Why Did Unreal Tournament 3 Fail?

[A Nobody]

Sure it was a step backwards from Unreal Tournament 2004, but how was it that it was overshadowed by the likes of Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare? How did it fail as a shooter? Did some people's tastes change at that point? What big flaws did the game have? It's a shame that it was the case. Unreal Tournament 3, like other UT games, looks a ton of fun.

[Teo Slayer]

Never played Unreal Tournament lol, I remember that angry german kid screaming at his PC cuz it couldn't load faster this game lmao

 

[A Nobody]

1 minute ago, Teo Slayer said:

Never played Unreal Tournament lol, I remember that angry german kid screaming at his PC cuz it couldn't load faster this game lmao

 

That was all acted out.

[Redneckerz]

Consoles, actually. Though i love the game on 360.

[roadworx]

old-school fps games like that were on the decline in favor of gritty military shooters and halo clones, and it just overall wasn't good enough to bring people back to the genre - or really even as good as it predecessors, tbh.

[Mr. Freeze]

- Only six game modes at launch

- Slower than UT and regular Unreal

- Bad art style, looks like a GOW ripoff

- Apparently super buggy at launch

- Came out at a time where the FPS zeitgeist was changing in favor of CoD and Halo. Like it or not, Unreal was getting long in the tooth and those franchises were seen as the hot new thing. 

[Mayomancer]

We'll have to get a really good and decently accessible game for an arena shooter revival. Quake Champions tried to do that i guess, by introducing the character skills and all that stuff. If ID really wanted it to be a thing they could given the huge success of the recent Doom games, It doesn't seem like their highest priority at the moment though.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

There was to be a reboot in development using Unreal Engine 4, but development was cancelled in favor of continuing updates for Fortnite, ultimately rendering Unreal Tournament 3 to this day the latest & final installment of both the Unreal & Unreal Tournament franchises. Epic Games now only focuses on just the Unreal Engine itself as well as the aforementioned Fortnite franchise.

[lazygecko]

These are the competing FPS games that came out around the same time: CoD4, Crysis, Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2 Ep2, and Portal. All of these titles had a lot more clout in the gaming mindshare and that's just within the same genre as Q4 2007 was insanely packed with high profile titles all around.

 

It certainly didn't help that Epic actually delayed the original launch date to said time frame specifically so they could add in the really shoehorned single player campaign that was barely disguised botmatches padded by FMV cutscenes.

[INfront95]

Few reasons:

 

After UT and UT2004 game looked ugly as fuck. Everything is grey, gritty and as some people say very gears of war'ish. Unreal engine at the time was very "heavy on your system" constant texture poping, washed textures, framerate drop etc.

 

Wrong time for the genre: sadly majority of the players already moved for CoD style and team based games. Shame really, i miss atmoshere of old Arena shooters. It was like a Festival.

 

And in my opinion main reason: Game was shallow. Few gamemods, no assault, instead of huge roster of skins we had 'armor pieces', clear focus on "nodes protection" gamemode (probably to compete with battlefield) and did i mention NO ASSAULT. Man so many years passed, but im still salty.

 

It was just a shadow of what we had before.

[HLRaven]

Honestly it was because the game was in the classic era of being gray to pretend it's a "dark game" and it didn't do any favors for it to look like a gears of war spin-off
I mostly played the game to screw around with feign death by jumping off bridges, cliffs, roofs and more lol!

[[McD] James]

I played it when it was free on Steam and thought it was ugly-looking, slow, and boring. 

[Dark Pulse]

Reasons it failed:

1. Midway desperately pushed it out about 6-9 months before it was ready because they were tanking hard, as confirmed by the devs.
2. "Loading: Main Menu".
3. Required a BIG leap up in hardware to run well on PC (I upgraded to a dual-core system for the first time thanks to it, and got one of the best GPUs on the market at the time).
4. Gamespy, fucking GAMESPY, necessary for online play.
5. Early on, no dedicated servers.
6. For those who liked the 2kx style, a return to something more grounded and UT99-like in movement (i.e; no more crazy wallkick flipjump crap) meant they were no longer pro.
7. For those who liked the 2kx style, the fact you could no longer dominate with just a Shock Rifle and Lightning Gun since Rockets and Flak were actually viable again meant they were no longer pro.
8. If you hated vehicular game modes, surprise, even DM or CTF maps could have those now.

Personally though, I'd place the blame more on the first four. Five stung for a short while but was corrected a few months in. The last three is just a case of UT going back to its roots, while those who liked 2kx didn't know what those roots were.

 

I still had a blast playing it, personally. Not the all-time classic UT99 was, but UT3 did deserve a better fate than it got.

 

I also soundly reject your assertion it was a "step backwards" to UT2004, mostly because UT2003/UT2004 was a step sideways away from the entire Unreal/UT game style. UT3 was a more successful blend of the originals' faster ground-based action, while still retaining some of the good things (more movement options without being stupidly floaty, vehicular combat) while dumping some of the dumber shit (adrenaline, adrenaline-based powerups, Shield Gun).

