Hey guys - first, I want to thank you all for your feedback of my review, whether it was positive or negative. Per the submission rules here, I have to keep my reviews somewhat limited in word count (around 2,200), so I did the best I could to cover all of my concerns, and beliefs as to why Unreal Tournament 3 turned out the way it did.
Regarding my score of 8.0, I thought about it for some time, but came to the conclusion that I couldn't have given it less than an 8 when focusing primarily on the multiplayer. The truth is, an 8.0 is an above average to good game, and that's where UT3 falls as it is right now.
Those of you who have played UT3 will probably agree that Epic was perfectly capable of creating a higher quality product, and subsequently earn a better score from most reviewers. I believe that had Epic dropped the single player efforts on the PC completely, that gamers would have still purchased UT3 at near full price, and we would have had more game types to play or more features. Instead, I feel that the single player campaign, along with the high quality and expensive cinematics, were developed with the intention of adding value to the console platforms.
Usually single player efforts in a mostly pure multiplayer game are done at the demand or expectations of the publisher, with the goal of justifying the value of the title to those who approve games at Sony and Microsoft, along with retail chain executives and marketing gurus in charge of bulk buying. I have a background as a Producer in game dev, so I understand the hurdles that developers often need to take when pushing a game on a console, it's much much different than a purely PC release. Developers are sometimes forced into promising things like X amount of single player missions, and a full fledged campaign where you conquer the world. So what happens in those cases? Typically developers sacrifice and make cuts elsewhere, to deliver on the contract, even if poorly. This is just speculation in this case though, I do not work for Epic or Midway.
With that said, I was somewhat torn between a 7.5 and an 8 for a couple days. If you play UT3 enough online, you'd probably agree that an 8 is fair, as it's not a bad game. The series isn't dead, it just seems that Epic stripped away some things while only adding very little to take the place of the missing. While I may have seemed to complain about UT3 a lot, I also did mention there were things that I did enjoy as well. I just expected more of an evolution.
Regarding the original UT, it was definitely one of the greats of its time, and I spent many hours playing it each and every week for a good year, but my favorite of the series did become UT2004, which I thought was excellent.
In terms of quality games lately that other developers should try to learn from, I think Infinity Ward did an excellent job showcasing how to make a very solid single player and multiplayer experience with Call of Duty 4. They were able to accomplish a multi-platform release to boot, and still keep things very enjoyable. I understand that they're different games with different engines, and even styles, but I think that for UT3, and the time spent working on it, the sky should have been the limit.
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