Yeah, I remember when I first saw Unreal... going from inside to outside, the music, the colors. Unreal was a major reason I bought a $150 Voodoo1 card back in 1998 to run in my PII-300mhz system.
I still have that game, playable on Win7. UT was a great multi-player platform with some of the best maps - still only for UT. The fun of being blasted by rockets as it throws your body up against walls, etc. Looking over the edge to see a planet down below. At one point, there were 500 very active servers. Nowadays, there are about 10~15 UT2004 servers and about 5 UT3 servers. Guess you won't see me on UT3.
Too bad Tim Sweeney forgot where he started from... We had high hopes for UT3, and Epic/Sweeney ruined it. The game engine itself is solid and ran great. But they made UT3... un-fun. It came with mostly beautiful-but crappy maps... that were somewhat small, yet came with huge and fast vehicles.
They took out the view-zoom feature, so you can see behind you when flying - an IMPORTANT feature if you're going to be giving other people "rides" with grappling hooks. The Game Menu interface was crap crap, storage of custom maps is a severe pain in the butt. So yeah, out of the 32 or so maps it came with, only 12 or playable. It took over a year before the players could make good and better maps, and there are some AWESOME UT3 maps out there now... but there is a problem.
1 - maps are huge (25~50mb each), okay. but the downloading system sucks.
2 - By the time good maps came out, most people have gotten bored playing the same 2-3 maps (per game type - that are GOOD) and have moved on.
3 - because of map download issues and huge file size, most servers only run the standard maps! That nobody wants to play... and at the same time, many of the few remaining players want to spend the time DL the new maps.
UT3 is completely fixable. Just like UT2003 kind of sucked... With UT4, they threw in 100 extra maps (130+ total), fixed the scaling and play issues and made it... FUN. I migrated off of UT-classic in 2 weeks.
So the same this is what UT3 needs... turned into UT4. Include 125~150 AWESOME maps. Fix the functions that are need (Zoom) toss in some cool mods for people to play with. Sell it for $30 and perhaps WE WILL FORGIVE YOU. I have added 100 maps to my collection, most of them better than anything than Epic included in UT3.
I guess I need to move on to modern warfare games... which are not the custom map/fantasy type maps of the UT universe. ugh.
Thanks Epic, for killing our inner child.