clearly scoffed in the face of many long term UT players in their actions with this game. Claims that PC is their bread and butter are worth nothing when they have clearly biased UT3 towards consoles. "Its done when its done" statements that they have been shooting their mouth off for the past 2 years are a complete and utter joke given the state of their release. Quite frankly, a level of trust has been lost and a lot of people, me included, are affected by it. Yes I know Epic is in the business of making money and I respect and understand that. Only time will tell if their arrogance will pay off. So far, its not exactly looking that good is it?

+1

This game feels roughly 20% as polished as Gears of War, which makes sense if you can believe the GoW sales figures. I give credit to Epic for even releasing UT3 at all, on by far the least popular gaming platforms today (including last-gen systems like XBox and PS2).

2004 is long gone.

[[TT]BrundleFly]

Claims that PC is their bread and butter are worth nothing when they have clearly biased UT3 towards consoles. "Its done when its done" statements that they have been shooting their mouth off for the past 2 years are a complete and utter joke given the state of their release.

Exactly...

If they are abandoning the PC in favor of consoles just be straight with us and tell us the truth. Instead they string us along for years and let us think that they were putting out a product worthy of running on a PC and in reality they were leaning towards a mainly console product that is lackluster on the PC. The word betrayal comes to mind...

How are you doing these days Brundle? You got me worried dude!

[slinky317]

So I was saddened to see that right now UT3 only has less than 500 players playing. Yes, it is late, but even Quake Wars, a mediocre game that's been out for months has more players.

After playing UT3 for a while I'm a little disappointed. The maps, with the exception of the remakes, are too small and the vehicles feel cramped. Also, there are too many vehicles and the combination of the small maps and the small amount of maps makes some of the vehicles underused (the Raptor for instance).

I was really hoping for some good, large warfare maps like they had in Onslaught. But every new map that isn't a remake is smaller than Onslaught maps and that's highly disappointing. I feel like I'm playing Team Deathmatch with orbs rather than a strategic game to capture nodes.

In any case, I'm going to keep playing because it's on Cains and it's a decent game. But with the playerbase as low as it is now, I don't see the game surviving and I don't see how Epic can be convinced to release map packs for such few players. :-(

[Fluffy]

So I was saddened to see that right now UT3 only has less than 500 players playing. Yes, it is late, but even Quake Wars, a mediocre game that's been out for months has more players.

Quake Wars is far from mediocre but it is very much a niche game. If you have no background in quake games or ET it can be hard to get into as the movement system is not exactly intuitive and the assault style gameplay is very much a matter of taste. It does have a lot of advantages over UT3 to explain it's relative success in online numbers terms.

1: It has a large active player base to call on of players who do understand and like the gameplay as it's essentially a vehicle version of ET. A free and popular game.
2: It has only 1 gametype meaning that anyone who wants an online game with a low ping can always find one 24 hours a day.
3: It scales down to low end pcs quite well. UT3 does not.
4: All of the maps play well at 24/32 players. There may only be 12 out of the box but they all work. Hardly any of the UT3 maps work well at the higher player loads pc players like these days. All of those maps seem to be aimed at console player loads. Big surprise huh.
5: It has awards for the stat whores to work at. Utterly meaningless awards but people still seem to like that garbage.

UT3 is doomed as far as I can tell. It has no active user base to bring players in from. The old games barely have more people playing than it does. CTF and DM are ok for a brief nostalgia ut99 kick but there is no long term attraction there. People stopped playing that stuff for a reason. Times change. War mode needs a pretty high spec pc to play at solid frame rates. It's new user unfriendly as the oldtimer ut player will rip the crap out of any newb. You cant just spawn and go in this game and be useful/have fun like you can in any of those class based games. You need to learn a lot of stuff 1st. Sure some people dont have it yet who want it and some of those will play online but then a lot of those playing online now will drift off too so you cant count on numbers climbing much more after the next week. By the weekend most of the UT fans who want this game will have it.

IMO the only hope is in cross platform play. If it takes off on the consoles it might have a future as a viable game. As a pc title it's looking dead in the water.


BTW if you want to see real player numbers for games dont bother with gamespy. They include bots as players.

http://www.serverspy.net/site/stats/

is better, and this one...

http://www.game-monitor.com/search.php?game=ut3

lets you see a chart over time (click near the bottom) It's only been tracking retail for 4 days (before that it's the demo) but if you look at the green line for players online at a given time in the 1st graph you can see just how dire things are ATM.

P.S. I'm not a UT3 hater. I see a lot of potential in WAR mode but with player numbers this low that potential may never be realised.

