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Comment by fergie | Hacker News Reader

Its strange that Unreal Tournament was kind of abandoned by Epic. It was such a great game in every way- so far ahead of its time. Even today Unreal Engine is probably the best off the shelf 3D game engine available.

I am surprised that they dont make more of the franchise. If they repackaged UT2004 with the new engine (UT2023) I would play the hell out of it.

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Fortnite is the new money maker, UT doesn’t even come close unfortunately

I'd be curious to know what percentage of Fortnite's playerbase has even heard of Unreal Tournament, let alone played it.

Epic’s internal team working on the new UT was repurposed to fortnight when fortnight started making a whole bunch of money.

Not spelling fortnight incorrectly because on my phone.

The Unreal franchise was Epic's flagship product for many years. UT is a natural platform for esports (cf. CS:GO). Sure, UT might not be casual enough for everyone, and Epic was right to focus on Fortnite when it blew up, but why Epic hasn't marketed UT as an "elite" gaming product and put it at the top of its esports food chain is beyond me. I would expect it to provide a halo effect for the rest of their products. (And besides, there is so much untapped IP in the Unreal universe)

I think Epic have been looking at ID’s various attempts at making a modernised or esports friendly Quake (arguably UT’s prime competitor at the time), and believe there’s no market or demand for it.

I wonder if there are any bits of Quake 2 code still left over in CS:GO

I know Carmack made a comment that HL2 did have bits of Q2 in it.

Epic was working on a new UT which has been in early release. It's quite fun but I believe development stopped some time ago.

It was killed due to the success of Fortnite.

That's just one side of the story. While the success of Fortnite definitely played a part of the cancellation, no one really cared about the Unreal Tournament reboot. It got no traction at all. The game was playable but had no players. And while there was a big interest of a small group, it got no interest outside of that group. I think that even if Fortnite wouldn't have been as big as it is, Unreal had no chance because the gaming demographic changed and there is no demand for a game like UT anymore.

Arena shooters in general are kind of a dead genre. Quake Champions, Diabolical, and a few others all collapsed. Even Halo Infinite couldn't sustain a player base.

Halo Infinite died because Microsoft mismanaged it. They had huge player numbers at launch but they failed to keep the content going and people moved on. They couldn't even manage a tie in with the stupid halo show when it launched.

Their complete lack of interesting custom games is what killed it for me.

Halo, for me, was about forge and messing around in fun game modes people came up with. Releasing Halo without forge and with bare bones custom game tools is like selling a car without seats.

Yeah, they claimed live service and I believed them, but forge was released a month ago and I can't muster up anyone who wants to play anymore. lol. I can't even get my bro to play through coop. Bums me out because halo was my jam almost my entire life but they can't be arsed.

It's sad because forge mode looks amazing.

Server Browser added this most recent update, and to MCC a while back.

Halo infinite failed because literally half of it's content was garbage. A bunch of new guns, most of which sucked, a bunch of new maps, that weren't impressive, and genuinely game modes that were so boring and bad, my friends and I gamed them to get them over in a couple minutes instead of the normal 30 minutes it would take to play out.

It was also really glitchy, really poorly optimized, and full of GARBAGE microtransactions. It was like multiple tens of dollars for a different set of armor, while previous halo games arguably pushed cosmetics as an awesome thing and an actual status symbol because you couldn't buy them, only unlock by completing challenges.

I hope they open-source all the assets and maybe the existing game code like they've done with some other cancelled titles. It would be cool to see the community finish it or build something from the ashes

It turns out the source code was available from the beginning: https://github.com/JimmieKJ/unrealTournament

It didn't get "no interest" it got people dipping their toes in waiting for it to be done.

I played it, and enjoyed it (I played the living daylights out of UT 2004 and UT 3, and was eager for UT 4). I was waiting for the single-player portion of UT4 to be in a cleaner state. It was the only reason I signed up for an Epic account. But UT 4 stayed in rough shape with unfinished features, though it was playable.

I doubt I'm the only one that was tracking it and watching games like the newer (and amazing) Doom come and go.

Right, Epic was making gobs of money on Fortnite and couldn't justify continued funding of an open source UT4. I recall how cool it was that they decided to run the project as free-to-play open source... I even played for a while. Then PUBG happened, leading to Fortnite as a response, and it sucked all the air out of the UT4 effort.

Yes, it stopped when Fortnite was getting traction. It was a small team and development was not going well anyways.

This was the reason I stopped buying any epic stuff. When they went Xbox instead of PC for gears of war, and then never came back, I wrote them off.

I've got good news for you-https://store.steampowered.com/app/1097840/Gears_5/

They were working on it when fortnite got big, in fact it was kind of a cool experiment where they involved the community in the process and development, halfway crowdsourced in a way. But when fortnite got big the team got moved to that, so here we are.

Make Unreal Tournament great again!

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