The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

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Wises
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Re: The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

Post by Wises »

@paper.. probably because it is post 436 version m8..

in which case try patching it with nodelta 436 patch.. /steam/.../ut99 folder perhaps.

you already have a copy .. surely.
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Re: The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

Post by Feralidragon »

I just noticed that just before this came up, they made another post:
http://epicgames.com/community/2013/02/ ... ity-night/

It's funny to see that although they make this announcement, the interest is so low in UT3 that a server in the 9th position has 0 players.
This is why they should look at the game with more players on it in the series, and perhaps do something about it.
I can't help but to think Epic's amazement about how far the game came, if they joined a popular insta or siege server for instance and saw what the community has to offer to top everything done in the sequels.

Plus, Epic claims that UEngine3 runs on flash, therefore they are technically able to create a UT live, but again, they could give this project to some trainees who actually care about the game, as that way they wouldn't loose any $$$ if it didn't work well.
Hell, even the enterprise I work on has FAR less capital than Epic (obviously) and we still invest in side projects, and many of them fail, but a few live on and are the ones bringing profit.
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Re: The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

Post by Wises »

Whoever is in charge of the direction in which EPIC should go imo has deemed the classic 'EPIC FAIL!' saying more and more plausible by the second.
not trying to be overly critical on the company .. but it seems that they too have jumped onto the fk the past look to the future mindset.
People Don't Like Change.. Never have. (at least Big Changes) Like taking a very popular game and trying to ADD a whole lot of extra Stuff into it to make it more appealing.
As an optional Extra this would be good.. but as the base , NO!.

2k4 for example.. addition of 20 ugly (imo) non human looking avatars with mickey-mouse/terminator voice-overs.. umm hello?.. was there a huge post somewhere , where a large majority of the community requested these Characters to be included into the Pack?

Next comes the GamePlay .. um 400Ton Truck feeling comes to mind when attempting to Move/Jump in this game .. and what are these 'little speed' tablets for?.. are we promoting some kind of drug perhaps?

anyway without .. blabbing on (see sig for more info) about such things.. This is what I think would Fix things quite nicely and without too much drama.

Bring UT to UT3 Engine
update aethetics and everything but keep it original
(^ Leave or add extra tidbits as addons/extensions to , rather then core)
Gives Developers things to do :)
Maybe if you really wanted to make a few addons .. do things like Mapvote
Redirect Fixes
etc
etc
etc

Now who wins here?

Everyone..

Epic , get all current and probably existing developers/mod-makers/players onto new Engine
licence's will be bought..

Developers Win , Better Engine , more Cooler things / effects can be achieved through the UT3 Engine .. I bet
Mapmakers Win .. Checkout the UT3's Skyboxes and other goodies
and most of all the PLAYERS WIN.

As they get to play a fkn awesome Game on on their new Ninja Kickass computers without the need for 110 Patches.

Makes it seem like .. Not so-much of a deal .. if you look at it that way.

and Legal/BS aside.. It would imo Work... and Benefit everyone.

Then after 2-3 years of migration maybe sooner .. if done properly.. you can put the UT99 MasterServer (Great Machine that puppy) to rest and and finally end the UT99 (OLD) Era to rest ;)

blah blah.

appendage: just in-case Epic don't visit here very frequently .. I decided to post this stuff over there as well.

maybe.. someone of significance will hear our cries.. and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
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Re: The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

Post by Feralidragon »

^ It's not that easy, and it's not like they have free time to do those things.
For every single project they need manpower, resources and whole amount of legal and financial homework to deal with all of it.

Now, I don't think that it would be a wise decision to put their own paid developers to do it, I mean, if I was the owner of Epic, and UT wasn't giving profit anymore, why would I invest money in trying to bring it back when I could direct my current manpower to far more profitable things?
However, in case they have trainees from schools or for small projects in an internship, they could indeed at least try to put some of the youngsters to do a "small" project like this.

Generally those are underpaid or not paid at all, and have the same (if not more) enthusiasm to get something done and impress (since many have plans in joining the team for real), therefore if the project was successful, great, if not, nothing major was lost and the trainee learned something.
That how the company I work for works. We have summer internships which last 2 months, and we use them to give birth to new ideas and see how far or how much potential they really have, without wasting money of their own nor precious time from the main developers to do it.

