I have been around the “Unreal Scene” since it began in 1998 with the release of the original version of Unreal. Those days were a lot of fun and there was huge interest in playing “The” must have cool shooting games and Unreal 1 was the leader of the pack. With Unreal 1 there was no mercy given – and none expected.

Unreal Tournament 3 Titan Says “Howdy”

Since that 1998 release date Unreal has progressed down the line from Return to Na Pali (1999); Unreal Tournament (1999; Unreal Tournament 2003 (2002); Unreal Championship (2002); Unreal II: The Awakening (2003); Unreal Tournament 2004 (2004); Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict (2005); and finally Unreal Tournament 3 (2007).

UT3 had the potential to be the best yet in the series and in reality the PC version of UT3 has the best feel of any previous version of Unreal ever released for the PC. The game play and physics are outstanding and the graphics are – well – Unreal! The weightless bouncy feel of UT 2004 was replaced with a solid heavy feel that is closer to real physics. UT3 is the in-your-face king of cool shooting games. In my opinion the hands down winner of any FPS game ever unleashed on the FPS gore loving fans that believe a frag a day keeps the doctor away.

It all started about 6 months before the game was released when I purchased an advance copy of the game at that time called Unreal Tournament 2007. There was much hype concerning the upcoming release and everyone was super excited. A screen shot would be released here – an artist’s conception artwork would be leaked. Since the last version was released in 2004 there was actually many years of this sort of thing and it was building to a fever pitch. Finally the day came when I could reserve a game server at Art of War Central. The Moon and stars all align and the “CoA House of Ass” UT3 server came online on November 20th, 2007. Issues start immediately. . . .

At the start the server did not show up in the in-game server browser. This is corrected by the 23rd of November. At this point its hard to give the server a proper name since at this time the server name is some weird combo of gamespy user name first – then server name. Eventually this gets corrected after the first patch. A lot of the early issues with the game in my opinion could have been avoided if there was a built-in web admin utility available at launch date. The web admin utility for UT3 was not made available until February 7th, 2008. This was a huge blow to the game since before the release of the web administration UT3 servers had to be controlled via changes to ini files. Compound this with the fact that everything changed – file locations; compression, the command set itself, etc – game server providers and server admins like myself were rather confused from the start. If you are a programmer and are used to this sort of stuff you did well but if you are not like myself the lack of any web admin tools like I used in UT2003 and 2004 it made it a pain in the ass to run a UT3 server.

There were many other issues at release – the in-game browser worked poorly, no way to add servers to favorites, and another huge problem at release was that there was no map redirection. If you have played the Unreal franchise for any length of time you would know how important the loss of map redirection would be to this game. The Unreal community thrives on custom content and the game just is not the same without it. Map redirection is not available until around February 11th, 2008. I get it working on February 14th, 2008 on the clan UT3 server. I could go on and on concerning the issues surrounding the game at its release date but that is not the point. Epic has been doing a great job fixing the problems with the game and UT3 as it exists now is better than any other FPS game on the market. There are market pressures that make games get pushed out too early but in this case it seems mind boggling how a game with such a stellar franchise as Unreal would be released in a half completed state considering the last release was in 2004. Even if the game had all the same bugs but shipped with web administration and map re-direct fully functional the game would have been a success in my opinion. Lets not forget that Call of Duty 4 and Crysis also released in November 2007. UT3 had to be ready out of the box to both compete with other titles released during the same time period and please their loyal fan base. Epic failed in both of these areas.

For my game clan interest in the game was already lost in the first part of December 2007.

A few random comments from the CoA Clan Forum on December 11th, 2007:

Brooze CoA: “Sure, but when 2K4 was released, it was a pretty polished-looking game right out of the box, and at least it had a decent server browser in which you could add favorites and view who was playing on a particular server! This game looks distinctly rough and ready in comparison, which, given the time it was in development, is baffling! I quite like the game, however, and in time, given a decent system, I’m sure I’ll appreciate it more, but for the moment, I’ve seen nothing which justifies it’s 8 gig installation”

ChaoS_CoA: Its my understanding that the in-game browser is the way it is since it was written for both the PS3 and the keyboard . . . I agree that just about everything that surrounds the game is rough – the in-game browser, the dedicated server, etc . . . but the game itself is great ! Web Admin is rumored to be in the next patch . . . .”

Followed by: Silver: “http://www.guffsturdpolish.com/default.php”

ChaoS_CoA: “That’s right . . . UT3 just needs a dab of Turd Polish!”

Snap: “Lol! I could use a can, make that a tanker truck of that at work. Still I’m not a fan boy of UT3…. No way in hell should it have suked so hard from the start, and still does IMHO…”
I really feel from approximately that point in time our game clan pretty much lost interest in Unreal Tournament 3. Remember that at this point in time there is no web admin to provide an easy way to change the variety of maps and custom content served up to the players. Many servers at this point have been running stock maps over and over again since there was no easy way to change map rotations. Even if web admin did work there was no map redirection functioning that could send that content. This is the instant on generation and if a game is to be successful it needs to be ready out of the gate. Sure – there will always be bugs with any game release but developers need to ensure core functionality is there and this was not the case with Unreal Tournament 3.

