Epic has just announced a new Unreal Tournament game. It will be free and developed with the community. There will be mod-support, and it's up to developers to choose if they want to release their mod for free or charge for it in "Epic's marketplace".

They made it very clear that the game will be completely free, not "free 2 play", which for me means that there won't be microtransactions or anything.

I'm curious to see how it will turn out.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-05-08-the-next-unreal-tournament-will-f2p-developed-with-the-community

f2p open source game? i hope they will do smth against cheaters

Community content made UT3 worth playing, so I'm cautiously optimistic about this approach. I'll be keeping an eye on this.

Promo tool for the new engine?
Everyone wins, I guess! (except maybe GOG's sales of the older iterations)

Did I actually read : no micro transactions? Is it 1 April?
It would be wonderful to play a new UT as I remember playing UT2003 and UT2004 (and to some extent the very first UT)

I don't really believe that though. Maybe no fee for maps or guns but i think they will offer skins and such using microtransactions. But only cosmetic stuff. It's fine by me, they have to earn something off of it and i don't buy that stuff anyway.

Ohohohohohohohoho!!!!! Definitely looking forward to this one. I wonder if Timesplitters 4 is going the same route? :o

From the live stream it seemed like everything that Epic themselves created for the game would be available for free, but modders could decide themselves wether they wanted to charge for the content they create or not.

--edit: I'm guessing they're hoping for the modding community to really take off and carry the game further.

Very excited to see how this plays out.
Especially if the game it self will have the oldschool'y sleek and clean visuals.

And of course Linux support is fantastic aswell.

Kind of a strange way to move forward with a high end franchise. Seems very nice and open and all, but it makes my cynical side curious as to what the angle is. UT2004 is one of my go to games to this day, and I've played it as much as anything else out there. I've also played a fair amount of UT3.

I've heard the UT3 was such disaster talk for years, but even with my hands on perspective, I still need someone to explain to me what was so wrong with it to gain such infamy.

It's been forever. About time.

Edit: And yeah I actually liked UT3 so what was wrong with it?

I'm a die-hard fan of ut99 and have wasted countless hours on that game.

I pray to Godzilla that they will do it right this time, and make it feel and play like ut99 - complete with mutators, voicepacks, customization of individual bots and all.

But i fear they will mess this up good and proper, and it only will become another glorified tech demo.

Off-line bot matches, single-player campaigns, LAN multiplayer, and DRM-free multi platform compatibility is a must. The reason that ut99 is alive and well - and probably is going to outlast UT3, is the combination of gameplay, feel, the huge amount of content created by the community, multi-platform compatibility, and all the possibilities for customizing stuff.

This just my guess. In the video they do emphasize that the game will be FREE not FREE 2 PLAY. So, my guess is that there won't be microtransactions.
The gameplay was fine, but i think that the main issue with it is that it had less content (less maps, less game modes) than its predecessor.

Yeah, you kind of had to have gotten it at release to understand. Having been in the beta would make it still clearer. The truth is, there were so many problems with the game it could hardly do anything but fail. I'll try to list some of the worst bits here.

1. The thing is, UT3 was developed for PS3, and then ported to PC. For the latest installment in a PC centric arena shooter series, this is a bad thing. It affected lots of things in the game. The GUI was obviously designed for a console. The settings were sorely lacking in options that PC players expected to be there. Some of the weapons had been awkwardly redesigned to better accomodate controller-style gameplay. The worst example of this was the secondary firing mode of the flak cannon. As a ballistic weapon, the way to use the secondary mode of the flak cannon has always been to deliberately aim high, judging which angle to use to let the grenade hit at the right distance. Since this requires that you can move the crosshairs very quickly, this was not feasible with a controller. Their solution? Change the flak cannon so it magically fired the grenade up through the solid barrel of the gun at a 30 degree angle. Not only was it hilariously stupid, it also made it impossible to aim the damned thing. But hey, consoles are what matters, right?

2. One aspect of the multiplatform approach that had been hinted at was cross-platform gameplay. This turned out to be impossible, because in order for the game to be at all playable with a controller, they had to lower the speed of the PS3 version to 80% of the PC version. So it simply wasn't possible for PC and PS3 players to play on the same servers.

3. The PS3 version was actually moddable, just like the PC version. Only... The modding tools were all on PC, and a mod had to be compiled specifically for the PS3 in order to work there. This meant that all of the mods were made by PC players. Meanwhile, the UT3 forums filled up with PS3 players begging the PC modders to compile their mods for PS3. Since most PC players didn't have the PS3 version, and so couldn't test their mods on PS3, they were reluctant to do so, especially because of begging by a bunch of whiny bitches with nothing to bring to the table themselves (this is how I imagine many of the modders must have felt). This situation quickly resulted in the UT3 forums degenerating into a flame-fest-filled pit of despair. Well, maybe it wasn't as bad as all that, but the mood on the forums was not nice.

4. At launch, the server browser was a broken piece of shit. 'Nuff said.

5. This is by far the worst mistake Epic made. UT2004 was kept alive and relevant by the fans. Any multiplayer game needs servers to stay alive, and the fans delivered those servers. Thousands of them. For every game mode and mod imaginable. Epic obviously expected them to do the same for UT3. There was just one tiny little problem. Out of those thousands of fan-run UT2004 servers, the vast majority of them ran on Linux. Did Epic have a UT3 Linux server ready at launch? No, they did not. Did they have it very shortly after? No, they did not. It took them somewhere between 4 and 6 months after launch to make a Linux server.

6. Most of the problems with the game were eventually fixed. All those nasty console remnants were patched out of the PC version eventually. The server browser was fixed. More settings were added. More content was added. A Linux server was added. In the end, the game became what it should have been at launch. The problem was that it was too late by then. The majority of the player base had given up and either gone back to UT2004, or moved on to the next big thing.

7. Oh yeah, and given that the series is Unreal Tournament, the decision to remove the actual tournament from the game and replace it with the most horrible bullshit story imaginable, while desperately trying to justify fighting an actual war as a best-of-three Capture The Flag match using the most awkwardly contrived explanations, was really just the icing on the cake.