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UT2004 Shows Upgrades, Spaceships, Onslaught
Thanks to GameSpy for their hands-on preview of Unreal Tournament 2004, checking out the PC FPS title that's due out this Xmas. This latest upgrade "...will ship with vehicles, new weapons, two new game modes, and more new maps than all the maps UT2003 shipped with", and a new space level has you "...piloting small Wing Commander-style space fighters [before] the action switches to more traditional-style combat." The novel 'onslaught' mode, in which competing teams use vehicles and special weapons to "...control a series of nodes connecting your base to theirs" was the "clear favorite of the day" for the author, and IGN PC has another hands-on report that suggests these new modes introduce a "surprisingly satisfying strategic layer" to the upgrade.
I'm sick of people complaining about the hardware requirements every time the latest and greatest game comes out. Some of us actually look forward to software that stresses the limits of conventional systems ... keeps the industry evolving.
I don't know if people like you are cheapskates or just poor, in either case stop bitching about it to the rest of us
I assume you are joking. You have to be. I wouldn't even play the original Unreal Tournament with less than 128RAM, and ram is cheap as hell.
If a what, three year old processor and 64M of ram puts this out of your reach, then you are not one for current 3-D technology. Stick with tetris.
I think that has more to do with the requirement to have a valid key. As a consequence, people who leached the game can't play. As a consequence of that, the game servers are mostly empty save for the few weeks of hype that accompanies a game release.
A game like ut2003 stands or falls with a community. If there's a critical mass of users (legal & illegal), mods will appear, levels be written and people will just continue to play and buy the game. That never really happened with UT2003. A few people bought the game, went online and found a handfull of other people who bought the game. Then a few of them bought another game and after a few months almost nobody played ut2003 online anymore.
I understand that gamecreators want to protect their stuff. However, their actions are actually hurting their revenue because nobody buys their games after the hype is gone. What use is an online only game if the online community has moved on to the next game? Right none. Worse then hurting the revenue, they are also hurting the few people who do buy the game. These people are eager to play and after a few months their expensive game is worthless because nobody else plays it.
So here'a a suggestion. Release the game with the usual restrictions. Geeks will drool over the screenshots and buy the game no matter what. After a few months, when revenue starts to decline, remove all restrictions. By then the game will have been cracked&distrubuted anyway. Now rather than withering away, the gaming community will stay alive. You will continue to sell copies (new gamers & converted leachers) and maybe a few upgrades. This will last as long there is a community.
Quake 1 & 2 and Doom 1 & 2 continued to sell years after their release. They didn't have any restrictions. Quake 3 sold lots of copies based on the popularity of its predecessors (and the unrestricted demos that had been ciculating for months). It wouldn't have gotten that far on its own.
Jilles