Dark said:
Imo RoAR didn't suck ass, the problem was as with ut2k4, there are few people who support decent mods
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I really hope with the next version epic makes more effort to support mods, teams of people devote huge effort into creating these mods only to find that nobody plays them. It's depressing.
the coding in RoAR was probably decent but the mapping was pure horror, the maps were all too spammy and unbalanced. and the problem that no one plays usermods isnt with epics support, if a mod is good then ppl will play it, if it isnt then nobody will. theres not much more epic could do. mod support from a game company is basicly down to how easy their game is to mod, they cant promotote the mods activeley.
jwer_NL said:
I still think the biggest part of UT99 being such a big hit was the fact that people could download it for free, it made it possible to always find a decent server with decent people on it, in fact, you could pick one out of a list of many. Now that they (hey, i'll admit rightfully and understand it fully) squeeze every penny out of a game there's no way a game will ever be as big as a free game.
Guess why Enemey Territory is so popular, you don't need a massive machine, it's free and it's made by gamers...
first off, enemy territory isnt made by gamers, it was supposed to be an official add on for RTCW but the singleplayer didnt meet id softwares quality standards so they didnt publish it, instead of dumping it completeley they made the MP freely available tho.
i agreee that the "free" availability of UT added to its success, but i think it was also the fact that it had a lot of new elements, dodging, secondary and even tertiary fire modes and introducing a totally new twist to an old gametype like CTF (xloc).
but if you compare its popularity to Q3 then UT has always been the smaller game, even tho the latter required a CDkey. the secret to this is that the quake franchise managed to take its community to each new issue of the game, something which didnt work with the UT franchise as they refused to listen to the community and made changes too radical for a lot of people.
it is pretty obvious that with 2k3 and 2k4 they wanted to get as many casual gamers (but more importantly buyers) for the game, thats their good right, but people who play a game 4 hours per month and only 3 months long do not make a community. hence the low popularity compared to the most popular online games atm of which all require a CDkey aswell (HL1&2, COD, MOHAA, BF and Q3) the exceptions being AA and ET which basicly got its whole community from RTCW tho which is CDkeyed aswell.