The main side-effect of the release of the UDK is that absolutely no one wants to release any mod for Unreal Tournament 3 anymore. That means that the only thing UT3 is anymore is merely a competent shooter. Is that a bad thing? I don’t know! To think I bought Unreal Tournament 3 for the mods! Anyway, next on the list of UT3 mods-turned-retail is the space shooter/man shooter Angels Fall First: Planetstorm.
Other than that, not many specifics on AFF Planetstorm’s retail jump besides the fact that it’ll be sold on Steam. There’ll be a boatload of changes from the December 2009 version, including an UI overhaul, new environments and gigantic stomping robots. Besides that, I can only hope that the retail release actually makes the game playable. Despite the effort it must have taken them to produce full bot support for their maps, it’s not terribly fun for anyone–least of all me two years ago–to download a 2GB install then find out that there’s six servers up, none of which have human players in it. Planetstorm is a game that demands 32 player servers, and if the final product can have the quality needed to get people interested in it, then it will succeed.
Then again, it’s harder to find people not playing a game they bought, unless it sucks. I don’t see that being a problem here. The future will tell.
Here’s the article. The announcement of the retailification is the first comment.
It was bound to happen. People’s expectations of mods grew so much that a good mod now requires the same effort (content wise) as a game.
What Epic, Unity and Crytek did is to meet the demand with offers of game engines.
Now that the engine challenge is removed, there’s one more barrier to cross: good promoting. A poorly promoted game will have a small community.
Planetstorm, while having a tiny user base, still is one of the prettiest mods I’ve ever seen. Massive space-ships, beautiful outspace, interesting interiors. I just wish ppl would play it.
I had forgotten about this game. It was fantastic but had no players.
I want it to go retail and be massively successful, but I really can’t see that happening. The multiplayer shooter crowd is a bit over crowded as it is.