Besides old rumors of UT and where it could head, there has been some recent attention given to the Unreal Tournament line by Epic Games. A comeback is planned, but what that entails is not exact yet.

Besides the original teaser tweet hinting at the comeback, there's also a UE4 dev twitch stream set to go live on May 8th at 2PM EST.

What do you think will be happening with this? A new UT game with an upgraded engine? The long-requested free-to-play version of UT? Even more important, would any of the loyal UT2k4 players be willing to part with their version and try something newer?

Source

Please note that the Twitch.tv stream is now live.

UT is free? Yes.

Note: Not 'free-to-play', free. (I am assuming meant to distinguish it from closed-source free-to-play games (free as-in freedom))

A marketplace for mods and other content will be set up for selling. No microtransactions from Epic, but they will take a cut from user content sales.

As long as they have a Free mod setup along side the paid mods I will be happy and their blog post here seems to imply they will.

They said that they will be taking a more open stance for mod creation, so I don't see why you can't distribute your own mods. Now, I am assuming to *create* mods, you need the $20/mo Unreal Engine 4 subscription to gain access to the source of the engine and game to create mods.

This is hugely exciting news! I hope that this game (UT4? UT14?) will take the game back to its UT2004 roots, and we can just forget about UT3 for a while. Now that it has been anounced, I am impatient for that playable alpha/beta that they say is months off to arrive.

Also this http://store.steampowered.com/sub/683/

I would have gladly paid money for this, I'm even more excited it's free! Can't wait to play it on my new computer

They've posted a video on teh youtubes of the important part of the stream.

I'm really glad they're starting from scratch here, and starting working on this today. I hope game true to Unreal Tournament comes from this, UT3 was more of a war than a tournament and the campaign really reflected that. UT2004 had tournament style maps whereas UT3 had open maps that felt natural.

I'm posting this as I watch the clip of the stream and it sounds like it's going to be a purely multiplayer game, which isn't a huge deal. Sounds like the Epic devs are going to get the framework down initially and then flesh it out to a proper game complete with game modes and stuff, which of course can be added.

Now! Join those forums and post ideas!

Joystiq posted a video of the devs playing a very early prototype of the game; check it out:

Looks like Epic is doing this thing. A few screenshots, or at least a few sample shots, of what they're working on

http://www.pcgamer.com/gallery/unreal-tournament-unleases-new-concept-art/

[bump]

More UT goodies straight from the Devs themselves.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/07/29/unreal-tournament-video-shows-team-deathmatch-in-action/

Did someone else recognize Deck-17 from UT2004, which was already present in previous versions (under another name) ?
I think it means "back to basics, we're making UT again, not COD"

Not that COD is bad, just that UT is not COD.

Did some of you recognize other maps ?

And glad to see it's free, I'll get it for sure in that case.

This is really superb stuff; I'm hugely impressed with how mature the new Unreal Tournament already looks in terms of physics, gameplay, and rendering. Hayleia, you're absolutely right; that map strongly resembled a new version of Deck 17, which is one of my favorites. Good on them for this!

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/08/13/unreal-tournament-2014-playable-free-to-all/

Compiled Pre-alpha builds are being released periodically and Epic seems ok with it. Check the link for more details.

For those that don't want to click and to better meet our "Quality vs Quantity" mantra:

There are a few members of the Unreal Tournament forum who are compiling small builds with multiple updates a week which anyone can run. The game is still in a pre-alpha state so expect things to be incomplete; currently maps are untextured and guns are unbalanced. Expect other incomplete aspects of the game as you play and remember with each build existing aspects may get more complete and new features may be added. You can download the latest build from here. There is no auto updater so check back often or join the official IRC Channel (GlobalGamers, #beyondunreal) to get updates on when new builds are available and take part in discussions!

Previously (currently?) you needed a UE4 license to compile & play the game but Unreal has allowed this to happen and are even hearing feedback from these builds. It's a win for us and a win for Epic. The builds seem to be online only and available servers are almost always constantly full however members of the aforementioned IRC community are working on creating a server browser and an auto-updater.

I'll be downloading the latest build tomorrow and plan to see you guys online (if we so happen to find each other in the same server)!

Gameplay:

The builds, as per Epic's twitch.tv stream, are now moved to the forums. The new link for future releases (will be weekly if they can, Thursday or Friday) is here. They have a windows and linux build of the client and server available. Going to see how it is progressing on the windows side

I believe we should host a server ASAP. I have created an account, downloaded the Linux server binaries, and tried to start up the server; unfortunately, I get the following error, and I can't find proper documentation. Any inspirations?

I don't plan on being able to run this server on 512MB of RAM, but I'll throw it up on my server just to see what I get. I also realise there are no instructions on how to run/execute it. So, maybe we can go over that or something

Certainly; I'd be happy to try to put our collective intuition together and see if we could figure it out. I notice that the messages reference LogHAL, which to my knowledge is part of Windows' Hardware Abstraction Layer; I therefore suspect we might need some form of the Microsoft library package beyond what mono provides to run the server.