[Rand{CLR}]

Well, a few things. I'm not prepared to call this game fully dead until the week after Christmas. Epic could not have picked a worst time to release if they tried. It's not like a DVD that would have gigantic sales before the holidays, and is tracked on pure sales alone--it's a game with more AAA competition than any other time in history for FPS games. People waiting for Xmas or picking it up on sales in the meantime are (ideally) going to greatly outnumber those who have it now. The game needs at least 10 times the number of folks online at any given moment than it has now to last.

But I am worried about two things:

1. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Those people really complaining about consolization to the exclusion of most else are not playing the game as a result. And others worried about that are not buying it based on what they read on this front. This is BAD, because it doesn't lead to better quality, more pc-centric games--it leads to MORE console games and consolization. These people need to get off their high horse and look at how many console players there are vs. the number of hard core pc players and learn simple business modelling.

2. Epic's reaction to what they're seeing with the UT3 reception. What I'm really afraid of is that they'll draw the opposite conclusion this time around, and rather than give us a quick, much better UT4 (ala UT2k4 over the DOA UT2k3), they'll look at the shear success of 360's version of Gears of War over the pc version, the incredible lack of support for UT3 pc, and how well it may do on PS3 and 360 once the exclusivity period ends, and conclude that it no longer pays to make games for the pc anymore. That is the worst conclusion for us they could reach.

This is why I hope the PS3 launch is really horrendous, with just a couple of thousand copies sold. The best thing for the game now aside from Xmas purchases and very fast patching is for it to fail across all platforms so Epic doesn't begin to think console-only is the way to go.

In any event, Epic should take 2 lessons from this:
1. Never release a game that isn't ready. Especially this close to a gift holiday and against this much semi-established or established competition.
2. If you have a "beta" in any form, please, for the love of all that is holy, MAKE CHANGES from the beta before you repackage it and send it off completely, utterly unchanged. They really ticked off a lot of people by not making any changes.

-Rand

P.S. Note that I almost certainly have more play time in UT3 than anyone here right now. I'm leading everyone in my "friends" list by quite a bit. So I do like at least some of what they've done. But I'm also a realist.

Edited for typos.

[[TT]BrundleFly]

How are you doing these days Brundle? You got me worried dude!

Well I'm still my same old cheerful self but I'm not doing to good health wise. Walking is a killer, worse since it got cold. But I keep on truckin best I can...

We'll still get together for a Christmas drink. I know you live a long way out but you would be welcome to come visit my home with your wife, etc if you like... I'll give you a call or PM...

I will be looking forward to that Brundle. I think I can manage a trip out there before Christmas.

Rand, I would play it more if it didn't crash as much.

Things are very quiet from Epic at the moment. I venture to guess that there are some heated meetings going on about now over there.

[thinktank]

Uh, are you guys serious?

This is a joke right?

Have you guys actually PLAYED the game?

... It's actually very good.


Give it some time for the current popular titles to die down and people will pick it up, but until then, I'm afraid you're all wrong.


If you want to argue about it being launched wrong, I.E poor timing and console issues, go ahead. But I think arguing about the game being good is ridiculous, it's a fantastic game.


Edit:
Those numbers are wrong; there are not only three people playing QuakeIV right now... I know this.

[Nomadicus]

thinktank is absolutely right. What is abysmal is the dedicated server. The game is great. The server is horrific.

UT3 should have a few thousand servers out there -- most of which would have been home based -- if it wasn't for the total lack of server support. Many home based servers can now accommodate a 5v5 setup nicely.

IMO if the game dies, it will be because of lame server support.

The game is fantastic.
The editor is beyond fantastic.

[Premonition]

To me i dont like the steep system specs and how the game performs. I can run 2142 with 64 players better than ut3 with 10 people and thats with ut3 set bottom`ed out.

scudbutt use to have maps in 2k4 that looked as good as some of these. When you see a pic it look really cool. But ingame its kinda ... blah. But ut3 is the worst looking game ive seen on the unreal 3 engine so far.

I hate the server browser as well. The question for me became is ut3 any better than ut2k4. I dont care about vehicles and walkers of doom. I just wanted fast paced action.

I sure dont see upgrading just to play that. Its ut and thats cool but it didnt go out its way to be what it could have been and what many expected it to be.

I dont wanna sound like im bashing it because it is ut and that alone is cool. But i thought the same thing about quake 4 as well. It was cool to see a new quake but a few months later the game was next to dead for basically the same reasons that ut3 is looking bad now with.

TF2 is sounding more fun to me, but thats just my opinion. Had i not needed a upgrade to video card id probably have a more positive one.

[Duke{CLR}]

I don't have much to add to what has already been other than the fact that for the short time I have had a chance to play this game I have loved it. I found that the action is fast and furious and one hell of a great time.

I do hope they fix the issues with the VOIP and the server browser. It would be a shame to see this game fail to be popular because of a few things that could be easily fixed. Epic has made a lot of money so far I hope that they just don't take it and run.