Epic Games stops development of Unreal Tournament

5 hours ago, Novaseer said:

I guess my statement of "Epic haven't released a good non-VR game since 2004" remains to be true.

Hmm, it was my impression that at least Bulletstorm and the early Gears of War games were well-received.

1 minute ago, TheMightyHeracross said:

Hmm, it was my impression that at least Bulletstorm and the early Gears of War games were well-received.

Not a fan of either myself.

9 hours ago, Space Boss said:

 
Is it really, though?

...What are you babbling about? Patches roll out every month and a new one is due Dec 18th. 

If they don't want to update the new one, just release the source code for the old one. There's no doubt tons of people who will try to fix it up. Hell, I'd love for a portable UT99 on a hacked Switch or once of those handheld PCs (like a Dragonbox Pyra).

It's frankly amazing that UT99 runs fairly well on even modern Windows with only a little extra help needed (like more modern renderers and remembering to set a framerate cap, as the engine starts going to hell above 150-200 FPS or so).

I believe Tim Sweeney has gone on record as saying they'd like to open-source Unreal Engine 1 at some point, but I think would need to also clear up some stuff with Digital Extremes due to co-development. UE2 would be next to impossible due to middleware though (like SpeedTree and Havok).

Then again, there is that leaked UE1 source floating around. And if it still won't happen, sooner or later someone might start reverse engineering the thing - not like the file formats aren't all that well known, after all, and really only a handful of pieces are proprietary, making the attack surface somewhat smaller than it would be otherwise if it was a total black box.

Hard to say if Epic would crack down on it, but nominally speaking, commercial possibilities for the engine are nil (I mean, Unity can stomp on it all day at this point), and as long as it's not packaged with any commercial game content, I don't see how it'd run foul.

Plus there's precedent in terms of legality - see that Devilution project for the original Diablo.

Its a shame. The franchise that made Epic Games popular has come to an end. The franchise that defined and gave "Unreal Engine" its name. This made me really sad especially since I am a "UT guy" when it comes to Quake vs Unreal.

BUT I am not surprised. Epic did the same thing to UT3 after Gears of War overshadowed Unreal. I still Haven't forgotten "from the creators of Gears of War" tagline 😠. UT4 had been in a state of limbo for 1.5 years now and I knew they would pull the plug one day.

Despite that I prefer UT over Quake, I really hope that Quake Champions doesn't meet the same fate as UT4.

I'd much prefer a UT Live like id did with Quake Live, the original UT was always my favorite anyway.

Shame it will probably never happen.

9 hours ago, Edward850 said:

You can't change that no matter how much you want to otherwise.

You're just reiterating that Fortnite is popular. Popularity and quality are definitely not correlated (and in particular do not have a causal relationship), especially in entertainment. You can definitely see that in Television planning. Many great and critically acclaimed television series are not successful and most of really popular ones are crap. Entertainment formats (games or movies) have to be shallow to be successful today.

15 hours ago, Tetzlaff said:

"Quake Champions doesn't met my personal expectations therefore it's dead."

Ehem, no.

That's not even close to what I meant. I suppose it was my fault for being so vague this time, so that's fine.

By that I meant that since the days of Early Access it seemed to be plagued by the same recurring issues people seemed to keep on mentioning, which gave me the impression it hit a dead end.

Back when I was young, companies released finished products. Nowdays, it is lot of early access, abandoned products and broken promises.

I saw some videos of the Fortnite game, the graphics seems to be targeted at teenage kids and the game-play at simple people. If they have fun with it, good, at least I wont meet them in real-life.

They were never going to update it anyway. The premise was letting the community update and add to it. They released it as one level that was uninspiring. Despite all Fortnite's fame, Unreal Engine's money, and Unreal Engine being taught in universities, they can't spend extra money to finish projects.

It's interesting to me how many seem to care about this in contrast to how many people played it.

11 minutes ago, MrGlide said:

It's interesting to me how many seem to care about this in contrast to how many people played it.

I have played it. I spent longer digging through the menus than anything else. I only played it because my TF2 friends have jumped over to play it. Since they dominated at TF2 they seem to dominate at Fortnite and I wanted to be a part of it. Until I actually played it.

It's just not for me. The level of openness and danger around every corner is an issue. On the other end of the spectrum, The fact that the best strategy is literally hide fro 20 minutes is also an issue. Seems like the first 5 minutes are the most action packed, followed by something between boredom and dread better than any horror game can provide.

Not really surprised to see the news about UT. About a year and a half ago or so, I perused the UT4 dev forums out of curiosity, trying to get a grasp of where the project stood, wondering if I should possibly invest any time into it. Reading a few threads from apparently long-time UE modders who went on for paragraphs despairing about the dismal state of the project was enough to convince me to stay away from it. 

32 minutes ago, geo said:

I have played it. I spent longer digging through the menus than anything else. I only played it because my TF2 friends have jumped over to play it. Since they dominated at TF2 they seem to dominate at Fortnite and I wanted to be a part of it. Until I actually played it.

 

It's just not for me. The level of openness and danger around every corner is an issue. On the other end of the spectrum, The fact that the best strategy is literally hide fro 20 minutes is also an issue. Seems like the first 5 minutes are the most action packed, followed by something between boredom and dread better than any horror game can provide.

