The 2014 reboot of Epic’s beloved Unreal Tournament arena shooter series that was billed as a “collaboration” between a small team at Epic and the community is no longer officially being worked on, according to Epic.
“Unreal Tournament remains available in the store but isn’t actively developed,” Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney told Variety.
This is probably not what the game’s community – who learned in September that the Unreal Tournament team was busy helping out with Fortnite Battle Royale – wanted to hear.
Even after years of development, Epic had continued to describe it using words like “early” and “pre-alpha,” and there hasn’t been an official update since summer of 2017. That makes sense, given that it was actually the Unreal Tournament team that originally created Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode.
At the start of this year, fans worried that this would leave Unreal Tournament rudderless.
Nearly one year and zero updates later, here we are. The game was hanging on by a thread, and now it seems that thread has been snipped. Or fragged into giblet-ridden oblivion, as it were. However, the community continues to work on the game, creating new maps, weapons, and mods, and holding out hope that Epic will eventually resume development on the sci-fi shooter.
Here’s hoping that loyalty eventually pays off, because otherwise, this is a pretty sad way for a developer-community collaboration to end.
Comments
7 responses to “Unreal Tournament Reboot No Longer ‘Actively’ In Development”
Oof that sucks. I was a huge fan of UT 99 and this project was extremely promising – the game is loads of fun, plays and looks great – but I must admit I hadn’t played in a while as I waited for it to develop more.
Guess that ain’t happening.
Damn, I wish they had kept working on it 🙁
Unfortunately it kinda makes sense… character arena based shooters is practically all covered by overwatch now and also in decline partly because of their fault with Fortnite.
No point sinking money in an online only multiplayer game that has a dwindling population
I wouldn’t say OW is in decline due to Fortnite. It may keep the playing-base from being as large as it could but pretty much everyone leaving say they are doing it to unhappiness with how Blizzard balancing/patching it and the low frequency of new content.
When OW was still fun I didn’t play UT sure, but then I didn’t play basically anything else. Now that I’ve stopped I’ve gone back to it. If only they were still developing 🙁
I wouldnt say OW is in decline per se.. its just that OW is now the de facto character based arena shooter and any other game on the genre will just be 2nd fiddle (like all shooters will always cone 2nd to CoD) and as such its arena shooters as a genre itself thats in decline
And since epic does have a cash cow in Fortnight why bother with something that would be 2nd fiddle at best when u can focus on the more profitable game
Exactly – the audience for a traditional arena shooter was dying when team-based games became popular and it never recovered.
What gets me though, is it had so many game modes that it wasn’t just an arena shooter. It could be so much more. I feel like they could have made UT2019(2020?) and just had a battle royale mutator.
The game hasnt seen active development for almost 18 months. Why has it taken so long for official word to get out? Theres an active group playing Quake Champions. I think its difficult for a game genre to be popular if noone is making quality games of that type.