The third Unreal Tournament is nigh!
October 9, 2007 10:31 pm RantsThat’s right, the Unreal Tournament 3 demo is slated to be released within the next two weeks (likely even this week) according to Mark Rein! They seem determined to get rid of the old two weeks jynx - the UT2003 demo constantly being announced for ‘in 2 weeks’ and eventually releasing nearly 3 months after the first announcement - and hopefully they’ll pull it off. Because, you see: earlier Epic claimed the demo would be released roughly a month prior to release. Which means that if the demo releases this week - UT3 follows next month!
Anyway, so we’ll be getting a beta demo featuring some basic bot play and online play. There has been no mention of the contents, but I’d be expecting at least some DeathMatch maps, one Warfare map and one Vehicle Capture the Flag map. That’s always been pretty much the standard layout for UT demos. It should be good fun and a lot of people I know are looking forward to it. So I’ll definitely be seeing you in-game when this demo releases!=
But wait, that’s not the end of this post. You see, a short while ago Epic also revealed the - incredibly low - system specs for UT3. Just about anyone should be set to play this game smoothly when it releases, because minimum specs - 2GHz, 512 MB RAM, Radeon 9600 Pro, bla bla - are for PCs well over 5 years old! So, if you want to know whether you can join in the fun this weekend - or the next - when the UT3 demo releases, go test your system here. Then rejoice as your system is bound to be plentiful for at least low detail - and look me up later on Xfire for some public UT3 demo fun!
Update 10 oct: Some of the contents of the demo have been revealed by visitors to Epic’s recent press event. Apparently it will include the vehicle DeathMatch map Heatray, which includes a regularly spawning Darkwalker as the main focus of the map. It will also include a straight DeathMatch map known as DM-ShrangriLa, which is the asian-themed map shown in early gameplay footage. Lastly a Vehicle Capture the Flag map featuring solely Axon (human) vehicles is included, which is apparently rather large and intended to be a decent indication of what servers and clients will need to run proper Warfare games. No, there’s not going to be a Warfare map in this demo, but there will likely be a second demo after release which will include one. Straight CTF also seems to have been left out.
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October 10th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Definitely a good call on their part. One of the reasons why a game like CS is so popular is because every system can run it, so I hope that UT ends up on the same vein.
October 10th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Judging by comments from people who actually got to mess around with the game on older systems at press events… it does look set to run well on pretty much anything.
My main hope is that it’ll truly be able to rival the original UT. Many hands-on players have commented it’s even better than the original, but I’ll try to keep a slightly less positive inclination for now
October 14th, 2007 at 6:06 am
So how has it been so far?
I’ve been away from my gaming computer the past few days and am going to be till wed. I’m really interested in checking it out since you love UT so much.
October 14th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
It’s absolutely amazing! This could well become the best entry in the franchise yet, definitely better than UT2003 and 4.
I’ll be posting up my impressions soon, if I can drag myself away from it that is.