UT4 gets questionable changes

The pre alpha for the new Unreal Tournament recently saw a nasty update that has seriously angered a lot of long time fans of the series.

Here's a list of things this patch screwed up:

Removed grenade function from eightball/rocket launcher
Brought back the grenade launcher from Unreal Championship 2
Swapped bio rifle slot for the UC2 nade launcher
Added overheating to pulse gun/link gun
Removed helmet armor (one of the few things UT3 did right)
Removed impact hammer from DM and CTF
Added respawn timers to CTF
Added new death cams


...and that's on top of a list of previous gripes I already had with it:

Weapon fire rates in general felt way too slow for speed of game
No razorjack/ripper/ripjack
In spite damage output, weapons feel punier than UT99's
Needle bullets (I'm pretty sure my Daisy .177 pellet gun fires projectiles bigger than most hitscan weapons in this game)
Engine is horribly optimized, ini tweaks required to run it

https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Version_Notes_2016_10_18

With the way it's looking, Xonotic may actually have a chance in later versions as I think community interest in UT4 will fade as it's appeal mostly came from how many things it used from Unreal Championship 2 and Unreal Tournament 99. What currently plagues Xonotic the last I checked was the weapon/ammo distribution and the amount of unpolished features that could simply be swept under the rug and hidden from most users.

UT4 massively disappointed the competitive UT community. The devs have no interest in their suggestions. They should have stuck with what worked before and made UT2004/UT3/UT99 great. Instead they want to reinvent the wheel.

UT4 massively disappointed the competitive UT community. The devs have no interest in their suggestions. They should have stuck with what worked before and made UT2004/UT3/UT99 great. Instead they want to reinvent the wheel.

Yep and it sucks because it showed promise of being the successor to UT99 that we never saw, basing it's gameplay off of UT99 and bringing in a thing or two from Unreal Championship 2 (streamlined environments and new ways to jump and dodge in particular) as well as adding a couple of other interesting things (forward run auto-sprint was a cool one as was sliding). Sadly they decided to derail it somewhere down the line and ignore the community. They also made most of the weapons feel pretty wonky in this game (ASMD being so slow to fire that it's useless unless your a master at shock combos, hitscan projectiles being too small most of the time to hit anything, gamespeed being faster than UT99 but having slower firing weapons, lack of a ripper, etc.). Honestly between this game disappointing and Toxikk being a bit of a letdown (thanks to it's ranking system that requires you grind out hours before being able to freely play on all servers), Reflex not picking up much of a crowd, and Tribes 4 dying I think it's safe to say that if the dev team here rushed and hid all of the broken/incomplete parts of the game (campaign and bots in particular) and fixed the weapon system (which they plan on doing, redistribute ammo and swap machine gun with lightning gun), that I think Xonotic would be able to go toe to toe with the next Quake. It might not get all of the popularity, but I think would begin to climb out of the obscurity that it's faded into since it got forked from Nexuiz. Especially if some of the incomplete features become more fleshed out over time (Tribes style vehicle CTF with jetpacks anyone?, it would work better here than in Tribes 4...) and more and more official maps started getting released.

Ahh well its just another crappy game. So what if the next version of its is more screwed up than the previous ones.

Just to give some context to this thread, while throwing my feelings in too:

The reason for Impact hammer removal was that it's unintuitive for new players both for jumping and hitting enemies. I have to wonder if shock rifles are unintuitive too and if the devs are more concerned about lazy players rather than new players that might potentially be not so new and oblivious shortly after.

The reason for rocket 2ndary removal was because of how "situational" it is and how it supposedly broke something about gameplay. All who have played the franchise for decades apparently missed this issue. Also, I fail to see the logic in getting rid of it's situational variety only to make another new weapon to be only about just that situation.

The reason for Link gun overheating was because the weapon was too "spammy". So it's the same badly founded reason we have overheating for our Arc as well. Rather than rebalancing the ammo drain, damage or fire rate, they add something way out of place instead. If Link gun is spammy then what about other weapons? They're all spammy depending on the situation. Is there gonna be overheating/reload for other weapons too? *cough* Chaingun *cough* That at least would be consistent, but a faster (and imo better) solution would be to scrap the idea altogether.

I really hope they come around and listen to the criticism their community is giving them.

I'm still trying to process whatever it is they are attempting with these changes. They brought back Unreal Championship 2's grenade launcher (one of the most hated weapons in the franchise) to replace a secondary firing mode to one of the series' most well known weapons as well as replace the bio rifle as a core weapon in most cases (which is dumb given how differently it functions as it's a useful weapon is for escaping situations or causing area denial). Also what is this spammy crap they're talking about? They sped the game up, but reduced the firing rate of almost every weapon and shrunk the projectiles for most them to about the size of a needle, making everything feel clunky. Shock rifle is also a pain in the ass to use due to it's slow fire rate, are they gonna tweak that for the noobs? As for the impact hammer, it started going down hill when it was made into the shield gun in UC1/UT2k3/UT2k4 and sorta headed back in the right direction in UT3, but nose dived in UT4. I don't get why they can't figure it out, it was a damn near perfect weapon in UT99 and not too bad in UT3. In UT99 it was always a good weapon for reaching places, blocking shots when your out of ammo (secondary mode on it can be timed to do that in UT99, even says so in the weapon priority menu), and occasionally getting the drop on someone. In UT3 it was good for most of those things but couldn't block shots, however had usability as an EMP device that could also knock items loose from players. They got it right in one game, mostly right in another, technically still had it usable (albeit dumbed down) in a couple of other games, but for whatever reason they can't make it work in what is supposed to be a major reboot of the series.