As you may know, Unreal Tournament 3 received a fair bit of negative publicity for it’s supposed poor sales and low activity during the month of December. Interestingly the activity of the UT3 community, particularly in the UT3 CTF Hosted Cup, seems to dispute this. The cup admins have received well over a dozen emails from teams who were too late to sign up and quite a few matches have already been played. Meanwhile a second coverage team has joined up and started covering division 1 matches with both shoutcasting and videostreams. They even made an awesome intro for their services!

While the cup has been progressing steadily, with an interesting upset when TRS beat fan favorite Sanctuary by 2-1 (1-0 Coret, 1-1 Reflection), modders have released the UT3 version of TAM, which has swiftly become popular in pickups. Subsequently Epic announced plans for a new beta patch to be released pretty much any day now, with a lengthy list of fixes. Hopefully they’ll also manage to squeeze in that all-important “console copy/paste” fix that everyone has been asking for before the final release is done. Now of course that’s all fine and dandy, but what about it’s poor sales and activity? Isn’t Unreal Tournament 3 doing extremely poorly?

Well… looking at todays overview of NPD sales statistics for the month of December: that does not appear to be the case. In November both Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 struggled to make the top 20, now Crysis is firmly in 7th place and UT3 ranks in at a decent 15th. Both seem to indicate much better sales in December than the month before and in light of Mark Rein’s recent comment that UT3 is selling quite decently for an Unreal Tournament game - seems to indicate that my initial assumption was correct: the press made a big deal out of something quite ordinary. Hopefully Unreal Tournament 3 will continue to pick up higher sale figures, because while it may not be the most well-polished game, it’s definitely the best multiplayer shooter right now and the polish will come eventually!

Now then, it’s time to get back to playing. We have a cup match tomorrow!

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After a wealth of new information and footage, as well as a brand new website… FunCom comes forth with even more announcements regarding this interesting upcoming MMORPG. Perhaps most interesting is a major change to the class list of this game: the Lich class has been removed and it’s abilities have been partially merged with the similar Necromancer class. Meanwhile the Scion of Set and Druid of the Storm have been merged into a Tempest of Set class. According to FunCom these changed were made, because the Scion of Set and Lich felt too similar to other classes.

Only moments after this news hit the Age of Conan community. FunCom followed up by announcing that Drunken Brawls wouldn’t be in for launch. This interesting fighting mechanic akin to Guild Wars: Eye of the North’s non-level/class-dependant dwarven fistfights, will now be released in a patch after release. Yet almost as to make up for it, FunCom then announced that a Thief-like stealth system - including HUD indicators - would be in place and usable for all classes. Many upsets all around and understandably the official forum is in termoil right now, as no one really knows what to expect anymore.

And now it seems FunCom has decided to postpone the game for a release on May 20th. A very strange move after only recently confirming that the game would be released on the 28th of March, announcing the contents of the Collector’s Edition and spreading pre-order boxes worldwide. What does this mean for the current state of the game? And how does this affect drunken brawling, will it be in at launch or not?

I’ll keep my eyes peeled on this one. Gameplay footage and what information is available make it out to become a great game to play, but these recent events do seem a tad worrying. Hopefully FunCom will manage to prove that postponing to May was the right thing to do and deliver one heck of a game come launch day!

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Yarr, it be 2008 now mateys! Another year to loot, pillage and game!

So yeah, happy new year everyone! I hope you all got to enjoy your final moments in 2007 last night, I know I did. As always, moving into yet another new year tends to make one reflect on the year past. Last year marked the start of The Game Drone on it’s new domain, along with an all new layout and new unique entries. The fresh start went together with a new posting methodology, which brought forth popular entries like 17 Tips for Beginning EVE Players. Unfortunately the posting rhythm kinda got warped after the first few weeks, so content has been pretty meager up until December.

In this new year The Game Drone will of course move forward. I’ll improve the posting rhythm by introducing more entries of the smaller variant and getting decent schedules in for recurring items like Screenshots of the Month. Meanwhile there are a couple of other ‘projects’ I’m working on, which you’ll probably start noticing somewhere in the coming months. Hopefully game developers will also prove generous and provide us with a wealth of quality games and news to talk about!

Anyway, have fun gaming for now. If you press the read the rest link you’ll find this month’s Screenshot of the Week. I hope you’ll like it.

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InstantAction.com is the name of a browser-based gaming service set to launch some time in 2008. Initial impressions seemed to point to a mostly casual gamer site that tries to combined services like Steam with sites like Youtube. Not particularly interesting for the ‘hardcore’ PC gamer.

That all changed yesterday with a newspost up over at Shacknews, which features a video and snapshots demonstrating a Tribes-like game, in development at GarageGames, for the browser-based InstantAction service. According to comments from one of the developers on the project this is leaked footage featuring their current alpha build, which has only been in production for a mere 3 months. In fact, it only hit alpha status last Thursday!

More inside.

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To me the most awesome aspect of the new look is the fact that EVE’s performance doesn’t suffer under it. I get the same framerate whether I put the old client on maximum settings or the new client at high. As long as your video card is recent enough to handle Shader Model 3.0, you’ll be treated to a visual improvement at zero performance loss! The reason behind this is that the old client only utilized your processor, whereas the new client utilizes your video card to render most of the visual treats. Now go on, head on in and enjoy the shots!

Oh and please let the page load fully first, afterwards you can click each picture for a nice full-size pop-up box (if your browser supports Javascript, which it should). These are ‘high-res’ (1024×768 and 1024×640) screenshots, but the versions you see below have been downsized a bit. So just let it load, and start clicking when it’s done for full detail!

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