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Anyway,
I just read that
diatribe, er...well, that "review of the reviewers".
For the most part, I agree with what Paul had to say. I
don't feel that there was as much open disgust that I have
for some of the reviewers, as I have for them. First and
foremost, apples to apples and oranges to oranges, since
UT and Q3a are in the same general area, they are compared
together...in fact, both of them are even stacked up against
Half-Life and even StarSiege: Tribes. There are levels of
quality here that just aren't in the same category. Each
development team listed their goals and intents for their
respective projects and mostly accomplished them.
Break it down:
* Half-Life -
engine based on the original Quake/Quakeworld engine with
extensive refinements. Valve took a game engine that was
1+ years in development, and enhanced it. OOB (out of the
box) it still needed serious enough patches to the foundation
to get the netcode working (decals) or else Multiplayer
capability was going to be shot. Other than that, as a single
player story game, it kicked mucho @$$. Development teams
goal was to make the best multiplayer game, bar none.
* Tribes - this
engine was on it's own, but had a year or so behind it before
it was kicked out to the masses. Dynamic extension of wide
open expanses and support for indoors. Nice change of pace,
and even the netcode didn't suck too badly. Characters and
objects in game are static though. Not a whole lot of difference
there.
* Unreal - new
engine at the time, and 200 polys to the fore-front with
dynamic rendered backgrounds. Gawds! This scene kicked totally
all over Q2, since the whole thing was great to look at.
Netcode bit the big one, and the coders scurried back to
quickly hammer out fixes and patches...from which was born...
* Unreal Tournament
- same engine but with all the fixes and patches built in...oh,
ok not all the fixes and patches. But most of them were
worked out. Bot design has been brought to a new high, although
they had to reach down low to get it, since the ReaperBot
was a cheating mofo (ok...I'm a little bitter, but I still
think I can kick that thing's @$$ ^_^ ). So what's the total
development for this gem? Well, U [1+] + UT [2+] = more
than 3 years in the making. I would think that there had
better be something else in the box other than deathmatch.
I just can't help to wonder how often Epic is kicking themselves
for not putting a CD protection on the disc like Q3a had
on theirs (Activision). Development teams goal was to build
a quake killer. Um, but last stats indicate that U/UT have
a long way to go. In fact, according to the statistics from
The CLQ, even Kingpin has more happening than Unreal combined
for total minutes played and total number of servers. See
attachment...numbers are directly from The CLQ, poplular
servers page, current as of the moment that I write this.
* Quake 3: Arena
- Technically and graphically, the most advanced polygon-pushing-rendered-hardware-accelerated
game currently available. This engine was created from scratch
in the matter of a year, and OOB didn't need any netcode
enhancements, nor any patches that fundamentally changed
the engine...just the gameplay or user interface usability.
The development team didn't say they were going to build
an Unreal killer or a Q2 killer, they said that they were
going to build the best graphics/game engine. They froze
their list of things to put into the game, and didn't continually
add to the list like other developers just to make a few
more gamers happy. They created a game that is cross platform
compatible--meaning it runs on more machines, more processors,
more operating systems than any game out there. And for
every player you meet on the internet, your guaranteed to
be meeting someone who has the balls to actually buy a game
to play, rather than be a fux0r and leech it off someone
else, while taking money out of the pockets of the developers
and distributors who are trying to survive.
So far, just
looking at the debates that have started since last year,
it just shows that quantity seems to be more valuable than
quality. Quantity of what's in the box, and what someone
gets for free instantly, rather than quality. Games happen
to be the one of the largest factors for pushing the computer
performance envelope, since there are very few business
apps that actually require 1 GHz of processing power, or
over 10 Mbps of bandwidth.
Yeah, obviously
I'm biased, but I'm pissed off in so many ways at magazines
where Q3a gets rated lower than Tomb Raider (a brand new
engine versus an aging single player game engine...ack!
), and so many things about Q3a are dismissed as being trivial
and handed out from an uncaring company. When people get
hit with the future, they don't realize what it is. Besides,
even on my latest overclocked 458 MHz-Geforce-powered machine,
Unreal still needs things turned off to be playable, and
it still gives me headaches after 10 minutes of play....on
the other hand, I can play Q3a all night long and not even
feel it...except for not blinking...which makes my eyes
hurt... :)
Randy Abulon
/ GameTraveler
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