I should be grateful to Epic, I was struggling for a blog topic, and then they drop their most recent announcement about Unreal Tournament and my blog brain kicks in. Their announcement, which can be found here, basically states that they are making a new UT game. This would be pretty frickin exciting anyway, but the way they are doing it is the really exciting thing.

They start coding it today, and it is going to be an open development taking feedback from the community. And when it is eventually release it will be free, and by free they mean proper free, no micro transactions. The intention to be to have  a marketplace where modders can sell maps, skins etc with Epic taking  a cut, similar to how Valve treat Dota 2 etc.

This is exciting because Unreal Tournament is great, and always has been. Hell I remember the arguments over which was better Quake 3 or UT, and a new UT game is probably the most exciting shooter news I can think of. And that was before I found out it was free. And that was before I found out it was going to be made by a small team with community support. And that was before I found out it was going to have full mod support. Frankly I am not sure I have ever been more excited about a shooter.

I have been waiting a long time for Epic to do something cool. Don’t get me wrong, I quite like Gears of War. The first one could easily be described as near iconic. However I didn’t want 4 of them. I have lamented before that Epic are, by a long margin, one of the most financially secure studios, because pretty much everyone pays them to make games using the Unreal engine, but seem unwilling to take risks. After Gears of Wars 1 success, they made 2 more Gears games featuring Grey soldiers hiding behind grey wall. They were good games, but exciting ones?

This finally seems like a risk, perhaps not a massive one, but a risk none the less. And I am pretty sure that had Epic gone on kickstarter to fund this, they would have been criticized for it, but it would have been funded in a matter of hours. But no. They have kept the announcement incredibly low key. No video’s by Blur, no flashy countdown clock. Just a nondescript page on the Unreal Engine wiki. If anything that made it more excited. Seems like they are making it, because they really want to. Now that is cool.

Twitter: @hangmansj0e

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