TheTestTube.com - UT3 Beta Demo!

I've been playing this a lot, it's really good. Epic finally went back to the roots of the series just like the players have been asking for since ut2k3.

If any of you guys want to try out for the clan I'm in (NBK (Natural Born Killas)), we are recruiting. You can look into it Here.

I know the name is very cliche, but the clan was founded in 1998 so it was pretty original at the time. The clan is highly respected in the competitive community (ProUnreal) and we are very skilled at the game as well. In fact our own {NBK}cpense played against Fatal1ty at the 2003 winter CPL.(as seen on MTV). We plan to be really active in this game in both CTF, TDM and 1v1. I would love to have some you guys playing with us.

Anyway, here is a little mini-review of the demo from my point of view:

I'm glad they finally took out that fucking shield gun, that in my opinion is what ruined ut2k3 and ut2k4. It made the whole dynamic of the game change.

In UT99 all the weapons were incredibly powerful, so it was more of a cat and mouse game. You had to plan your moves much further in advance since one wrong step and you would be killed.

In the 2k series, this was not the case as the shield gun made it very difficult to kill anyone. So the dynamic started to play a lot more like quake3. Long drawn out firefights with a defensive style dominating everything. Gone were the exciting fire fights from UT99, now all you had were players just running away from each other 99% of the time.

And they took out the dodge jumps in UT3 (you still can dodge, and wall dodge though), which when added to the 2k series, really ruined the scale of the maps.

All the maps had to be these huge areas, so the players had room to do all these acrobatic dodges. Flying around like a bunch of faeries. And since the maps were so large, hit scan weapons were the only weapons really used at all. Combine that with the defensive playing style and you have a very boring game.

Now that the movement is back to the ut99 way of things, save for the wall dodge, it should be a lot more exciting and way more in your face than before. I really think this game will be the best one in the series.

I know the game has already gone gold. I just hope Epic has fixed that god awful server browser, and gave us an options for some brighter skins. Other then that I need to build a new computer bad. Right now I'm avg 30-40 frames per second.

Also if anyone needs any help tweaking, you should check out this Guide. I managed to get about 15 more fps after going through the whole guide.

And if anyone is running a p4 with Hyper Threading. When you start the game alt-tab out and then ctrl-alt-del right click on the demo and choose "set affinity" and disable one of the virtual cpu's/cores. For some reason with Hyper Threading on, you lose about 5 - 10 frames per second.