Unreal Tournament Gets Halloween Maps And Masks

Lots of games are in early access, but the new Unreal Tournament [official site] has thus far seemed to be in a kind of embryonic access. That’s because it’s being created – for really reals – in partnership with its community. Perhaps the game is now sufficiently advanced to be considered a fetus, for the build released yesterday introduces special Halloween content.

Detailed via the UT blog, the update adds a “twisted take on the classing Facing Worlds map” called Spooky Face, and a number of unlocks such as a Pumpkin Fiend mask (pictured above) you can get for harvesting 6666 pumpkins. You can also unlock a Harvest Gourd with 200 skulls, or trickster horns (also pictured above) for 5 spooky stars. This sounds like the weirdest economy.

Otherwise the update brings a bunch of other generic fixes and additions, including a new interface for downloading community-created works and improvements to bot AI. These changes are detailed at length in the full patch notes.

It feels like a changed world, when there’s a new Unreal Tournament game out there for free download but relatively little fanfare around it because of the nature of its development. Are you playing the game, or interested in the game, or waiting for it to be finished? Or, like me, do you think Quake 3 was better?