News Crysis, UT3 sales disappoint developers

Simple reason I guess is that Orange Box and CoD4 came out around the same time.

 

This is just another testament to the fact that consoles are taking large shares away from the PC gaming market. People that would normally be all over UT3 are playing Halo 3 or COD4 on the 360. Hardcore PC people will always complain about no keyboard and mouse, but most casual to hardcore GAMERS don't really care as much. PC used to be the best experience you could have, now it is just too expensive to keep up with, and you can have the online portion via 360. Plus you can do it from the comfort of your couch or bed on a larger screen. Plus there are all sorts of problems with PC games because of the wide variety of hardware, and buying the software and getting it to run well can be a headache even for more enthusiast level users.

I wouldn't say consoles are the sole reason, there have been a lot of good games to come out, but they definitely have effected the market on new games for PC.

 

im no hardcore, so i bought a xbox360 controller and tryed to use it on my PC, played Crysis and great force feedback, driving boats or jeeps feels so natural. but i just can't get the hang of aiming...... how can people play FPS with joysticks.

anyway, i'd expect the following reasons for each game
-Crysis: steep hardware requirements i'd expect, making the game seems like £300 instead of £30 (but still, i bought it ), the thing is that Crysis could have High as its initial release max setting, then release Very High when the time is right.
-UT3: come on Epic, Gears of War is better than this! i tryed the demo and guess what! i'd rather go back to UT2004. the interface is poo, the gameplay is a carbon copy of UT2004. only thing new is the graphics, although looks nice, but don't allow AA, and it takes a 8800 series to run smoothly. i'd rather buy Gears of War with a ported, yet better UI than this.
i'll consider buy UT3 when mod community catches up, and/or when it's a budget game

 

Problem with artificially cripiling it would be people would complain, especially those who had the gear to run it.

 

you must realize most people in the world have a rig like mine. CRAIZIZ? is that a russian dish?!

 

Worrying times. Lets face it PC gamers arnt daft, well the majority that play wow are, but... well you get what I mean; and most are reasonably tech savy. PC gamers aren't an easy push-over and when something is crap it wont sell. Im glad in a way that Crysis didnt sell well on PC seems most havent fallen for the hype, didnt think that the demo was anything to shout about.

Only 'bad' thing I see from all of this is that devs will be even less reluctant to throw money at the PC, but im not so sure this it neccessarly a bad thing in the long run. The PC imo has always been a platform for innovation, and good new games will always be around the corner. When devs do break the PC market they do get well rewarded. Blizzard and wow are a prime example.

imo games like Quake, while they were good back in the day (Quake 2) are now MP borefests good for a 20 minute mad run-a-round (all imo of course)

 

you took the words right outta my mouth (keyboard)

 

You hit it on the head with the steep system requirments. I built a brand new system in anticipation of crysis. Then, when actually being played, has horrible FPS. I, then in turn, report this all over the place to friends/gamers online. How is it that a brand new system, with some of the best tech you can buy, can only get an average of 30fps in game? And they wonder why people are buying up consoles, like the Wii, at every turn. Games should equal a fun past time, not saying crysis hasnt done that, but it seems people build for these great games only to be let down as the gameplay isnt that great at all. And oh, I just got the ice level in crysis and I seriously want to vomit that its making my $1800 computer look like an atari.

Go buy COD4, it runs just as good, or better then BF2 and requires NO upgrade at all.

 

COD:4 is the top selling game at the mo it seems. That has to be because it is part of a known line of games (COD) but also becuase It only requires mediocre systems to play it fairly well.

So far this chrimbo I've bought Crysis and Bioshock. That should do.

 

what's your rig spec can i ask?

Crysis is fine if you play in Dx9 and use tweaks to enable most of the noticeable Dx10 effects.

 

actually, this news kinda makes me cry a little. its tru that PC gaming is slowly going downhill, and unless sales for these 2 games pick up drastically, then i think we're all a bit buggered. more and more developers/publishers will make more and more games for consoles, while us PC users get lumbered with crap like bioshock (yes, it was crap. it was a game that wowed XBOX users cuz they're not used to truly great gaming like deus ex/system shock 2etc)

what hasnt been mentioned is that laptops are outselling desktops nowadays. who here can honestly say they tried running ANY of these latest games on their laptop? probably only the 2% rich enough to spend a couple of grand on alienware or whatever the gaming laptops are. most of our 'casual gaming' market (who are destroying real gaming IMO) have crap-tops with out a real graphics card. that's a good reason why sales are ****. and yeh, i guess that all relates back to graphics being the source of the problem.

