The future of Unreal Tournament will be broadcast on May 8

Saturday, 3rd May 2014 15:05 GMT By Stephany Nunneley

Unreal Tournament is set to make a comeback, according to tweets from Epic Games’ Paul Meegan and Mark Rein.

We saw the tweets regarding the future of Unreal Tournament last night from Mark Rein while we were off the clock, but Blue’s News picked up on those made by Meegan.

The future of URT will be revealed during Epic’s next Unreal Engine 4 Twitch stream on May 8.

Here are the tweets:

The first Unreal Tournament was published in 1999 and its success led to three sequels: Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004 and Unreal Tournament 3.



  1. Panthro


    What ever happened to announcing something as a surprise and not announcing announcements, it just takes the fun out of it.

    #1 8 months ago
  2. Astaroth

    I sooooooo want another great Unreal Tournament like the first one in 99 or the really great Unreal Tournament 2004. I have really high hopes now! Let’s wait and see.
    If it’s any good from what they show us I will instantly pre-order it.

    #2 8 months ago
  3. The_Red

    This would have been amazing news if the announcement wasn’t about turning UT3 into a F2P crapfest and calling it future of UT.

    What happened to Epic? UT and UT2003-4 were great games. Then they became a Gears factory and ruined UT with the 3rd one. Then they even ruined Gears with the 3rd one. What gives?

    #3 8 months ago
  4. CycloneFox

    It would be so awesome to finally get a UT4. I loved UT’99 and UT2k4, but disliked UT2k3 and UT3. I suppose, every second one were bad.

    #4 8 months ago
  5. gameoholic007

    I had a blast on URT3, lots of epic battles on it and crazy mods. I don’t see why some people didn’t dig it…….unless they couldn’t hang with it lol jk. Can’t wait to hear the announcement on what’s going to go down on the 8th.

    #5 8 months ago

    been a fan of UT since dot. UT 2k3 was the best and still is. I did enjoyed UT3 and still play it, but it lacked the scale and modes from UT2k4. I hope UT4 will be like UT2k4.

    #6 8 months ago
  7. TheWulf


    You think a lot like me, sometimes — which I offer as a compliment, as it means I ascribe the qualities of perspicacity and insight to you — which leaves me feeling a little surprised that you didn’t figure out what was going on, there.

    Ever since Nu Epic, they’ve been trying to hide their ridiculousness. The thing is, they know what the herd wants is grimdark and po-faced, but they’re completely ridiculous, they can’t help themselves. Gears was ridiculous, so they tried to overcompensate for that with making it excessively grey-brown, and they had to ensure that the characters were stupid and never said anything intelligently funny or clever.

    Bulletstorm was Epic as Epic wants to be. Yeah, it was developed by People Can Fly, but it had a lot of involvement from Epic. Like, they knew that they couldn’t attach their own name to it because it was too intelligent, too colourful, and too novel to actually sell well (and they were right), so they used People Can Fly as a fall guy for the bad sales. But this is what they want to be.

    Unreal Tournament ’99 revelled in glorious ridiculousness, especially with some of the mods out there, which Epic wholeheartedly endorsed at the time. UT2k4 was also really amazing, colourful, and ridiculous. But by the time UT III rolled around, the mainstream had been integrated into gaming. And what does the mainstream want? Grittiness, po-faced and one-dimensional characters, colourless and lifeless environments, lots of WAR WAR WAR AND EXPLOSIONS (if I never hear another kid or 20-something talk about war and explosions, it’ll be too soon), and so on.

    So, they were torn. Do we appeal to the Unreal Tournament old guard, or do we reinvent it to fit the mainstream? They did a little of column A, and a little of column B. So it wasn’t awful, in some cases (especially with custom maps) it could actually be quite good. The Black edition had its moments, but it was still trying too hard to be accepted by a mainstream audience.

    It was grimdark, it had giant guns that took up half the screen, it was stupid (as in, it felt like the general intelligence of the player was meant to be a lobotomised bonobo, which I class myself as being a tier above of), it was streamlined to fit controllers (and it lost a lot of nuance that way), and so on.

    So, yeah.

    But something interesting is happening, now. Something very interesting. It’s a realisation that’s been blooming in my mind for some time, and it finally twigged what might be happening. Consider this: The mainstream that brought our hobby to its knees with endless pandering to the lowest of brows is slowly moving over to mobiles. The console market has shrunk considerably because of this, so they’re trying to understand where the money is for the hardcore experience they want to make games for.

    Another question: Why is Epic coming back to the PC? Everyone has one. A PC can do a lot of things that a tablet can’t. I’ve asked a number of intelligent friends of mine why they still have computers if they have tablets. They said that a tablet is just something they use to Skype on the go, or to relax with whilst watching Netflix or browsing. But if they need to actually do anything more complicated than that, the apps of every mobile device (Apple and Android alike) lack the years of complexity and nuance built by their PC cousins.

