Even the tallest of titans couldn’t stand against the tide of free game-making for long. With so many developers turning to Unity to make their own games, and Unity’s capabilities improving rapidly, Ye Olde Unreal Engine was starting to look like something of a dinosaur despite being the go-to framework for a great many blockbuster action titles. And now it, too, is free, albeit with one big proviso. While this is primarily big news for devs (more on that below), it does also mean that anyone can now make their own maps for the work-in-progress, community-made Unreal Tournament sequel/remake. Which is currently also free. There’s also a new, super-shiny map to try out the next-gen engine with.
As has been previously documented, the prospect of a new Unreal Tournament game fills me with joy. It’s a sort of violent, twitch-shooting, wall-dodging, gib-splattering joy but I take what I can get. Development continues apace, though naturally not nearly as fast as I’d like, with weekly livestreamed updates. There’s new builds of the game every Friday and still radical changes being made to even the most basic systems of movement, shooting and aiming. These builds are now officially available to all (as opposed to the community hosted jerry-rigging I last reported on) though still “non-representative pre-alpha” to use Epic’s phraseology.
Want to play the new Unreal Tournament for free, right this very second? Cor blimey and OMG you totes can! Hero of the people ‘raxxy’ on the Unreal Forums is compiling Epic’s builds and releasing them as small, playable packages that anyone can run, with multiple updates per week. The maps are untextured, the weapons unbalanced, and things change rapidly as everything’s still “pre-alpha” but it’s playable and – more importantly – fun.
I know how game development works. I know you aim to have something playable as quickly as possible, and then test, iterate and repeat for potentially years. That doesn’t stop me being reflexively impressed that Epic are already playing team deathmatch in the new, community-driven Unreal Tournament. They’ve got all the weapons in, there’s a couple of new maps, and heck it already looks pretty fun in this three minute video of the devs playing and chatting about what they’re playing.
It would be fair to say I was pleased to hear that Epic were working on a new Unreal Tournament. “Fair to say” in that nothing has ever been more true and “pleased” in that I danced around my room. The 2004 edition is a little over ten years old and still easily one of the finest first-person shooters ever made. From weapon balance to movement models, it’s damn near perfect and my love affair with it continues to this day. The new version promises frown-causing community development and an eyebrow-raising commitment to being totally free outside of a user marketplace. Now that the project is a few months old, they’ve ramped up the interaction with weekly livestreams.
If you were at all doubting Epic’s plan to resurrect Unreal Tournament as an openly developed, entirely free (user-driven mod/map marketplace aside) enterprise, doubt no more. There’s a game now, and it has guns and big, gray texture-less cubes and everything else all videogames have. You can see it in sorta-action below.
A new Unreal Tournament is happening. Fiiiiiiinally! It feels like it’s been eons since the decent-ish Unreal Tournament III brought hoverboards to a shock rifle fight, but Unreal Tournament 2014 is coming to the rescue. This one, though, stands to be a massive departure from previous entries in the arena shooter pioneer series. Epic is keeping its team lean and developing the entire game – from day one – alongside fans. Meanwhile, the whole thing will be free, with Epic making precious pennies off cuts from a user-driven mod/map store.
Sounds pretty neat, right? But it’s also a logistical can of worms that could fit 100 of the things from Tremors. How will Epic stop its audience from fragmenting, especially if maps aren’t free? Do creators *have* to charge for maps? With source code out in the open, won’t it be especially easy for cheaters to meander their mucky fingers into this game’s DNA? Will the basic game even have much meat on its bones? I asked Unreal Tournament 2014 project lead Steve Polge all of that and more.
Update: It’s Unreal Tournament 2014, an entirely free sequel. Not free-to-play. No microtransactions whatsoever, apparently. Epic will make money by taking cuts from a user-driven mod marketplace. The game is extremely early, and Epic plans to develop it alongside fans.
Original: Epic is about to announce something involving Unreal Tournament. Normally that would mean I’d be typing at you live from some extravagant Epic-rented volcano yacht in the Baltic sea, but not this time. Instead, the mega-developer is broadcasting the announcement to all humans by way of technomagical streaming technology. You can watch below.