Try PUBG or Ring of Elysium (F2P).  I played Fortnite when it was first taking off and it was fun, but then it evolved into a build fest and whomever can jiggle their mouse and build above the other person quicker wins engagements.  It's extremely annoying and there's no real tactical depth.  PUBG and ROE are the complete opposite, if you're looking for that sort of the thing.

First Jazz then UT..

O O F

33 minutes ago, geo said:

I have played it.

I was talking about ut4, mainly commenting on the very dead userbase, but people are up in arms that epic is dropping development on a dead game. Fortnight is bleh imo, I agree with Flesh420 that pubg is better.

37 minutes ago, MrGlide said:

I was talking about ut4, mainly commenting on the very dead userbase, but people are up in arms that epic is dropping development on a dead game. Fortnight is bleh imo, I agree with Flesh420 that pubg is better.

Personally, I didn't play UT4 but that's because i don't have a good enough rig for it. But I have played UT99, UT2004 and even UT3 a lot.

When it comes it UT99, I can assure u that many people here have probably played it and enjoyed.

11 hours ago, Mr. Freeze said:

 

...What are you babbling about? Patches roll out every month and a new one is due Dec 18th. 

Okay toots, no need to get so upset.

I can assure you I've lost thousands of hours to my life for Unreal Tournament, helped post news onto BeyondUnreal for a number of years, played with the devs on a handful of occasions during the UT3 days, got in early on some of the patches for that game during closed beta, and had a blast with several iterations of it.

Hell, I was even part of a team trying to port UT99 into UE2, and we were pretty successful before internal politics fucked that up.

Granted, for me, UT99 will always be "the one." It simply felt great. Quake 3 felt prettier, but so stripped down. (And I hated the stupid plink-plonk hit sounds, and I still do - to me they're a massive crutch for being unable to tell when you clearly hit your opponent or not).

I'm sure this forum had its days of "which is better" like any other forum of the time, but I was in UT's camp all the way, so boy was I let down when 2k3 (and to an extent, 2k4) felt more like Quake than UT. With all those movement options, forget needing to commit - just kick off the wall, run away with your shield gun, and basically nullify anything out of the Shock Rifle -> Lightning Gun -> Shock Rifle combo that everyone used.

"Shields up, run away! Play the game the pro way!" Still remember saying that some fifteen years later.

9 hours ago, Agent6 said:

By that I meant that since the days of Early Access it seemed to be plagued by the same recurring issues people seemed to keep on mentioning, which gave me the impression it hit a dead end.

Nah, Quake Champions is still regularely updated and there are always other players online. So it's far from dead.

Well actually they stopped supporting Unreal Tournament 2016 Pre-Alpha demo I mean UT4 so even to this day they are still supporting Fortnite Battle Royale.

On ‎12‎/‎7‎/‎2018 at 4:30 PM, Tetzlaff said:

 

Nah, Quake Champions is still regularely updated and there are always other players online. So it's far from dead.

My concern with Quake Champions is that the player base is pretty small compared to other popular games. The stats as of now show about the same user base as when the game was first available as a Steam Early Access title. There was a big boost when Bethesda did that free play weekend, but the numbers have dropped off significantly since and it just seems like it's on a slow, downward trend.

https://steamcharts.com/app/611500#All

I need to fire up the game this weekend. I haven't played it in months, but was in the closed beta and played it a lot back then. When I logged on a few months back, it wasn't really much different from the beta and then when they first made it public on Steam. There was maybe only an extra DM map or two compared to back then? It was pretty disappointing, honestly, and it's one of the things that has kept me from playing it regularly.

On ‎12‎/‎7‎/‎2018 at 1:23 AM, ReaperAA said:

BUT I am not surprised. Epic did the same thing to UT3 after Gears of War overshadowed Unreal. I still Haven't forgotten "from the creators of Gears of War" tagline 😠

 

Hm.. I don't know about that. UT3 came out the year after Gears (2007 for UT3, 2006 for Gears 1), so it's not like they abandoned it for Gears. Yeah, the game ended up languishing for a couple of years, but mid-2009 well after the player base was already dead, Epic released the "Black Edition" patch which added a hefty amount of content. It didn't really do anything to revitalize the player base, but still, they at least tried.

2 hours ago, amackert said:

Hm.. I don't know about that. UT3 came out the year after Gears (2007 for UT3, 2006 for Gears 1), so it's not like they abandoned it for Gears. Yeah, the game ended up languishing for a couple of years, but mid-2009 well after the player base was already dead, Epic released the "Black Edition" patch which added a hefty amount of content. It didn't really do anything to revitalize the player base, but still, they at least tried.

UT3 became a much better (and dare i say even slightly better than UT2004) after Black Edition and mods like foxmod, mapmixer. But by the time this happened, it was simply too late. The damage had already been done because of the console-ish, half-assed initial release.

8 hours ago, amackert said:

There was a big boost when Bethesda did that free play weekend, but the numbers have dropped off significantly since and it just seems like it's on a slow, downward trend.

These spikes are pretty normal, they happen with all games that go through such periods.

People sometimes try something out that goes free for a while even if merely out of curiosity, but those people always leave immediately afterwards. Their curiosity has been satisfied and nothing keeps them interested in the product. I remember when L4D2 could be grabbed for free years ago and the number of concurrent players spiked to over 110.000 for instance, but that didn't even last a week before the numbers returned to their dramatically lower normal.