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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?
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 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
I don't see this launching soon.
open = being able to have your own build that bypass the DRM.
Your heart was broken because they didn't support your OS of choice? I'd prefer to play my games on Linux too (and I do with those I can) but really? Isn't that a bit of hyperbole?
If all the content is third party, it's not really their game being charged for.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
Right there with you. That was the last regular FPS I played. Quick, fast, brutal action. One of my favorite games of all time. And having it on Linux meant I actually played it, rather than just have it sit on a shelf. All they needed to do was slightly improve on the UT2K4 concept.
I hope this works out, I'm very much looking forward to this.
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...
Man, I saw that in action just last weekend. A buddy had a retro-game LAN party in place of a bachelor party. Good times.
If they were going to bring it back, I'd suggest adding the family pet as a dynamic object that generally tears the shit out of you. Or the occupants of the house going about their business. "I'm sniping behind timmy's left ear" "Lookout, Dad is coming into the kitchen and he's full of rocket whores!" "Player 3 chewed like a cheap plastic toy"
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.
Bring back the GIANT MAPS. I'm jonesin' to play in the giant bathroom again.
Yes! These maps were great! I used to hide out in a drain in the sink (there was a redeemer hidden in there) or take a sniper position on top a piece of crown molding. 2 inches high in a kitchen with a super shock rifle? and the TV actually worked!
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Yes. Yes. and Yes.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
The $20/month is the fee for continuing updates to the Unreal Engine 4, that cost won't impact UT4 in any way except that I believe modders would nee to licence the Unreal Engine 4 to create mods for UT4
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.
All right, I'm cool with that, but around Slashdot it's often the opposite: people see making a buck somehow wrong, when it comes to software and entertainment.
But Quake 3 clones like that tend to be less fun, less optimized versions of the real thing. May look too dark or something, sound effects worse, maps worse, runs slow on old PC, inequal quality, unfinished game, lack of players and even sometimes the little issue that people installing the game from distro's package manager will have an older version.
I'll have to try Xonotic 0.7, expecting it to barely run on open source driver, I expect to have to set the keyboard to qwerty before launching it so I can access console and weapons. Would be nice if it reaches version 1.0 some day - Quake 3 did in 1999.
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.
Consider that there are few games for Linux and there were even fewer at that time. It probably is a bit of a hyperbole (and I don't think there is any problem with that), but I can see how someone would have their heart broken over that. Maybe they use only Linux normally, so it means they cannot even play?