A Single-Player Gamer's Take on Unreal Tournament 3

When Epic was touting UT3 prior to its release, one thing they were
keen to mention was a study they had done on their customers. Said
Epic, something like 60% of all the people who bought the UT games
never went online; they played the game for the single-player aspect
only. Therefore, said Epic, Unreal Tournament 3, would be more
single-player friendly.

I mention all this because -despite these claims- the first thing you
see when you start the game is a log-in screen for multiplayer gaming.
Want to play offline? It's a tiny link at the bottom of the page. If
you start an offline campaign (which takes far more steps than with
most other games), you get a nasty error message telling you that
offline games are missing some features (what features were never
quite clear). And the coup de resistance: as shipped, if you don't
make an online profile, the game will not save your progress through
the offline campaign (this will be fixed in the first patch). *THIS*
is making things more comfortable for offline gamers?

Well, it's not like they totally reamed single-player gamers. They did
add a campaign with a story to Unreal Tournament. Honestly, were there
really a lot of people saying to themselves, "You know, this running
around capping people in the head and stealing flags is neat and all,
but I really wish there was a compelling narrative to all this". Jeez!
It's a game about a tournament; does the series really need a
structure more complex than "kill everyone and get to the top of the
ladder"?

Apparently Epic thinks so, because they saddled us with a cliche tale
of revenge and corporate warfare. The characters -many of them
blantantly stolen from Gears of War- fall flat, the story has a
predictible non-ending (what is it with designers nowadays that every
every damn game has to end with a cliffhanger? Learn to wrap it up! If
the game's good, I'll buy the sequel even if the previous game ended
neatly), and the explanations for why things like power-ups and
respawns litter the battlefield are so laughable I'd rather they'd not
mentioned them at all.

I'm all for motivation and backstory where appropriate, but -argh-
next time, Epic, keep it out of Unreal Tournament.

Meanwhile, the bot AI -once the crown jewels of the UT series- is no
longer impressive; they can't defend worth a darn, and aren't much
better on the attack. With the original Unreal Tournament, I sometimes
had a hard time telling my AI teammates from real players (except they
weren't calling me "***" all the time); with UT3, they are
indistinguishable from the brain-dead AIs in other games.

The levels are underwhelming; they either feel to small or too big for
the number of teammates you are given. The gameplay modes aren't
particularly impressive (the new "warfare" mode bores me to tears;
give me back old fashioned "Dominion"; there was a game with some
passion. Or at least bring back old fashioned Assault! And as for the
vehicles; why give me a tank and then make the level nothing but
narrow canyons? I for the most part ignored the vehicles and
hoverboarded across the levels (not that the hoverboard was so great,
since you can't shoot, or grab powerups/flags/weapons while 'boarding,
and can get bounced off the board with the slightest of hits... but it
beat walking).

As to graphics, I can't say I was overwhelmed. I know that deathmatch
games are optimized for gameplay over visuals -you aren't supposed to
have any time to stop and take in the scenery- but after the vivid
realism of Crysis, the Unreal 3 engine looks second-rate. In part it's
because of art direction - there was never any part of the game where
my jaw dropped and I went "wow"- but it's also technical; UT3 relies
far too much on post-processing, which makes everything look too much
like a cartoon. The lack of any real interaction didn't help things
eithe; the maps all felt static and dead.

Arguably, I'm not the real market for these sort of games; the Unreal
Tournament is, after all, primarily a multiplayer game. Quite
possibly, as a multiplayer experience, UT3 is an exceptional game. But
by Epic's own words, UT3 was supposed to be geared as much towards the
single-player gamer -like myself -as the more vocal multiplayer
community. But in my opinion, they failed. UT3 isn't an awful game,
but it's far less satisfying -even to a self-avowed single-player
gamer like myself- than their previous offerings.



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