Here are a few comments from the Epic Server Admin Mail List:

Mike – 11-23-07:

Can I just say something a bit off topic ? Please don’t see this as rant, but I really admire the patience of the community. UT3 is one of the first games (I know) which had a patch released before the majority of the people even received the retail game (including me and it is pre-ordered for over a year now). I assume the reason is not the bad development or QA, but the pressure from Midway and the whole console discussions. As I said, this is not a rant .. I am just saying – games like BF2 were full of bugs and glitches, but UT3 is pretty much the first game (I played / saw) in such a “bad” unfinished condition. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy it.

Chuck “CHiLLZ” Childress – 11-24-07:

“For me this whole scenario is a bittersweet thing. I can definitely see both sides of the situation… I have been an active part of “the community” for the last 8 years running, and on the other hand- I am a professional developer for my day job. So I have this funky mix of perspectives regarding situations like a new game release. I definitely understand some of the frustrating “realities” of software development under a deadline and a budget. Of course, it is perfectly reasonable for us as avid fans who love this game series, to want something that lives up to our expectations. We love this game, and we want to be able to CONITINUE loving it. ;P Goodness knows I was very much looking forward to seeing our Epic boys “finally get it right” on the release of a sequel, especially after all they have been through and (presumably) learned from previous releases.

The truth is, they have done some things with this iteration that are more of a nod to “the community” then I think I have ever heard of any development house doing, for *any* 3D shooter– they brought in some of the top competitive UT players in the nation and had them play-test the game while in development. And I think everyone would agree that the actual game play of UT3 reflects that. It is smooth, engrossing, and largely free of annoying quirks.

Now granted– as a professional developer, who has also been an aspiring unreal mapper in past years, there are many things about UT3 as a complete product that could be easily critiqued. The player scale is wonky, the user interface is clearly a last minute port from a console design, the lack of adequate server side support at release time, getting stuck on a compliance issue immediately following release, lack of adequate config documentation, etc.

And being someone who is very much part of the “OMG WTF I want my Linux ded server!!!” faction, I am certainly very sad to not have UT3 running on my colo box yet. But as much as it pains me to admit, I think the bottom line of this particular topic boils down to one (hopefully consoling) point:

*** Epic has always done the best job of supporting their products (in the long run) of any video games I have ever purchased. ***
This has been proven to be true in multiple cases over time, and unless something drastic happens to change that, and as a result– I will still be checking this mailing list every single day until I get my Linux dedicated goodness.”

Mike Noordermeer – 11-24-07:

“QettoE wrote: They did a good job in keeping their promise and released the game on time. Let’s help them out with constructive feedback and bug report, not criticism. That’s what forums are for. . . . True, but it would be a real shame if the community turns its back on UT3 because of a lack of good servers, etc. The outstanding issues should really be fixed asap.”

I think Mike’s comment above was spot on: The community did turn its back on UT3 due to a lack of good servers and the outstanding issues were not fixed As Soon As Possible. Indeed, many outstanding issues were not fixed until the June 2nd, 2008 Patch version 1.3.

On April 2nd, 2008 I checked the gamespy.com stats page (gamespy stats):

There were 995 UT3 Servers with 287 players in-game.

A quick check today – Saturday, January 10th, 2008:

31. Unreal Tournament 3 (PC)
503 servers, 429 players

(That’s a loss of 492 servers since the check on April 2nd, 2008)

Here are the 5 top rated games as shown on January 10th, 2008:

1. Half Life
5175 servers, 20079 players

2. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
13548 servers, 14073 players

3. Battlefield 2
3846 servers, 13232 players

4. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
2937 servers, 10446 players

5. Battlefield 2142
1063 servers, 4368 players

And yet the game survives as an angry wounded beast! The best game that never was is down but not out. Twisted, angry – its heart torn from its chest and yet it beats on. . . . The drums of war are calling and the spirit of the tournament cannot be pounded lame by any hammer and anvil. Lock and Load Baby – we’re going in. . . .

Led Zeppelin: The Battle of Evermore
“The pain of war cannot exceed
The woe of aftermath,
The drums will shake the castle wall,
The ringwraiths ride in black,
Ride on.”

“First there was Chaos, the vast immeasurable abyss,
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild.” — Milton

Chaos(CoA)
LosChaos.Com

However – a funny thing happened on the way to Liandri Stadium: UT3 stumbled and fell from the starting gate and has never recovered. There is a small cadre of die-hard fans out there still playing the game – a band of brothers that refuse to shoot the horse with a broken leg in the brain with the kill shot and put it out of its misery. Occasionally I can hear a round being shoved into the chamber and the barrel click in place but no shots fired wildly into the dark yet. UT3 is a whimpering beast covered in blood but its surviving by clawing its way through an urban landscape pock marked with shattered dreams and broken illusions.

The beast that UT3 has become is still out there but its being clobbered by the competition and mistakes made at the beginning of its release doomed it to become The Best Game That Never Was. This article comes from the UT Trenches and details what happened to UT3 and attempts to explain why it never made it as the de facto FPS powerhouse game that all others should measure themselves by. The CoA UT3 server has also become a victim of the decline and is now offline. Tis a shame and it’s not something that I wanted to do – that is – pull the plug on the game that I love but the fact is that the server sat idle week after week. When you consider that there are only a few hundred UT3 servers online at any given time in the US it just made no sense to keep it going. Who knows – if the soon to be released “Titan Bonus Pack” somehow breathes some life into UT3 we will be back . . . ..