Unreal Tournament 3
By James Tischler / April 5, 2009
Note that Unreal Tournament 3 is a sequel to a long-running series, and will therefore be reviewed as such. If you don't understand what this means it'd be a good idea to read this.
When it comes to the newest Unreal Tournament, less of everything seems to have been the creators' brief.
Smaller maps, fewer opponents, fewer game types, fewer movement options, fewer mutations, fewer maps, fewer player characters, fewer UI options (until the latest patch), very few graphics options, fewer key options in game, no more reticle options, no more play list, fewer weapons.
But they did give us some things: feign death for opponents who don't regularly put a slug in a body on the ground to make sure it's dead, hover boards for those warfare and VCTF maps (but they made them smaller, so why do we need to get around faster?), and more vehicles and deployable things.
Some of the things they got rid of do seem to have been victims of the Xboxification process.
It is impossible to zoom into first-person view and then out into third-person when driving a vehicle, with graduations in between, very likely because, well, a pad has no mouse wheel... This is actually in the game code, but disabled, probably because at some point they started making the game with consoles in mind. Some nice fellow has made a mod that replaces all the vehicles with zoom-enabled ones, but it has compatibility issues with other vehicle mods.
You cannot throw weapons without an ini hack, so no good for online play. They replaced this little bit of tactical decision making with being able to collect extra ammo from the weapon spawns.
No toggle for camera view.
No toggle for the find enemy base graphic, you have to turn it on and off in the menu.
The UI is terrible, especially when compared to those of its predecessors, with entire pages of options being removed, and the no longer easily navigable windows. They recently finally added more options to the graphics section, but none of the previous customization. You used to have the option to disable part or all of the HUD, but now you can choose the presence of only three parts. And you can't do it while you are playing, because, again, not enough buttons on those darn console pads.
You can't customise the colour, size and type of reticle for each weapon any more. You can only have them big, small, or gone.
The map sizes and number were other obvious candidates for Xboxification. They gave us hover boards to get around faster in the Onslaught replacement, Warfare, but shrunk the maps anyway, so what was the point? Plus, taking only deathmatch maps, there are half as many in UT3 as in UT2004 (that's going by the special edition of each, plus a map pack for UT3).
Even the mutators are annoying; the latest patch has disabled having on both the increased speed and berserk mutators at the same time. It has been suggested that this was done because of performance issues on consoles, but surely it wouldn't affect the patch for the PC version right? Right? At least the one speed mutator we used to have was configurable and compatible with berserk, and that's on top of there being somewhere around ten fewer mutators.
There are also fewer movement possibilities, rather decreasing the complexity of that part of the game. An example is the removal of dodge jumping, which was hard to perform and was a pretty good advantage to those who could do it (one of its main advantages was that it gave the player on foot a way to avoid faster vehicles, making it a clear distinguishable feature of the better player). Overall, you feel like you are much more tethered to the ground now.
No more mines, grenades or air strikes.
Another crime was to get rid of the fun, silly sports-style Tournaments where you prove your worth and buy a gang of cutthroats and gib some enemy teams on your way to the top of the tourney.
Instead we get expositional cutscenes where beefy men-children glare at each other with homoerotic tensions. And a story that tries to make CTF make sense in a war zone... And we didn't even get space combat...
And why the fuck does it auto log me in as offline whenever I start the fucking game? I always have to log out then log in again to get online. Fucking buggy patches.
UT2004 was a god among PC games for mods and one thing that bothers modders about UT3 is that a lot of stuff was removed from the scripting tools and instead moved to native code, supposedly to improve console performance, and this makes modding quite a bit harder. Now a year and a half down the track we can see the result: even good old Chaotic Dreams is dead in the water for now, since no one cares enough to help them turn out some more chaotic goodness.
It may look like I have nothing really good to say about the game, but I do, and I did. It's certainly not bad, but hardly seemed worth the wait, since it feels like it's still only half a game, even after some three patches and a major free map pack.
The Unreal 3 engine is pretty nice, and it definitely has some promise. My PC is nothing great, only one of the first dual cores plus an 8600, and that runs the game at max real smoothly, except for cutscenes that hiccup along every now and again.
So it looks pretty, but they really should have stayed with creating maps that look like tourney arenas, instead of this gritty "real war zone" stiffy they got going on. More bright neon, lava, molten metal, icy chambers, low gravity forests, soaring towers of death and so forth -- why do the old maps seem so much more original? The only ones that are really memorable in the new game are the ones that copy old maps, both in aesthetics and the actual map design, such as Facing Worlds. But, hey, at least they let you turn off the motion blur.
For another lamentable example of the Xboxification process, check our recent Team Fortress 2 review. For updates about the status of UT3, keep an eye on its dedicated forum thread.