It's official: Unreal is dead

I liked Unreal Tournament, surprised they never took one more shot at it.
 
Arena shooters are dead, it's not the fault of the game developers. Why spend millions developing something that'll be played for a couple weeks to a month before everyone moves back to their objective based shooters or their BRs ?
Be glad it happened instead of being bitter that it ended. It was a golden age but time is a harsh mistress that conquers all.
 
scojer said:
Fortnite makes them too much money.
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That is not at all what happened and has nothing to do with it. This all happened back in Gears of War era. Cliffy B flat out stated that PC gamers sucked. Bad attitudes, pirated too much, and cheated too much. Also that their real profit stream was engines now. He was even parading around in pictures with his mock Gears Chainsaw gun at that time.

He wasn't really wrong either. The attempted fix for all this was also to have UT3 on the PS3 as well and when it didn't work Unreal was dead. In truth it died with Unreal Tournament 2003 which was so polarizing half their fans hated it. Then UT2004 had Onslaught The Noob Mode and further cut the community into slices. The writing was on the wall. Introduce the TAM (Team Arena Mode) mode and that was the final nail. UT2003, Onslaught, and TAM killed Unreal permanently it was never coming back. Epic was wise to realize their key franchise was dead and to run as far away as possible and go all in on Gears and let the "fans" make their last Unreal because it was just morons huffing corpse farts. That their last community attempt was run by some of their forum mods who liked stuff like Onsalught, instagib, and TAM... all stuff the real fans would not touch, and banned anybody who did not tow the line did not help. So it imploded in well, Epic!, fashion.
Drexion said:
Arena shooters are dead, it's not the fault of the game developers. Why spend millions developing something that'll be played for a couple weeks to a month before everyone moves back to their objective based shooters or their BRs ?
Be glad it happened instead of being bitter that it ended. It was a golden age but time is a harsh mistress that conquers all.
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UT invented objective shooters with Assault mode. It also died way before Battle Royal.
 
GradBryan said:
if epic locks the game, is there any website that can save its game? and if i want to play those games where can i find it? Will you please tell me.
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It would technically be considered "abandonware," but it exists in a grey area that is just a step away from piracy. Generally speaking, a game is only considered abandoned if it hasn't been sold or supported for at least 20 years. As such, that can't be discussed here. You can probably still legitimately purchase the game by finding keys to buy.

As far as online goes, only the master servers are being taken offline. The community can and has been maintaining their own list of servers and you can connect to them directly using the IP address. There is a community patch for UT99 that forgoes the Epic master server for a custom one. I'd imagine some abled person may develop such a patch for UT2004.
 
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Man I loved Unreal 2003/2004 back in the day and even the original UT. I was super high ranked globally for instagib CTF. I am afraid old age has killed my skills.
 
Decko87 said:
I liked Unreal Tournament, surprised they never took one more shot at it.
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They did 7 years ago but it never made it past pre-alpha. It was named "Unreal Tournament" but also kown as Unreal Tournament 4. It was completely FREE, not even "free to play", although it was going to have free and paid community cosmetic items. It was meant to be the last version of UT that would be continually updated with development done by both the community and Epic. Epic had a couple people that worked on it part time, sort of as a side project, but it was supposed to rely heavily on community development. I'm pretty sure the idea behind the community driven development was because Arena shooters had been dead for the past decade and just money pits with no return. So a couple people from Epic passionate about Unreal Tournament convinced the business to at least do that.

I actually played it quite a bit. People ported over all sorts of classic UT maps and there was a small classic instagib CTF community. It never got very popular, but UT seemed like it had some potential to grow.

Then basically a year after the pre-alpha of UT, Fortnite blew up and started making millions of dollars a day. Epic shifted all of their resources to Fortnite. So no one from Epic had time to work on it anymore and no one from the community stepped up to take the project over so it died.

