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It has been four years since the last Unreal Tournament, a time-frame that is just too long. UT2004 improved upon the original Unreal Tournament in every way. It had a shiny new graphics engine, tweaked and honed multiplayer, and smarter AI bots for those who enjoyed playing offline.  As well as that it had enough players to sustain its lifetime well past its expiry date. The community thrived with custom maps, game changing mods and a bustling server list. If we fast forward to the present day and to the release of Unreal Tournament 3, nothing much has changed. UT3 has the same high-powered engine as Gears of War, it has the same tried and tested frantic gameplay and it has improved offline AI. So why is no-one playing it?

The most obvious answer is competition. 2007 has been a marvellous year for gaming and gamers have been treated to many AAA titles. Whether console of PC gamer, there has been a plethora of games that are unavoidable. If we just focus on offline games, then there has been Bioshock, Crysis, The Orange Box, and Uncharted, (just to name a few). Once those have been completed, people have mostly moved onto Halo 3 Multiplayer, CoD4 online, TF2 and not forgetting the 9million still people playing World of Warcraft. It’s a viciously aggressive market and only the best can survive. Despite that fact, the developers should be worried because UT3 has had a welcome reception. If we look at Metacritic; the PC version has a score of 83 and the PS3, a score of 87.

The build quality of the game is great; it runs smooth on most machines and looks fantastic. While the game is good, its server browser isn’t. From the beginning, finding and connecting to a server has been a laborious affair. When the Beta Demo was released for the PC, no-one could stay connected to a server. The dedicated package was broken and as a result games were hosted by individuals and were extremely laggy. This most likely pushed away positional fans. Those who were set on purchasing the game argued that it’s only a demo. The situation was barely improved upon on release as the integration of Gamespy caused many problems; again making it difficult to actually get into a server. Only the die-hard fans remain and they will most likely stay loyal for the game’s existence. With some many other great, stable games on the market, UT3 practically doomed itself. There really isn’t anything on the horizon that looks to change that. Now the game has died, it’s practically impossible for it to be raised from the dead.

One month on and it’s UT03 all over again, and there’s nothing Epic can do about it. By confining themselves to a multiplatform release strategy, it’s unlikely the developers will repeat the past. When Unreal Tournament 2003 was released, it failed. A year later, Epic took a long and hard look at the game and rehashed it as UT2004 and it was a fantastic success. It was achievable because the game was primarily a PC franchise. Nowadays, that’s not really possible because the development time is increased by catering for consoles. Epic have got a lot of work to do to win back their fans. It’s going to take something drastic and new, something fresh and innovative. Let’s hope the situation is better, one year on. 

Update: For those doubting the credibility of my sources, please head over to here. Despite the UT3 Demo Time at the top, its for the game as a whole. (Needs to be viewed in FireFox.)

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