Unreal Tournament
As a huge fan of Unreal Tournament, I have been waiting for this day for a very long time. In fact, since Unreal Tournament 3 came out in 2007 a lot of people have been waiting for a new Unreal Tournament game, it has been nearly 7 years since the last Unreal Title and now Epic Games has finally announced they will start to develop a new Unreal Tournament game with help from the community. The new game will be based on Unreal Engine 4, which is Epic’s latest and greatest game engine and as a result, it will look and perform absolutely fantastically. Not just that, but it’ll be very portable across Windows, OSX and Linux and the game will be completely and totally free. Here’s the announcement from Epic’s online live stream where they explained exactly what the new game will be like, even though the game has basically started development today.
We even asked our good friend Tim Sweeney, Co-Founder of Epic, about whether or not they would be making a new Unreal Tournament game in 2012, but he would not confirm nor deny any such project. And he once again denied any such existence of an Unreal Tournament game at GDC earlier this year with some other press. Even so, I’m not entirely sure he was wrong in either statement since Epic Games hasn’t technically started development of the new Unreal title until today. Today is day zero and starting from today they are beginning the development of the new Unreal Tournament game. What’s interesting is that Epic has decided to bring a lot of the people that currently work at Epic, but were somehow involved with Unreal Tournament as modders and such into the project. Additionally, they are being very adamant that they want to have heavy involvement from the community and that they want to include gamers to help make the game better even at the Alpha stage.
I think that this game is going to present a new way of developing, creating and ultimately releasing a game. However, I don’t really know what’s in it for Epic Games, maybe a way to showcase their latest engine? I don’t quite know, they’ve been a pretty bottomline focused company and for them to do something like this and make a game absolutely and completely free (not even Free to Play) is almost out of their character. They claim that they will be making their money off this game through the marketplace created by modders, they want to give developers, modders, artists and gamers a way to buy and sell mods and content. Earnings from that marketplace will be split between the modder/content developer and Epic and that’s how they expect to pay for the game. It isn’t quite microtransactions, but it kind of is. It sounds almost like something we’re seeing from Valve with Counter Strike: Global Offensive, where people are paying to unlock skinned guns made by the community (In fact, I think we’ll see exactly some form of that, and many others). But you won’t see me complaining, I’ve been starving for a new Unreal Tournament game and now we’ve got it. Now it’ll just be interesting to see how the game will look and how gamers will receive it on three different platforms.
