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Unreal Tournament 3 Performance Revealed
Vigile writes "The Unreal Tournament 3 demo will be dropping sometime in the next two weeks. With a launch on the PC, PS3, Xbox 360 and even an in-box Linux client it will definitely be one of the most widely-played titles this holiday. With an early take on the UT3 demo's performance, PC Perspective has put up an article that compares cards from NVIDIA and AMD in both single and dual-GPU configurations to see which are the best performers. It turns out that even mid-range cards are going to be more than capable of playing UT3 at impressive image quality levels."
That seems odd. A linux client, but not a Mac client? Less than 1% of the desktop market versus around 6% (and much higher outside of business), and they go for the smaller of the two? Or does the summary just leave out the Mac release?
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There are only a few differences between TFC and TF2... I'm curious why people are so amazed at TF2 when it is a dumbed down version of TFC. Not to say I don't like TF2, it's just that as a TFC addict for 8 years it's amazing that people didn't know about this game...
Seriously. How about some benchmarks with a mid/low range CPU?
I think I can safely assume that if bits of the demo dropped to 20FPS with a Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800, 4 Gigs of RAM and an Nvidia 8800GTS, there's really no point in even trying on a midrange machine.
Why can't I find the button to digg this article down?
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
I suppose the question you might ask yourself is not why people didn't know about TFC (which presumably most of us did), but why TF2 is enjoying such a positive response. While you note that there are only a few differences between TF2 and TFC, I put it to you that those differences are fundamental to this positive response.
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Game performance reviews that just target the latest cards annoy me now. A quick look at http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html shows that the latest ATI and NVidia card represent about 6-7% of users. While doing a wider range of cards obviously takes longer, looking at performance on the most popular cards of the last gen would sure be informative.
See, my view is that TFC is a distillation of all that is good about team-based shooters already, and that TF2 removed some elements which took some of the skill out of the game. It's still fun, but it's not quite as difficult.
The big change is that they got rid of grenades. Each class had a standard grenade and a class specific grenade that did different things. This made going outside of your base more like entering a minefield and you had to hurry around know exactly where you wanted to go.
Now for class specific analysis.
Medic: First off, in TFC the class wasn't called a medic, it was a combat medic. The medic had two shotguns, the super needle gun (as they do now), and the health "weapon" was only short range, it didn't have magical homing abilities. Also the lack of concussion grenades is a real bummer. A trained medic could fly across the map with those things, but even so, it didn't seem unbalanced because of the way the maps were designed. You couldn't just fly to the flag and fly back, you still had to get into the base. Just a bunch of walking was taken out and your health took a big hit from the fall.
Spy: This is where my real complaints come in. In TFC the spy couldn't cloak, the cloak replaced what was in TFC as the "feign death". So as a spy, you could pretend to die and you would lay on the ground, defenseless, appearing dead to the casual observer. You couldn't move around, and you had to do it convincingly otherwise people would just shoot your corpse and kill you. Another thing about the spy class is that the disguise time is about 3 seconds now. Before it was about 10-20 seconds, so you had to plan all of your attacks, and execute them without hitch because you couldn't just disappear and run away. No pistol either, just a tranquilizer dart that would slow your enemy down. No instant kill sentry weapon, only 2 grenades (one building destroy, essentially). Despite this, a good player as a spy would probably be on top of the server.
Scout, Sniper, Demoman, Pyro, Soldier, Engineer: Practically identical, with very minor changes
So really, the real changes were the Medic and the Spy. The rest were interface changes (such as the Engineer's build system or the Spy's cloaking system), but those were for the better.
So they took the skill out of two classes that didn't cause any balancing issues in the first place. Watching a spy in TFC would be 100 times better than watching someone play Splinter Cell. Yet now, all I see is people cloaking in the wrong occasions revealing their location, stabbing someone or shooting someone, and cloaking and running away. Cloak and dagger tactics in the literal sense. That's not what the class used to be about. It took considerable effort to pretend to be one of the crowd, then sneak around and destroy a sentry. Stab someone, hide, feign, disguise again. Pretend to die in the right occasion, pop up when nobody is around, kill, etc.
Look at it this way - the clever programmers at Epic managed to do for saturation what Doom 3 did for brightness.
Whoever designed the front end UI needs SLAPPING. Hard. Very hard. And often.
Yes you do. You just don't know it.
Most good spies will disguise as their own team and look like they are attacking with them, then have a bind that feigns + drops backpack. Completely convincing and nobody will ever notice the difference in a large firefight.
And here is a torrent (I'm getting 200K/s right now)
http://www.gameupdates.org/details.php?id=1657