See also:
- Broken Base: The new movement system, which allowed for double jumps, wall jumps, dodge-jumps and combinations. Some felt these changes were welcomed additions, as they helped players travel maps faster. Others felt they added an unnecessary complexity to the game. Content creators especially complained because this obligated them to scale-up their maps. Epic eventually took the hint and removed dodge-jump for Unreal Tournament III and the Double Jump for Unreal Tournament 4.
- Demonic Spiders:
- The different Skaarj Warrior variations in Invasion mode. Their blasts have a huge knockdown and can send you flying at considerable distances, which becomes a problem in open maps with cliffs (such as DM-IceTomb, DM-Inferno, DM-Phobos2 and DM-Plunge) or maps with death pit hazards (such as DM-Gael and DM-Insidious). And should they get in close distance to you, they retain their leaping strike and claw spin attacks from Unreal.
- The Warlords and their homing missiles, also from Invasion mode. These missiles can track you anywhere (think the Vores and their homing sphere, thankfully the Warlords' missile have an awful turning speed) and you'll be busy fighting many other monsters from Wave 11 onwards to notice them.
- Ensemble Dark Horse:
- The Gen Mo'Kai. The race is just next to the Skaarj in terms of non-human characters' popularity.
- The sexy female announcer is pretty popular for Youtube videos. Outside of it, on the other hand...
- Fanfic Fuel: Continues Unreal Tournament's tradition of having descriptions everywhere, yet leaving enough room for imagining how several stories took place.
- Memetic Mutation: Two weeks
. Later lampshaded by Epic. - The Scrappy: Mr. Crow, an outlandish, washed-up Monster Clown who became the face of everything which was wrong with these games.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The general reaction towards 2003, general consensus being that it felt like Quake. This was mocked on their old website for UT2004, noting that "many fans of the Tournament complain at these changes". Now for the longer version:
- The absence of the Ripper. In development it was considered to be a weapon whose firing modes were already covered by other weapons (the alternate secondary being nothing more than a glorified Rocket Launcher and the primary's headshot capabilities already covered by the Sniper Rifle/Lightning Gun) and prone to self-damage/death (the primary's ricochet abilities).
- The charges for the Translocator. In UT a chargeless translocator allowed a lot of movement, so charges were put in place to give gamers more of a challenge. In addition 2003 also had a weird trajectory on module launch that didn't sit well with fans. Weirdly enough, the Camera escapes the heat because it has actual uses.
- The Link Gun replacing the Pulse Gun. Teamplay-based abilities aside, the newly-found ability for the Pulse Gun to saw an enemy back in UT was something sorely missed.
- The Lightning Gun being the new Sniper Rifle. In UT the Rifle could rack up a lot of kills and snipers could change from position without being seen. The LG, on the other hand, had a trail telling people where the attacker was hidden. The Sniper Rifle itself returned in 2004, but the post-shot smoke wasn't well received.
- Vindicated by History: At its release, it was heavily bashed for having plastic graphics and for "not being Unreal Tournament enough". But nowadays, a lot of people are looking at 2003 with better eyes. Sadly, there're no master servers for the game anymore (all of these went to 2004) and it's impossible to buy the game digitally either (again thanks to 2004, though in part due to it adding toggle-able gameplay options to make it play almost exactly like 2003).