And fact is, many of our successful projects were born from those internships alone (the one I am the main developer nowadays was started by someone else 3 years ago in a summer internship, and is topping in success and still growing, to the point of the company have created a spin-off of itself with a new unique brand dedicated to it).

We have to see this from our eyes but from their eyes as well, and to be fair and try to optimize the existing resources. We want an improved UT, and they don't want to waste money, therefore this is the only way I see for things to get through.
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Re: The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

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ferali wrote:Now, I don't think that it would be a wise decision to put their own paid developers to do it, I mean, if I was the owner of Epic, and UT wasn't giving profit anymore,
Migrating the Game over to the New Engine would-not generate income is that what you are saying?.. I would think quite the reverse to be true.. as everyone would need to purchase the new (remake) of it for starters.. and Many new players would do likewise.. Hell me and 10,000's of others would buy it surely..;)
ferali wrote: why would I invest money in trying to bring it back when I could direct my current manpower to far more profitable things?
Like UT3 you mean .. :wth:

Assuming a Big Come Back of still their most popular works to date , superseding everything before and after it.. I think it would indeed be worthwhile to invest ManPower etc into it for reasons above. And Generally further promoting the Engines Abilities.. Imagine all the other games that could be Remade as well ..

then again.. that's just me.. if I developed it , then I would re-develop it..
or.. other people tend to get carried away .. and add little pills and advanced bulky physics etc to it .. and change the whole dynamics somewhat.. which is not I had in mind tbh.
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Re: The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

Post by Feralidragon »

Wises wrote:
ferali wrote:Now, I don't think that it would be a wise decision to put their own paid developers to do it, I mean, if I was the owner of Epic, and UT wasn't giving profit anymore,
Migrating the Game over to the New Engine would-not generate income is that what you are saying?.. I would think quite the reverse to be true.. as everyone would need to purchase the new (remake) of it for starters.. and Many new players would do likewise..
The future is free to play, or within a similar concept, that is all... a paid retail UT game won't succeed, sad but true.
Plus, free to play is far more profitable for a studio than making a retail game these days, and proof of that is that you see more and more AAA rated games going F2P: Blacklight, PlanetSide, and even the guys over CryTek already announced that Crysis 3 would be their last and their next game would be F2P as well, and even Epic is starting to think about it too (even Tim Sweeney said that free to play is inevitable).
The problem with free to play is that mapping and modding are generally not into it, although I already saw at least one game which actually incorporated something called "community gametypes", so it's not impossible either, an here's where UT could win in a F2P environment.

But again, a regular paid retail game would actually make them loose some money if they were serious about it, and believe me, I don't like to say this myself, but the evidence is far too strong.
Their money-cow gaming-wise right now is GoW, and that isn't going to change anytime soon, so UT would have to be a side project given to some newbies to carry on during an internship to even have the chance to see the light of the day.
Wises wrote:
ferali wrote: why would I invest money in trying to bring it back when I could direct my current manpower to far more profitable things?
Like UT3 you mean .. *Shakes Head*
Unreal was successful;
UT1 was successful;
UT2k4 was successful;
... see the trend here?
At market level there was no reason to NOT develop UT3, specially to showcase the new engine, plus the lack of UDK made them focus in what UT gives best: mapping and modding ability, for both PC and PS2.
The problem is that they made it too similar with GoW, when GoW and UT3 are 2 distinct games with distinct gameflows, that's why UT3 failed.
Would they have done UT3 in a not-so-GoW fashion, and it would certainly have some success.
Plus the lack of UT3 mods due to the quality bar being set so high with the new engine killed the game as well.
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Re: The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

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Ferali wrote: why would I invest money in trying to bring it back when I could direct my current manpower to far more profitable things?
Free To Play .. :wth:

These Idea's , at least to myself seem ... a little odd. (Assuming there is money in there somewhere..) as that don't sound right.