Edited June 24, 2021 by Dark Pulse

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

8 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

Gamespy, fucking GAMESPY, necessary for online play.

 

Early on, no dedicated servers.

 

If you hated vehicular game modes, surprise, even DM or CTF maps could have those now.

These were the three main cons for me. Mainly the vehicular combat.

 

That being said, I loved UT3.

[Blzut3]

2 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Required a BIG leap up in hardware to run well on PC (I upgraded to a dual-core system for the first time thanks to it, and got one of the best GPUs on the market at the time).

Now I'm sure it wasn't a major factor, but it certainly didn't help that UT2004 ran on just about everything (32-bit and 64-bit Windows and Linux, PowerPC and 32-bit Intel Mac) and UT3 was Windows only after the promised Mac and Linux versions got canned.  Which sucked for me as a Linux user.

 

That said I think UT3 largely just suffered from the first impressions problem.  It's launch state was just quite lack luster.  They added a lot over time, but by then too many people didn't care.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

It's currently the latest, last & final Unreal & Unreal Tournament installment to be released at retail.

[snapshot]

cause it sucked

[xvertigox]

It lost the UT soul/charm for me. I think it's because all UE games around that time had that same brown/grey over bloomed look. It was just thoroughly average, 2k4 and 99 shit all over UT3. I do wish UT4 had continued being developed, that could have been very interesting. From what I recall it was supposed to be handed over to the community to continue but then the fortnite bux started pouring in and Epic fully dropped it.

[Dark Pulse]

3 minutes ago, xvertigox said:

I do wish UT4 had continued being developed, that could have been very interesting. From what I recall it was supposed to be handed over to the community to continue but then the fortnite bux started pouring in and Epic fully dropped it.

That is correct.

[Roebloz]

You kinda got Team Fortress 2 coming a month before to completely obliterate any thunder it could had have, along with HL2: Episode 2 and Portal, and of course Halo and Call of Duty. So yeah, blame hat simulator 2007 for this one.

[ReaperAA]

I agree with pretty much everything that @Dark Pulse said. UT3 actually became a really good game once most of the issues got fixed (either by the Titan Pack or by community patches like Foxmod). Even the visuals could be made more vibrant by color tweaking of some shader with UT3's Editor (I remember making one that I unfortunately never released, though I still probably have it in my computer).

 

But it was unfortunately too late. UT3 deserved better in my opinion as it did some things better than its predecessor (UT2004). The gameplay in general was far more balanced and closer to UT99.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Looks more like a Gears of War & Unreal Tournament crossover game than a Unreal Tournament game.

[Azuris]

The Game was soooo slow, sooo damn slow.
 

It just felt as they tried to make a more "realistic" Shooter, as where hip at the Time, and that took out all the Soul of the Game.

 

7 minutes ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Looks more like a Gears of War & Unreal Tournament crossover game than a Unreal Tournament game.

 

Jep.


But hey, i have no Problem playing UT2k4 over and over again, it is no Problem to find Servers since they updated the Master Server.
New Games will also never be able to get the same amount of Mods and Skins from Fans nowadays.

It is just pure Enjoyment seing Pikachu killing Sailor Moon and Bender with a Rocker Launcher in the Hands.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

8 hours ago, Roebloz said:

You kinda got Team Fortress 2 coming a month before to completely obliterate any thunder it could had have, along with HL2: Episode 2 and Portal

Oh and The Orange Box, despite the fact that was a compilation containing Half-Life 2, Episode One & Two, Portal & Team Fortress 2, if it counts.

[Roebloz]

7 hours ago, Wadmodder Shalton said:

Oh and The Orange Box, despite the fact that was a compilation containing Half-Life 2, Episode One & Two, Portal & Team Fortress 2, if it counts.

That is exactly what I meant.

[Kinsie]

Friggin' look at it.

 

[Gez]

On mercredi 23 juin 2021 at 11:04 PM, Mr. Freeze said:

- Bad art style, looks like a GOW ripoff 

They were developed kinda at the same time, so clearly it was a phase they were going through.

 

Gears of War started as "Unreal Warfare", a class-based Unreal Tournament spin-off.

 

Eventually they decided to repurpose UW as a single-player, third-person game disconnected from the Unreal universe, as they felt that class-based arena shooters were old hat.

[A Nobody]

6 hours ago, Kinsie said:

Friggin' look at it.

 

What about the gameplay? How's it like?

[NoXion]

3 hours ago, The Strife Commando said:

What about the gameplay? How's it like?

 

"Slow" seems to be the main complaint, judging from reading the thread.

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Looks more like a fan-made remake of Quake III Arena or the multiplayer portion of Quake 4 than an Unreal Tournament game.

 

At least in regards to the graphics & art style.