When Epic killed Paragon they gave away all the assets and code for free and just recently there have been new games coming out based on that. So Paragon lives on which is pretty cool.
UT was essentially already free and open source, but no one was willing to just give away their time for free to continue development of it. Epic obviously isn't going to let anyone use the Unreal IP to make their own game.
When Fortnite makes millions of dollars a day it would be stupid for Epic to waste any time trying to make a couple million on a new Unreal game that takes years to make. So we probalby won't see a new Unreal/Unreal Tournament game anytime soon. The only real hope for a new UT is the community doing free work on it.

I never played pro UT or anything, I focused on other games, but I always loved instagib. Here is a video made of the alpha back when it was new.
 
sharknice said:
They did 7 years ago but it never made it past pre-alpha. It was named "Unreal Tournament" but also kown as Unreal Tournament 4. It was completely FREE, not even "free to play", although it was going to have free and paid community cosmetic items. It was meant to be the last version of UT that would be continually updated with development done by both the community and Epic. Epic had a couple people that worked on it part time, sort of as a side project, but it was supposed to rely heavily on community development. I'm pretty sure the idea behind the community driven development was because Arena shooters had been dead for the past decade and just money pits with no return. So a couple people from Epic passionate about Unreal Tournament convinced the business to at least do that.

I actually played it quite a bit. People ported over all sorts of classic UT maps and there was a small classic instagib CTF community. It never got very popular, but UT seemed like it had some potential to grow.

Then basically a year after the pre-alpha of UT, Fortnite blew up and started making millions of dollars a day. Epic shifted all of their resources to Fortnite. So no one from Epic had time to work on it anymore and no one from the community stepped up to take the project over so it died.

When Epic killed Paragon they gave away all the assets and code for free and just recently there have been new games coming out based on that. So Paragon lives on which is pretty cool.
UT was essentially already free and open source, but no one was willing to just give away their time for free to continue development of it. Epic obviously isn't going to let anyone use the Unreal IP to make their own game.
When Fortnite makes millions of dollars a day it would be stupid for Epic to waste any time trying to make a couple million on a new Unreal game that takes years to make. So we probalby won't see a new Unreal/Unreal Tournament game anytime soon. The only real hope for a new UT is the community doing free work on it.

I never played pro UT or anything, I focused on other games, but I always loved instagib. Here is a video made of the alpha back when it was new.
Click to expand...

Its hilarious that UT4 has all the new graphic enhancements and we are back at Barn Burner.
 
yea, instagib used to be my jam back in the day. Sad to see it go, I've never been good at or a fan of the BR games.
 
I messed around with UT4 a bit when it was a year or two old, I have to say it was impressive as a tech demo for the levels but I can't say I'm surprised it never took off.
 
I just looked at some charts.
Quake Champions is probably the closest thing to Unreal Tournament 4 that was actually released.
Quake Champions came to Steam 5 years ago and had 17k concurrent players at launch. Then it was down to only hundreds of concurrent players in a few months. Now it's down to 300-400.
Pretty much a massive failure. I wonder if they were proffitable at all.
Most likely the same thing would have happened to Unreal Tournament 4. Why put money into a game unlikley to be profitable? Especially when you lose out on oportunity cost you could have put into Fortnite.

Fortnite consistently has 3-4 million concurrent players at any time (compared to Quake Champions 300-400), and during special events Fortnite has 15 million concurrent players.
Fortnite literally has 10,000 times the player base of Quake Champions. lol

I guess as a classic arena shooter fans we have to live with playing the literal classic games themselves or the Indy games that come and die every year.
 
Quake Champions was very interesting at the start but the balance was not there. They tried to incorporate too much into it that removed the "skill" aspect of it. While I understand wanting to draw current audiences in through those things they are used to it just doesnt work in that style.

Limited maps, balance getting worse and it just wasn't fun. I found it pushed me back to UT99 to play that again for longer than I played Champions.
And UT99 came with a good number of maps and modes and options to keep it more interesting depending on what you wanted to do. Champions never really went anywhere so it fizzled out.
Lets not bring up modifiers and easy to distribute maps.

If they had delivered more of a complete experience it likely would have done better, but with instant communication that it was not finished and was lacking I'm sure they lost most of their potential audience before they got started.
 
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