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The Next Unreal Tournament: Totally Free, Developed By Public
Nerval's Lobster (2598977) writes "Epic Games is rebooting Unreal Tournament, but not in a typical way. A small team of veteran developers will begin work on the next edition of the popular, multi-player shooter, in collaboration with pretty much anyone who wants to participate. "From the very first line of code, the very first art created and design decision made, development will happen in the open, as a collaboration between Epic, UT fans and UE4 developers. We'll be using forums for discussion, and Twitch streams for regular updates," reads a note on the company's blog. All code and content will appear on GitHub, and development will focus on Mac, Linux, and Windows. What's the catch? According to Epic, it'll take months to forge a playable game. "When the game is playable, it will be free. Not free to play, just free," the blog adds. "We'll eventually create a marketplace where developers, modders, artists and gamers can give away, buy and sell mods and content. Earnings from the marketplace will be split between the mod/content developer, and Epic. That's how we plan to pay for the game.""
If it's free, as in free to download, compile and use, why would anyone want to use a market place to buy and sell skins/artwork?
As someone who played endless hours of UT2004, UT3 was such a disappointment in so many ways... And I could play UT2004 it in Linux, like 8 years ago. When UT3 for linux was abandoned, my heart broke. It took a long time for me to finally play it and realize it kinda sucked anyway.
Epic's decision to build the game in public isn't the only change that reflects the passage of time. Unreal Tournament will be free -- but not free-to-play, according to the developer.
"Free means free -- no microtransactions," he said. "Just free."
How does that square with the $19/mo that's mentioned earlier?
Former RealCTF level designer here.
This is a really good idea, and I welcome this as great news! :-)
If anyone needs some level design, hit me up!!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I will tell you this if our government was shaped up like these open market games, we would have far fewer problems to DE with. It's like bartering in a way.. I'll give you something in return for your services. It's presented in a fair way..
I hope they bring back UWindows. That, IMHO, was the pinnacle of interfaces for games and the consolized interfaces of the later versions are crap by comparison.
As anyone who's watched the most famous recent use of Twitch will realize, this should result in epic loltrolling and griefing of the development process.
That or else the development process will be sufficiently insulated from the rabble that this announcement boils down to just marketing.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Holy hell, I don't think I've ever seen a 2-digit ID post before.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
"Free means free — no microtransactions," he said. "Just free."
When asked how Epic will earn income with a free game, Polge said that Unreal Tournament will "eventually" have a marketplace where modders can post and give away or sell their maps, mods and other content.
How is a marketplace not microtransactions?
Xonotic and it's various mods like chaosesque anthology are similar to the original unreal tourny
I don't see this launching soon.
open = being able to have your own build that bypass the DRM.
Open for 3rd party development is an interesting decision and sadly not seen often enough. The ability to gain new ingame content for years to come will make paying players interested for years.
One of the best examples I can think of is Civilization 4. Released in 2005 + 2006 expansions and the colonization standalone in 2008. Looking at how other games from that time became history, civ4 should have been a thing of the past too. However the ability to mod more or less anything in the game (even C++ core features) mean that mods are still being improved and even here in 2014 new mods show up. Looking at the steam forum, people talk about which mods to use meaning presumably new buyers buy because the game core is modder friendly.
Had civilization 4 been released like the next UT, then I don't think it would have been much different. In fact the only thing which comes to my mind as possible additions would be better portability and 64 bit support. Any other addition that I can think of is possible with due to having access to modify the DLL file. My experience tells me that getting C/C++ coders, who will work for free on open source projects is a lot easier if linux is natively supported.
Time will tell how well it will go with attracting external development people for UT as well as how long lived the game will be. The setup looks promising and the fact that it will be supported natively on linux will likely make it a bit easier to attract coders.
They seem to have taken a leaf from Valve's book with Team Fortress 2, but are taking it a step further by opening the development itself. If this works out well, it could have a lot of ramifications for the future of game development. I'll be happy enough as long as the lightning gun comes back. That thing made headshots so much more fun.
Bring back the GIANT MAPS. I'm jonesin' to play in the giant bathroom again.
Avid UT player here (the original "UT99") and it was almost *entirely* because of the 3rd-party content (particularly the "Land of the Giants" maps) that I played the game as much as I did...
You don't seem to get it, you're already paying the subscription to use the engine, subscribers just get access to the source code of the game where they can make changes and whatnot. Totally different.
just upgrade UT2k4 with the things that have become standard in the last 10 years.....
actually fuck that, FPS has only gotten worse over the last decade, re-release with only the most minor tweaks to take advantage of modern hardware and improve the map and mod cache a bit (really just upgrade so hash collisions can't happen and add a browser function to delete only specific cached data when the cache grows to over 9000)
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
You only pay if you receive money from releasing a game, if your game is free you don't pay anything.
Imagine all games are made like this! Holy shit! Now imagine how great BF3/4 would have been... or Assassins Creed... or Spore (sigh in sadness)... or... you get the picture.
What's wrong with that? A hobby of mine is recreating popular Photoshop styles then uploading them for people to download free of charge. Actually there is a reason and that would be I got tired of seeing people freeload off of remaking movie styles, naming them something similar, and then selling them.
Epic is really pushing UE4. Looks like they've finally got some good people in charge.
What they're doing with this is getting people to pay them to enhance the UE4 engine.
The content they'll have people sell on the market? Drop-in resources companies developing with UE4 can purchase to build their game up faster.
After all, a chair is a chair.
Even though the UT series were great games in their own right, in reality their purpose have always been to serve as tech demos for the latest iteration of the Unreal Engine. The full UT3 source code is also available to UE3 subscribers as an example of how to implement a game using the engine.
However there hasn't really been any significant changes to UE3 in the last couple of years while they were ramping up development on UE4, so there wasn't much need for another UT game. Now that UE4 is ready to go though, it makes perfect sense to push out another UT. This model has served them incredibly well in the past, and in fact Unreal is still one of the most popular engines in the world today (in contrast to its original competitor Quake/Id Tech) in large part due to the popularity of the UT games.
So although they claim they'll be offsetting the development cost from marketplace sales, really that will be pittance compared to the revenue they will gain from engine licenses. That's what it's all about.
Every game these days supports MODs but nobody ever supports S3Ms anymore.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
UT ceased to be relevant a very long time ago.
DOATA2 and League of Legends are were it is at now for competition. Before that Starcraft 2. Before that CS. Team Fortress 2.
Making UT open isn't going to change anything, the world has long since moved on to bigger and better things.
If you want to bring something back that is relevant, bring back Enemy Territory with an open update. Now that would be awesome. Though much of the reason it was great, were features that have since been integrated into all FPS now, such as classes, experience, and abilities. Though few have adopted the objective based team play (with the exception of Brink which apparently sucked for different reasons).
You have to be a paid Unreal Engine 4 developer to access the source on GitHub...
Whether you pay or not, you're licensing the source. So it's both open and restricted in what you can do with the code. Similarly Epic can both gives you the source code to Unreal Tournament and restrict how you use it.