October 31, 2011

Unreal Tournament Iii

North America is currently saturated with online gaming leagues including TWL, CAL, TGL, CEVO, and OGL, just to name a few. A newcomer has debuted on the block in the form of Future Tech Gaming League. With their history in the European theatre, they bring a very promising ideal to North America. I was fortunate enough to sit down with Chuck "chicken-" Sico, the FuturTech Gaming League's Unreal Tournament 3 North American head admin. We got together to discuss the opening of FGL and what they plan to bring to UT3 in the future.

Where do you see UT3 going in the future with FGL?

FGL is a major step in bringing competitive activity to UT3, with Epic not supporting our community, FGL is exactly what we need to give us a boost and give us a reason to play the game despite it's shortcomings. I hope to see a lot more players interested in playing soon, and tournaments and LANs to follow, hosted by FGL. The Euro community is proving UT3 can be a lot bigger, North America needs to show we have the players as well. FGL will get as big as the players make it, it can only grow with the stable background we have. This isn't another league that will be forgotten tomorrow.

What does FGL offer to the community that makes them want to come back for more?

The ladders won't be just about bragging rights anymore, and I think it will add a great new dimension to our current ladder systems we are used to.

Why was FGL interested in you managing the UT3 North American division?

I've been adminning ladders and tournaments for UT since 2000, I was selected to join the 2k4 guys to form the community/pickup channels on irc.gameradius.org and I think I've done a pretty good job taking over the TDM side of it and pretty much running things myself. With little activity on ladders, I decided to host my own TDM tournament and managed to stir up a lot of activity in the game. When FGL was being formed, they asked around and people pointed them to me, they asked me to join them and help run the North American side of UT3 and I didn't hesitate to join. I also have a long history in server setup, so almost everybody knows me to some capacity in all the Unreal games. But I would also say FGL proved to me to have the support and backing a league needs to be stable and grow. I knew this was UT3's chance to get bigger and I wanted to make sure it was done right. I had been already running the community as it was so it was a natural transition.

What do you think of UT3?

UT3 is a great compromise between UT99 and UT2k*. Personally I skipped the 2k* series, I didn't like the drastic game play changes (dodge jumping, shield gun etc). With the removal of dodge jumping and the game play itself being geared more towards classic UT style, I think we finally have a game we can all play and enjoy, assuming you have a newer system to play it. I wish I had something good to say about Epic. They finally gave us a game we enjoy but the HUD and interface and everything other than the game play has been the worst of any game so far, including the very first Unreal1. Four months later we still rely on 3rd party mods and mutators to make the game usable, and Epic has done nothing but show contempt for the "competitive community". In a world becoming more and more console dominant, the people who made Epic who they are today are being left behind, second-class citizens. I hope they will soon realize we deserve better and show some support to the people who have been here for 10+ years playing Unreal games on PC. In the end, we are still here playing it regardless, so I should thank them at least for providing the barebones of a game that we can fix and then play. Epic still only has a beta demo released for PC, it's very buggy, nearly unusable unless you are a pro at UT engines and know your way around and know how to tweak the ini's. Back in the UT99 days, they patched the demo so potential customers weren't turned off by bugs and poor performance.

With the slow growth of the UT3 community what do you feel it is going to take to bring new players into the scene and encourage the existing community to become more active in the competitive scene?

Speaking of the game itself, I would say the first thing they need to do is release a final demo with all the bugfixes, however they need to fix the full version too. All the little things like copy/paste into console, an actual selection of crosshairs and server querying that shows more than how many are in a server (even 10 year old UT99 lets you see who is in the server, how much time is left, etc.) I wish Epic would remove Gamespy from UT3 altogether and go back to the classic UT server browser, that actually worked great. Things like being able to throw guns to your teammates in TDM have been removed by Epic. We all figured out how to manually bind it, but the problem if you throw a gun and pick it back up, UT3 crashes. Epic won't put keybind into the GUI setup, probably because of this bug that they don't appear to want to fix. In a nutshell, I would say it is up to the mod community to fix up this game, as Epic has shown no interest in supporting the game on a competitive level. A league like FGL is just what the community needs to spark interest and give them a reason to play, despite the shortcomings of Epic.

Does FGL plan to have any lans that involve UT3?

Our plan is to have a lot of competitions and I believe yearly LANs in the future, obviously depending on community growth.

What could the community expect to see from FGL in the future to come?

We are starting off with 1v1 tournaments in NA and Euro as well as the standard ladders. TDM will be in the near future and NA vs Euro cups will be planned as well. Prizes haven't been announced yet, but we will have something for our opening tournaments and it should only get bigger from there.