    See, a PC app doesn’t hand-hold. The problem with, say, an art program on the tablet is that it’s streamlined to suit those who’re just beginning to try arting, it’s more of a novelty than anything else. As such, it lacks the power of Paint Tool SAI, Photoshop, and many others. It lacks their flexibility, their plugins, and mods. This is because these things are thought to be too much thinking for a mobile device owner, whose brow tends to be lower than most.

    Even word processors and office suites are better on the PC than on mobiles, and provide that same kind of nuance. There are writers (as in books) who swear by those complex, nuanced PC applications. Want an example? On the PC, you can have a flowchart and a writing program opened in windows, next to each other. Why is that important?

    It’s important because you lay out your plot in the flowchart, your basic plot points, and some of the finer details, just to keep in mind where your story is going. A lot of contemporary writers do this, so that they don’t lose their way or get writer’s block. And as the story progresses, they change, modify, add to, and/or remove from their flow chart.

    The writing program can be one designed for writers as well, with a font and layout that’s perfect for them to speed read. There are many PC applications which allow for granular control over the visualisation of text that mobile devices just can’t allow for. It’s going to be decades before mobile devices catch up with computers, maybe even not in our lifetimes, maybe they never will because the apps on mobile devices aren’t aimed at people who actually want to do work.

    And here’s the thing… you’re writing, you’ve just finished a chapter and you know you need to do more. You can either go and setup the console and be lazy with hours of gaming, or you can switch to a game you already had running in the background, and you can set up a timer application to remind you when you need to get back to work.

    For reasons like that, a lot of people don’t own a console, a console is a luxury item, a mobile is a luxury item, a PC is a necessity. Even if the PC is actually a few years old, it’s still a necessity. And for many people who do have to work, especially in artistic fields, upgrading a PC can come before buying a new console. And money’s getting tighter all the time. So the console market continues to shrink because it’s not a necessity, and the PC market continues to grow because it is.

    It’s all due to the open nature of the PC, which is truly open, in ways that even Android could never be. It means that anyone can create anything for the PC, and many things can be running at the same time in a windowed environment. The only tablet that actually comes close to this is Microsoft’s Surface Pro, but that thing is actually a computer without a keyboard — and you’re paying fifteen times the price you would for a similarly specced computer. So, again, a luxury item.

    And what I think is happening is that companies like Epic are beginning to realise this. The mainstream is moving to tablets, the console market is shrinking, and the place you’re likely to find the old guard is the same place you’d find it in the ’90s — PC users. So, they might be ready to take a risk, they might be ready to make something colourful, characterful, and fun that’s developed first for the PC.

    And even if I’m wrong, that’s the way the wind is blowing. Give it a decade and the console market will be dessicated, as more and more of the mainstream move over to tablets. That’s why the console market is shrinking, as many analysts have pointed out. The thing is is that the price of consoles is rising all the time, to the point where people just don’t want to buy a new luxury item, with increasingly expensive games.

    Why buy an XBox One when you can get a very decent PC for that price, and when every game for it (which is going to be largely the same library as what the consoles get) is going to be less than half price. So, less than half price, better graphically, and you can choose your control and modify your environment to suit your need. You can even easily hook it up to your TV, more easily than ever now thanks to Steam’s Big Picture mode.

    Consoles now, more than ever, are a tax on the stupid because the market is continuing to evolve and consoles are dinosaurs that aren’t evolving with it. The PC is evolving, that’s why it has genres like MOBAs and such, but the consoles are always, always struggling to keep up. They’re only just barely getting some of the worst online games, whilst the first focus is always on the PC.

    So, I’m hoping that whilst Unreal Tournament III was made for a much more low-brow, knuckle-dragging audience, the next Unreal Tournament will be intelligent, fun, fast, strategic, and colourful — all qualities held by the incredibly wonderful UT2k4.

    Whether I’m right or not depends on how smart Epic is, or isn’t.

    #7 8 months ago
  8. TheWulf


    As do all of the old guard. Truly, as do we all.

    #8 8 months ago
  9. TheWulf


    It was okay, but it was a markedly inferior game than UT2k4, more limited, and with less interesting mods. And with the infinite backwards compatibility of the humble PC, why bother?

    Asking why people didn’t dig it is like asking why people dislike Rustler’s burgers so much when you can have a higher quality, home-made burger for only a fraction of the price. And that’s kind of what UT III is compared to its prior incarnations. It’s okay if you’re desperate for that kind of thing, and with some custom maps it could be good, but it’s nowhere near the level of excellence found in UT2k4.

    #9 8 months ago
  10. TheWulf

    As a continuation of the above — this is why many old PC FPS games are still alive and well. Even the original UT ’99 is still doing good, too. In fact, UT ’99 is doing so well that there are companies that still sell dedicated UT ’99 servers.

    One of the boons of owning a PC is that you never lose your old library of games. Games from the earliest PCs are still playable on today’s computers. As opposed to consoles, where if you buy a new one, all of your old games disappear into the ether. Not to mention the large amount of free PC games on offer, too. Ever play Warsow? No? You should.

    #10 8 months ago

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