I guess , its like mobile apps.. Free to play .. *But Wait!, There's More.. Scenario* .. buy 'Gold' via CC and you'll get for example a "REDEEMER"..

so thats where they could be headed..

in which case they could adopt Googles Strategy.. 'Take a little from Everyone, Instead of a Lot from a Few' .. and WIN The Game.

in respect to 'A UT Migration' however .. Marketing / Packaging and that stuff .. would be cheaper.. Because you could download it .. and buy a Licence key.. or something.
Advertise on youtube , or other places .. free..

I dunno .. My Idea's getting weaker by the minute.. to many "Fkn Road Blocks , ums , if's, and BS ".. such is the nature of the UT Politics community imo

>Focus on the intricacies of (nothing really Game Related) to the point of 'Talking yourself out of , what could potentially be a good idea'..

This is sounding more like a FAIL.. the more I think about it.. of EPIC Proportions.. I'm Afraid.
Last edited by Wises on Wed Feb 27, 2013 2:41 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

Post by papercoffee »

To add something to this discussion ...F2P games can be made with customizable content http://www.maniaplanet.com/de/shootmania/
The maps are made out of stock parts but if the architecture works and how game flow is will decide the mapper.

I don't like the lack of classes and weapons but I like the Idea of a game totally made for everyone.
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Re: The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

Post by Feralidragon »

I think you don't know what free to play actually is.

What you're pointing is a business submodel within free to play called: "pay to win". Where you buy things that give you a direct advantage over others.
However, this shows that you didn't play that many free to play titles, specially the ones AAA-rated that have been released in the past year.

I will give you the example of a game I constantly play for over a year called: Blacklight Retribution.
That game is free to play and I am still hopelessly addicted to it (to the point that I already have a max leveled account and another alternate one heading that way as well). However, I never paid a single dime for anything at all, and you know why? Because I don't need to, and either you pay for things or not, you do not get any direct advantage out of it.
I as level 1 player still pwned lvl 40 players and even players that put some money into it, there's absolutely no difference between a free and a paid player there, besides the ability to get sidegrades sooner, or pay for taunts and cosmetic stuff.

Adding to that, like any good free to play game, they have the free currency and the paid currency (in this case they call it GP and ZEN respectively), and you get GP at the end of the match, and they're fairly generous on it: if you play a reasonably good game (a 5~10min game), you win up to 200GP, and you can perm weapons at around 5500GP and perm parts at around 3000GP.
However, you can "rent" what they call premades (weapons you cannot modify the parts from), but which are fairly good and to rent one you only pay 200GP (remember, GP is the free currency here, not real money), and the rent last about 24h, and considering that generally you play more than one game, you can play with high-level weapons and still get GP profit.
Adding to that, all the high level things are sidegrades, they give you no considerable boosts at all: they are generally better in one field, but considerably worse in others. Many high level players still prefer the very default weapon they started as level 1, which goes to show the extremely well done balance of the game.

So how this applies to UT? Simple: if Epic made UT a free to play game, with mapping and modding support, they could follow a similar model, to keep it free but still keep it profitable to them.
All exclusively real money paid things would be purely cosmetic or wouldn't affect gameplay at all. They could establish rules in the kind of maps and mods pass through to be able to win free currency, and make the players not win currency at all for mods which do not follow that criteria (to avoid leeching). Hell, the profit could even come solely from the mapping and modding community who could start to make their stuff available for custom servers for free or paid ones.

You see, I don't know if you noticed but the world changed at lot every since 1999, and making free to play is actually uncomparably more profitable than selling retail games, since many players will end up spending more money in a free to play than by buying the game directly, and since it's free, it's bound to get more players from the very start.
Plus, selling the game itself means that: Epic would have to support the game through an entire generation, although the players only paid for the game once.
Many publishers started to see the problem with this, and therefore DLC was created, and now instead of selling complete games, they release stripped down games and sell the rest as DLC packs, otherwise the business is unsustainable (specially considering that post-release you still have to spend months releasing patches and some free packs to fix and promote the game, and during this time all the money they have for development is still the same money got from the first release alone).
That's why also sequels are released. Why do you think there isn't a Team Fortress 3 already? Because there's no need to, simple as that. The fact it went free to play made it profitable enough to keep supporting and updating it with content rather than releasing something new and paid.
If Team Fortress 2 wasn't free to play, I sure you we would already have Team Fortress 3 with a bunch of DLC packs.