I just hope developers learn that graphics should be second or thirdplace in the line of priority, and not used to just sell games.

oh, and i haven't bought either of them because already spent shedloads on other games, most of which have proven to have short lifespans. i got no money due to buying xmas presents and hoping that someone will pick up my hints and buy them for me!

damn....what a depressing post!

 

laptops that are able to run games arent really mobile (who wants a 17" 5kg laptop? lol)... and they got tiny little screens, yes, the screens they call big are tiny compared to what we desktop users get.

honestly, i simply cant imagine using a 12 - 17 inch monitor anymore.

lapotps are good if you need them just for things like word... but, for gaming they arent an option (as well as any form of media play back).

 

People paid a fortune to upgrade their PC to play Doom 3, or so i heard. I think the same is been done for crysis.

Its just that the new CPU (in affordable range) and new Graphic cards (Nvidia 9xxx series) aren't due out till 2008, so there not going to upgrade yet there going to wait, then they can go and buy crysis The point about hardware requirements is indeed a big point, as i can't play the game yet and that's why I'm upgrading in Jan/Feb

 

Well I hope nvidia hurries up with releasing a nextgen gpu so i can do a evga upgrade from my gtx. But i'am afraid the 90 days ar almost gone.

 

for crysis I think its simply because not a lot of people can actually run the game left alone smoothly (I can run it but I still have to shut down Anti Alliassing)

UT3 isn't doing very well due to a couple of reasons, for one you need a new PC to run it at max settings smoothly.
2de, they consolefied the game to me and many others has felt like a punch to the stumache, the main menu is crap, online service has been modified to fit the use on consoles limiting user friendlyness.

If I play online and I enter a custom map I play it, but unlike ut2004 when that map switches to another custom map i get kicked out due to a error.
Also the storyline has screwed to much with the game, A lot of things are left out.

Themes, Entire character lines, Gametypes, IMPORTANT MAPS (Like facing worlds).
Warfare that promised us a unieke gameplay element involving multiple maps in huge battlefields (hence the hoverboard) including both assault and onslaught gameplay... its a joke.
Warfare is nothing more than a modified often shrunken down onslaught game with a few custom level dependent elements that only HINT towards assault.
Not to mention that the original Onlaught gameplay with multiple nodes has been given a kick to the stumach by making NEARLY ALL warfare maps a liniar unchangeble (before it could be easily changed) node-setup.
It changed onslaught from a tactical gametype to something I redeem TUG OF WAR with ORBS... yeah, great gameplay element there, if only to fix what you broke.

The game simply often dissapoints, Also for mappers its a let down, I've tryed to make maps but features that made a mappers life so much easier have been left out.
Fake backdrop skyboxes and real water volumes for that matter, there are nearly no staticmeshes that can let you make forrests, egyptian themed maps and the many other themes that we lost.
UT3 was about bright colours, extravagant locations to fight in but MOST and FORMOST it was about the TOURNAMENT.
And thats where I think EPIC made its worst mistake. To remove the tournament setting and force us up this (i'm sorry to say) competely useless storyline with another (spoiler alert) ending that made me go like WHAT! YOU KILLED MY TEAM!, CLIFFHANGER, OMG NO!!!

Simply put, they removed to much for the sake of implementing a useless and frustrating storyline that noone will play for more than once because Unreal Tournament IS A MULTIPLAYER GAME.


And finally, theres the fact that nearly no-one is actually playing the game, UT2004 after launch had a huge amount of people playing. However a multiplayer game with 300 servers, but only (about) 300 people playing doesn't work very well. I often find only a hand full of servers actually include players. And only a few of those servers even by now, 2 months after launch include custom maps.
Unreal tournaments main drive was the community, and even if Epic would fix all the shortcommings this game has, they would still have to pull interest back to the game. And if they fail with that, I'm affraid UT3 will never be what its predicessors ever where, despite the graphics, dispite the fanbase and despite the awesome gameplay the game still holds.

Lets be fair, its a great game, but if you ever played ut2004, you can agree with me its not even close to what its predicessors where.
It pains me to see one of my all time favorite games in such a sad state of disinterest.
and I guess thats where the problem lies, because without interest... UT3 simply won't take off.

 

Yeah, UT3 may require you to upgrade your PC to play at max settings, but what game doesn't? Every new generation of game requires a more powerful PC to play at max settings, if you don't want to upgrade, don't play at max settings?

I do agree on Game Modes though, they culled some of the really fun ones, and the new ones can be a bit rubbish

I just wish they would bring out the Linux client (1 of the big points for UT) and i wish the Linux server was stable (it crashes so often ATM its crazy)