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Unreal Tournament 2004 is back

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Re: Unreal Tournament 2004 is back

#42
I have a special place in my heart for UT2004 because it was one of the very few games that had an official native Linux version at the time. I think I enjoyed the fact that it was running on Linux more than I enjoyed the game itself.

Re: Unreal Tournament 2004 is back

#43

I have a special place in my heart for UT2004 because it was one of the very few games that had an official native Linux version at the time. I think I enjoyed the fact that it was running on Linux more than I enjoyed the game itself.

I'll never forget installing ut2k4 on my linux box and having it Just Work. Magical.

Re: Unreal Tournament 2004 is back

#44
post #6

Are there are any FPS shooters on the genre of UT (or even Quake3) but modern, not remasters? I've been missing a lot the frenetic gameplay of those, used to play a lot of UT at a decent level but nowadays I only see tactical FPSs or the likes of Counter-Strike/Battlefield with a high player count.

Please point me to the nearest meat grinder. I'm jonesing for breakneck speed mayhem!

Re: Unreal Tournament 2004 is back

#46
post #26

Such a good game- very ahead of its time, great look and feel. Weird that it was allowed to wither and die.

They released UT 3 in 2007 but I think around that time the company shifted more towards their engine, which by then was already the most used game engine for high profile games (don't quote me on that one, it's a gut feeling).

They started working on a new title, but it was meandering for a long time; it seemed that they would do some of the ground work but relied on the community a lot to design and build maps and weapons. Then the Fortnite team released a Battle Royale mode and made it free to play and it completely dominated the market. The UT team was transitioned to Fortnite in 2017, and Fortnite became their money printer earning them hundreds of millions per month.

While I love Unreal Tournament and would love for them or some other party to fill the gap of a no-nonsense arena shooter, the reality is that it wouldn't be as popular or lucrative as Fortnite. It'd be competing with FPS games like CoD and Battlefield, which have more going for them - including an uneven playing field, depending on players' progression and paid-for unlocks.

Re: Unreal Tournament 2004 is back

#47

One thing I missed from Unreal Tournament, which too few other games adopted IMHO, was the concept of mutators. Effectively server-level mods which, as the name implied, mutated the gameplay in some way. There were silly ones like the one making your characters head larger for each kill, and those which made it just different like low gravity, and so on. It was also relatively easy to make your own, thanks to UnrealS…

Mutators are about the only thing keeping Starcraft 2 Co-Op players going in 2025 (and by extension, the community). Earliest memory I have in the multiplayer FPS context was probably the 'cheat' menu unlocks for Goldeneye on the N64 in 1997.

Me and my friend are somehow still playing co-op without mutators. My friend is max level, I'm like 100 away

Re: Unreal Tournament 2004 is back

#48

One thing I missed from Unreal Tournament, which too few other games adopted IMHO, was the concept of mutators. Effectively server-level mods which, as the name implied, mutated the gameplay in some way. There were silly ones like the one making your characters head larger for each kill, and those which made it just different like low gravity, and so on. It was also relatively easy to make your own, thanks to UnrealS…

This reminds me of Quake with the DeFrag mode "sub-game", but also gameplay available in Quake Live in which you could have a Railgun only match, but they could also behave like Rocket Launchers for rocket jumps.

Also allowing players to change the configuration of their game through the dev console was cool. My favorite visual change was to configure the railgun trails to persist for multiple seconds.

Re: Unreal Tournament 2004 is back

#49
I honestly can't understand why Epic Games refuses to open-source Unreal 1 and UT99. They insist on licensing individual developers, instead of opening up the source so community forks can thrive. Look at the id tech community, with all the Doom and Quake forks, and all the amazing projects that spawned off of them.

The topic of "middleware" often comes up, as an excuse for them not being able to open the source. Well, just remove any third-party libraries and middleware, even EA did it with their C&C open-source releases. The C&C release did not even compile, but that did not stop the community from porting to Linux and other platforms, as well as modernizing the source and creating replacement libraries.

Re: Unreal Tournament 2004 is back

#50

One thing I missed from Unreal Tournament, which too few other games adopted IMHO, was the concept of mutators. Effectively server-level mods which, as the name implied, mutated the gameplay in some way. There were silly ones like the one making your characters head larger for each kill, and those which made it just different like low gravity, and so on. It was also relatively easy to make your own, thanks to UnrealS…

Red Eclipse has mutators: https://github.com/redeclipse/base
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