no one uses the bio rifle?

you've never played against me then in any of the UT games. i love that gun. i know a lot of people that love that gun. it's *deadly* if you have the skills to use it properly. yeah, it takes some practice but a fully charged up alt fire hit will kill just about anyone stone cold dead. you can't do it at point blank range without hurting yourself, and because it arcs, and takes time to reach it's target, at range is really difficult to pull off, but trust me, get good at it and it's the ultimate leveller. they considered leaving it out in ut2k3, and a fan movement (which i was a big part of back when i used to write for 3DActionPlanet) convinced them that Unreal without the Goo Gun is like Quake without the rocket launcher. just because you can't use it, don't spoil it for those of us that do! and if you've never seen anyone using it, leaving it in won't effect your life at all.

This comment was edited on May 5, 11:16.

let's be clear cut on something here... as far as giving the user choice, implementing a solid checkpoint system does that too. if the game has one, I won't touch quicksave or quickload ever. i'll enjoy the game more that way. it's more immersive, more atmospheric and sometimes scarier.

game developers don't have to implement quick save, or checkpoints, and we don't have to buy the game if it doesn't have a feature we demand. incidentally i did.

complaining that the game had quicksave and that makes it too easy is like complaining a game has an easy mode.

if you can't control yourself pressing the quicksave key, how can you manage to pick a hard difficulty level?

we shouldn't insult each other over this anyway. if a game has checkpoints, i don't care if it has quicksave or not, and if people want to use it.

pretty much as expected. doom iiis mp has been designed around 4 players, in balance, map design and so on, but the engine can do a lot more. i'm still excited for the mp since splash damage really did a good job on enemy territory.

UT2K4 as previously mentioned did *not* succesfully market analyse, as highlighted by the fast selling out of DVD copies and the delay before they managed to catch up with the manufacturing. I'll admit it's not like the iD of old who made us all by 3D cards and network cards back in the day but I still don't see that being a reason to criticise them. It's like all these people who *expect* Valve to keep supplying them with free content for Half Life for the rest of their lives because of how commendably they've supported Half Life.

I agree on that, and I'd be very surprised if Doom III had bugs considering iD are powerful enough to dictate their own developement time. When it's done and all that. It was more a comment about PC Gamer's practice of reviewing unfinished code. I just don't trust PC Gamer. I see they went into detail about how the game's multiplayer runs...

Oh no wait they didn't do that at all. I wonder if they tried it and included it in the final score or not? I'll have to keep wondering.

PC Gamer's review, though I loath magazines reviewing pre gold code, does make mention of impressive outdoor areas in Doom III, so there we have it. Too often though I've read a review of a game that makes no mention of bugs everyone finds in the retail code. I can only assume the magazine is giving the game the benefit of the doubt that those bugs may be removed by the time it goes retail. They should just all go back to only reviewing gold masters, but they're all scoop jockeys these days.

Finally, if some of you guys want iD to delay the game another two months so the demo can come out first, feel free to ask them.

You guys are forgetting a few things as far as I can tell. You're confusing how many people would buy the game on DVD with how many won't buy it on CD if DVD isn't available. That's the two costs you have to compare. If the lost sales from a CD version is less than the estimated production costs of having two seperate manufacturing processes, then financially speaking just going CD is the route to go.

Of course it would be nicer on DVD, and of course they are going to make a boat load of money, but lets get something clear. We shouldn't be criticising a company for doing what the majority of companys are, we should be applauding the companys that supply games on DVD.

The analogy about a movie on 6 cds is a moot point since you install games and then only have to give the game a single disk subsequently. a film you'd have to change disc 5 times every time you watched the film.

If you're going to deny yourself a potentially great game over having to spend 20 minutes longer installing it, that's a pretty bizarre thing to do.

And as for the multiplayer, as others have pointed out the 4 player limit isn't hard coded into the engine, but it's probably the limit at which the game runs acceptably with everything going on in multiplayer. I've heard some descriptions of maps that have huge sections of the map moving around for example. If we have much more complicated dynamic maps and physics that's a lot more information that needs to be sent back and forth across the network and more load on the server. So it's probably more to do with hardware than engine. No doubt with simplified maps, and models the current engine would be able to cope with more. I'm interested to see how it plays but... and a big but...

Contrary to popular belief iD do not have to supply any kind of multiplayer at all. Infact when they started out on Doom III they weren't promising any. They said, that as far as they were concerned they'd made the best mp game with Quake III and so for their next game they were going to focus entirely on SP. Heck, iD didn't even make the multiplayer component.

As for talk of modding... here's how I actually see things. Do people seriously think that Half Life would have anything like as big a modding community as it currently does if not for the fact that it was the best single player game in a long time. two get a mod community you need two things. a big install base and an easy to work with engine. i'm betting doom III will have both of these things, albeit the work involved in creating a level or model of the standards the game is presenting looks much increased.

and finally... what's wrong with AvP wrapped up in an utterly beautiful engine anyway? AvP is one of the best PC games I've ever played.