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Unreal Tournament 4 didn't get a chance to fail because it was never a real release. UT4 was a free tech demo for Unreal Engine 4 that never got completed beca

Unreal Tournament 4 didn't get a chance to fail because it was never a real release. UT4 was a free tech demo for Unreal Engine 4 that never got completed because Fortnite started taking off at that time and developers were deallocated from it. And UT3 was definitely not a great game by anyone's measure.

chupasaurus 2mo ago
The people behind UT were reallocated to make Battle Royale mode for Fortnite which is the reason of the take off, not vice versa.
madewithdrama 2mo ago
It was never officially released, but it was on the front page of epic launcher for years, even after fortnite took off. The online experience was fairly complete and enjoyable (for people with experience) for ctf, duel, tdm, and team arena master. But yeah, epic didn't support it as much as they could have.
- doublerabbit 2mo ago
  Eh, "boomer shooters" died along side with Halo and LAN parties. Minecraft was the final nail in the coffin. The knack and knowledge of hosting a dedicated server required skills. If you could one click button host a Quake 3 Arena server or UT, there would still be sort of a crowd. But not only that, if you were new: servers got toxic with the same grumpy players knowing every single trick in the map to one-shot kill you with a rail gun. It got frustrating playing the same bloody map each map change. "Oh yay, it's cs_office again" /s The whole genre got stale and never has been successfully reignited. As Discord to TeamSpeak; same misfortune. Fortnite killed Team Fortress, Overwatch killed Halo and Minecraft was the new digital lego. None of them required such a skill to play or host the game. It was refreshing for it's time. Not forgetting it was the upcoming of a new crowd of folk and as generations go, the old cards topple. Who hosted an BBS when the internet came to be? IRC today is pretty much stuck in dinosaur country and XMPP/Jabber never got a product which then was further nailed shut by Google & Co. It was epic fun for the era but it had a death bed waiting.
  - busterarm 2mo ago
    Wut? We're in a Renaissance of boomer shooters right now. There's like hundreds of new ones and it's a popular category. Just check out civvie11's channel if you disbelieve. They're just all single player focused.
    - doublerabbit 2mo ago
      Single player maybe, but that's nothing compared to the likes of UT or Quake.
      - busterarm 2mo ago
        I don't know about that. I've pretty continuously been playing games like UT99, UT2k4, Quake (specifically Quake Fortress), TFC, AvP2 since release. Even things like Space Station 13 and King Arthur's Gold. It's not the only thing going anymore, but also people have orders of magnitude more choices. That's the thing that's missing today. Nothing is "dead", there's just too much competition now. Honestly the aforementioned games have had much more staying power than more recent multiplayer games. And they're mostly played by old men like me.
        raffraffraff 2mo ago
        I haven't fired up UT99, UT2K4 or any of the Quakes for decades. Are there active servers where you could get a good DM session?
        sitzkrieg 2mo ago
        afps is pretty dead. there are a handful of people on qw, q2,q3 but if you don’t wanna dig around start with the microtransaction feature quake champions or the quake re release while people are playing it again. also shout out to banana shooter or straftat if you want a quick fix in a f2p game. it’s not really afpsy but pretty fast movement and wacky guns in both
- keyringlight 2mo ago
  IIRC, Epic had (still has?) the source for UT4 available as they were trying to push community contributions, mostly on the playable content side but I'm fairly sure they had the core game there, based off what is now a very old branch of UE4. The telling thing to me is if there was a huge demand for it there was no significant effort to pick up the torch, or even do yet another 'spiritual successor'.
  - chupasaurus 2mo ago
    The source code repo is still on Epic's Github, not sure if everything else is that easy to get currently. The problem about picking it up by a 3rd party is the fun of getting approval on basically anything.
    - samplatt 2mo ago
      I compiled the project on a whim during COVID. It played okay. There was even a very small pool of players who had presumably just done exactly the same thing.

chupasaurus 2mo ago

The people behind UT were reallocated to make Battle Royale mode for Fortnite which is the reason of the take off, not vice versa.

madewithdrama 2mo ago

It was never officially released, but it was on the front page of epic launcher for years, even after fortnite took off. The online experience was fairly complete and enjoyable (for people with experience) for ctf, duel, tdm, and team arena master. But yeah, epic didn't support it as much as they could have.

doublerabbit 2mo ago
Eh, "boomer shooters" died along side with Halo and LAN parties. Minecraft was the final nail in the coffin. The knack and knowledge of hosting a dedicated server required skills. If you could one click button host a Quake 3 Arena server or UT, there would still be sort of a crowd. But not only that, if you were new: servers got toxic with the same grumpy players knowing every single trick in the map to one-shot kill you with a rail gun. It got frustrating playing the same bloody map each map change. "Oh yay, it's cs_office again" /s The whole genre got stale and never has been successfully reignited. As Discord to TeamSpeak; same misfortune. Fortnite killed Team Fortress, Overwatch killed Halo and Minecraft was the new digital lego. None of them required such a skill to play or host the game. It was refreshing for it's time. Not forgetting it was the upcoming of a new crowd of folk and as generations go, the old cards topple. Who hosted an BBS when the internet came to be? IRC today is pretty much stuck in dinosaur country and XMPP/Jabber never got a product which then was further nailed shut by Google & Co. It was epic fun for the era but it had a death bed waiting.
- busterarm 2mo ago
  Wut? We're in a Renaissance of boomer shooters right now. There's like hundreds of new ones and it's a popular category. Just check out civvie11's channel if you disbelieve. They're just all single player focused.
  - doublerabbit 2mo ago
    Single player maybe, but that's nothing compared to the likes of UT or Quake.
    - busterarm 2mo ago
      I don't know about that. I've pretty continuously been playing games like UT99, UT2k4, Quake (specifically Quake Fortress), TFC, AvP2 since release. Even things like Space Station 13 and King Arthur's Gold. It's not the only thing going anymore, but also people have orders of magnitude more choices. That's the thing that's missing today. Nothing is "dead", there's just too much competition now. Honestly the aforementioned games have had much more staying power than more recent multiplayer games. And they're mostly played by old men like me.
      - raffraffraff 2mo ago
        I haven't fired up UT99, UT2K4 or any of the Quakes for decades. Are there active servers where you could get a good DM session?
        sitzkrieg 2mo ago
        afps is pretty dead. there are a handful of people on qw, q2,q3 but if you don’t wanna dig around start with the microtransaction feature quake champions or the quake re release while people are playing it again. also shout out to banana shooter or straftat if you want a quick fix in a f2p game. it’s not really afpsy but pretty fast movement and wacky guns in both
keyringlight 2mo ago
IIRC, Epic had (still has?) the source for UT4 available as they were trying to push community contributions, mostly on the playable content side but I'm fairly sure they had the core game there, based off what is now a very old branch of UE4. The telling thing to me is if there was a huge demand for it there was no significant effort to pick up the torch, or even do yet another 'spiritual successor'.
- chupasaurus 2mo ago
  The source code repo is still on Epic's Github, not sure if everything else is that easy to get currently. The problem about picking it up by a 3rd party is the fun of getting approval on basically anything.
  - samplatt 2mo ago
    I compiled the project on a whim during COVID. It played okay. There was even a very small pool of players who had presumably just done exactly the same thing.