Again, Epic does this for business, and we have to think that way without neglecting the play ability of a potential new game of course.
Thinking that a new UT would be profitable as retail game is wishful thinking imo from any UT fan who didn't actually look at the current time and state of things and where they're tending to, but the harsh reality is another. No UT will be like the old one, nostalgia doesn't bring enough popularity for any game for it to be sustainable, however gameplay does and if they end up doing a new UT, it will be different from the UT we have now.

You can't even bring CS into the equation, provided that is still one of the most played FPS in the entire world, while all the series of UT bundled together doesn't even make it to the top 10 most played ones.

Plus, I think we all agree that UT1 was the best one of them all. Check out steam and its price: it's very cheap and still has good looking screenshots... then why UT isn't more popular anymore despite having thousands of servers available? If it was like you said, then UT would still be in the top 10 most played FPS, when it is no longer for a long time.
Even if they made UT freeware, I would say that only about a few hundred players would come to play the game and half would leave since they have nothing to hold for: no levels, no items, etc, which is what makes people to still be in a game nowadays given the wide range of game alternatives.
Adding to that, if you remember Cliff created an UT facebook page, and it got hardly any likes to it. although it was requested for fans to show their support. So where are they? All the evidence points to the opposite direction, Is there a giant outcry to justify a new retail UT? The answer, as painful as it may sound is: no.

Conclusion: new UT as free to play has still a shot if done properly, as a retail game it does not imo.
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Re: The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

Post by Raynor »

LOL, this thread has derailed quite a bit, but you gotta love this :confused2:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013- ... -our-games
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Re: The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

Post by Feralidragon »

EA is the scum that makes scum itself look good.
They have been doing that sort of thing forever, so that doesn't surprise me a bit.
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Re: The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

Post by Raynor »

Indeed, Dead Space 3 was their first serious "experiment" on customers how they react to micropayments. Sad thing is that no matter how vocal the minorty of gamers are, there is overwhelming percentage of clueless/ignorant people who still purchase all kinds of useless crap and it only encourages companies to push that practice even further.
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Re: The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

Post by papercoffee »

This is an old business model for me... I worked with many customers who wanted to have In-App-purchase in their Apps.
You get an App for 1 to 3 Dollars (or even more) and have to buy additional content inside the App.
Also many games worked that way.
Buy the normal weapon ...ok but you have to play the level 10 times or longer to earn the virtual money ...or you buy virtual money with real one ...or buy an even better weapon directly with real cash, because it was locked for everyone with only virtual coins.
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Re: The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

Post by Feralidragon »

I'm not against the concept of micro-transactions in games (free to play is all about those after all), I am against the way they are made by some publishers.
If they make you grind to no end, or make certain gameplay changing things simply unobtainable through "free" means, they're doing it wrong.
If they find just the right balance like a few games did, the whole thing is bound to get a huge success with praise from the communities around it, together with a great amount of profit from those micro-transactions (which some players would make not to buy something, but just to support the game, like a donation).

I have seen this working out to 1 game at least (which is the game I am playing for little over than a year, and which otherwise I wouldn't be playing), and I think the others should take a look at their ways, and find that balance too.
Team Fortress 2 for instance does it well too, and although I hate that game (I really do), I must say that the sole concept of only being able to buy cosmetic stuff (hats and other stuff) and that stuff being done by the community alone is great. Good weapons and whatnot, are given randomly through the week, and which although I don't agree as much, it keeps any "pay to win" claims at the other side of the door.

And again, selling weapon parts and such are not the only way to make games profitable, there is room for many other things to be done through micro-transactions, and which many can actually accept quite well.
EA is just doing it wrong, trying to use their brand name to push things down the players throats, and like you said, the saddest thing is that they're so oblivious that they fall for it, and worse, even when they realize it, they still stay and keep supporting it.
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Re: The Unreal Deal Pack is The Daily Deal on Steam

Post by papercoffee »

Oh from what I heared Crytech will follow in the footsteps of EA ...I heard something like "pay for every bullet".
If this turns out to be real.... :barf:
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