Epic Games has posted more than a dozen pieces of concept art from its upcoming FPS Unreal Tournament. It's all very early-stage stuff, but the images give us a glimpse of who we'll be shooting at, with what, and where.
Gamespy is dead. Sort of. A quick check will reveal that, at present, some of the games yet to hack-off the necrotic multiplayer matchmaker are still functional, albeit likely on borrowed time. Luckily, that list is ever-decreasing. Epic have released a new patch for Unreal Tournament 3, removing the lesser-loved sequel's Gamespy dependency in favour of the developer's own server bank.
Yes, we're all a little bit excited about this new Unreal Tournament game, but no one expected gameplay footage to pop up this soon. The video above shows the Epic team embarking on their first Unreal Tournament 2k14 deathmatch, and while the game is very clearly in its early stages (the environment is a bunch of grey cubes under a generic blue skybox) it's still nice to see it in action. One guy even manages to pioneer cheating in Unreal Tournament 2k14. Well done, guy.
Epic recently announced that they're making a new free Unreal Tournament game in collaboration with the UT community. This is good news. We like Unreal Tournament. Only yesterday, Andy wrote about his love for Facing Worlds. The monstrous flak cannon took the top spot in our roundup of gaming's greatest guns. With misty-eyed memories of frags gone by, we fired over some questions to Steve Polge, senior programmer and project lead on the new Unreal Tournament, to find out how this community collaboration thing will work.
Every week Andy celebrates a great map, level, or location from a classic PC game in On The Level. This week it’s legendary Unreal Tournament map Facing Worlds.
Under the name Inoxx, former Epic developer Cedric Fiorentino designed some of the best multiplayer maps in the Unreal series. His most famous creation is Facing Worlds, a CTF map set on a spinning asteroid that anyone who played the original Unreal Tournament in 1999 will have fond memories of. I’m listening to Foregone Destruction by composer Michiel Van Den Bos as I type this—the map’s soundtrack—and getting hazy flashbacks to playing UT on my 56k modem, spamming the “My house!” taunt and launching Redeemer missiles at the opposing team’s tower.
Last week, we were excited to learn that Epic Games is developing a new Unreal Tournament. If you’re nostalgic for the first-person arena shooter series there are a few audible cues that will immediately transport you back to 1999. The announcer yelling “M-M-M-M-MONSTER KILL,” for example, or maybe the music track for the iconic Facing Worlds map. The composers of the latter, it seems, might return to the new Unreal Tournament.
Thursday was stuffed with good news for FPS players. We announced Killing Floor 2, learned that Unreal Tournament was being thawed after seven years of hibernation, and, bonus some guy taught us how to Counter-Strike with a steering wheel.
Epic Games announced the future of Unreal Tournament today. The great news is that it will indeed have a future, meaning you can now start anticipating another Unreal Tournament, though we have no idea when it will come out or what it will be called. However, everything else about the game’s development is different from what you’d expect from Epic, or any other developer for that matter.
Be still, my heart. Epic Games vice president Mark Rein has posted the words on Twitter I've been waiting years for: Unreal Tournament is coming back. We don't know what form it will take, but Rein followed up his original tweet "I love Unreal Tournament, so excited for the comeback" with a confirmation—"Yes UT coming back!"—and a link to Epic's Unreal Engine Twitch account, where the future of Unreal Tournament will be revealed Thursday, May 8 at 2PM EST.
It's been but a month since Epic unleashed the source code and toolset for its powerful Unreal Engine 4 to studios and individual subscribers alike, but major updates are already bolstering the engine's considerable capabilities. The big news in Epic's 4.1 update notes is full support for packaging games onto SteamOS and Linux platforms, a strong move catering to indie game-smiths and companies looking to unhook themselves from a reliance on Windows.
We are fast approaching the first wave of Unreal Engine 4 releases, but so far we’ve seen very little of Epic Games’ showcase for the engine, Fortnite. Today, Epic revealed a couple more details about it, and invited players to sign up to an upcoming Alpha test.
Games for Windows Live is dying, and few tears will be shed for its demise. But concern remains for what will happen to the GFWL titles that haven't shed it like a pustulent pimple by the July 1st death-day. Epic and People Can Fly's score-'em-up Bulletstorm is seemingly the latest victim in the service's final thrashings, as it's been removed from Steam (although is still available on Origin) without word on a possible return.
At a GDC 2014 press briefing today, Epic founder Tim Sweeney announced that Unreal Engine 4 is now available for game development, but not just for big studios. Access to the binary development tools and the UE4 source code is now included in a $19/mo subscription plan. Developers will also pay Epic five percent of any revenue earned from UE4 developed games.
When you think about Unreal Engine 4, the newest, shiniest game engine, you probably think about games that will require you to buy a new graphics card, not something that can run in your browser. But UE4 is built for both. Epic Games and Mozilla recently showed Epic Soul, a UE4 demo, running in Firefox at near-native speeds without plugins.
The big news for console gamers today was that Microsoft acquired the rights for Gears of War from Epic Games, but that’s not all the news the developer had to share. Speaking with Edge, Epic Game’s EU territory manager Mike Gamble said that the first major titles built in the company’s Unreal Engine 4 will release on PC as soon Christmas 2014, with more coming in the first quarter of 2015.
People Can Fly, the Epic-owned developer best known for making Bulletstorm and Gears of War: Judgement, is now going by the name Epic Games Poland and is one of the many studios working on the detail-light survival game known as Fortnite.
Well this is impressive. Not so much for demo itself but for the possibilities the technology opens up. Collaborating with Mozilla, the team at Epic have somehow managed to squeeze their Unreal Engine-powered Epic Citadel tech demo onto browsers, without relying on plugins or added components. You can check it out here - er, if you have the recent nightly build of Firefox. It's currently not working in Internet Explorer or Chrome, but hey, the road to The Future is never smooth.
This year's Make Something Unreal Live - Epic's annual game making contest - has announced a winner. Epigenesis was crowned king of the grueling week-long final, held at Birmingham's NEC. It's a team shooter/ball game described by Mike Gamble, contest judge and Epic's European territory manager, as a "potential eSport". That makes it likely the only eSport developed around Mendelian inheritance - the process with which hereditary characteristics are carried between generations - which was this year's contest theme.
Epic Games Vice President Mark Rein stated support for Sony's PlayStation 4 console in an interview with CVG. Understandable so far, but then out comes this comment: "The kind of stuff that Sony announced it's doing, the level of convenience and things like that shows it's making a really perfect gaming PC." Well, then.
Epic are throwing their weight behind the Oculus Rift with a VR-tuned custom version of their Unreal Development Kit, Develop report. It'll be distributed with Rift headsets and offered free to Unreal Engine 3 licensees next month. A VR-enabled version of the Unreal Engine 3 Citadel tech demo will be included, so users can push their faces into that finely tessellated stonework with REAL TIME PHYSICAL NECK BENDING.
