alt Hacker NewsUnreal Tournament 2004 is back
Comments
This is cool, but reminds me of what we don't have. 99% of the content for Unreal Tournament was made by the community. Why can't the community make an open-source game? There are probably even attempts to make an open-source UT04. But I wish open-source could just make more standalone games. We have so few... Tuxracer, Chromium BSU, Battle for Wesnoth, Warsaw, etc.
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.
Hoo boy. I lost waaaaay too many hours to the Monster Hunt mod back in the day. The RPG style PvE one. All those leeches link gunning the one brave player at the front shooting the boss... Crazy fun
I'm not sure if this release is a good thing or bad thing for me haha
So happy to play facing worlds instagib CTF. Godlike!
A standing applause for those undertaking this effort as I look forward to losing even more of my future time given how much I lost to it in the past.
Many moons ago I worked with an individual whose wife was employed in marketing by a large well known video game company involved around UT. One day he came into the office and brought a load of leftover UT swag and it was a feeding frenzy. I still have and wear my long sleeve black UT embroidered tee and as a point of fact I just wore it again last week. Looking forward to the progress on this effort as an old head UT fan still.
I'm still playing ut99 GOTY with my son (yeah, I'm that old)... and nothing else matterrrrrrrrrrrr
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.
Epic Games have been surprisingly generous with their older library. Refreshing to see.
They taught a summer class at Stanford where the capstone was putting your 3D model into Ut4 as a new character. Classroom of networked commuters with all kinds of popular games on them…it was hard to get work done some times.
The most interesting part of UT2k4 to me is the software renderer. It actually worked on period hardware and many would argue it looks better. You should definitely give it a try if you've got the game on a modern machine.
A while back I kinda got Unreal Tournament running inside Unreal Engine, okay, more like a VM running UT inside Unreal Engine, but still...
For those looking for silliness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVO2VDPnI0Y
This is great. I remember playing this for the first time at a Wizards of the Coast in the mall. They had 8 or so PCs on a LAN in the back of the store. My first true LAN party I guess.
Plaay >>
In the mystique female voice!
I bought it in steam before they removed it. So I can still install and play this game from time to time. Capture the flag is something else in this game!
Still holding out for UT1 code to be officially released.
For those who loved UT99, there is still a fairly large community of players online, particularly in the gametype known as BunnyTrack.
It's focused on movement-based challenges and is extremely fun and unique.
I host a few BT servers myself. Please feel free to join and check it out. See: https://www.bunnytrack.net/about
I discovered "secret level" on prime recently where there is an episode on UT2004 (with the original sound effects like "killing spree !!!" ). With this additional news, I now want to run it again...
UT2003 was the first online multiplayer game I ever played, and I played it a lot, mostly at the office with coworkers; we then moved to UT2004. So, so many fond memories of both. Glad is back.
Wow, this is great! I wonder if there is support for ray tracing and other modern tech, but even as it is I would not mind playing this again. Been a long time. Plus, moved to Mac recently and expecting the new fangled Mac support this brings will work well.
UT2k4 was a LAN party favorite of mine. One of the last good multiplayer FPS games before Epic lost its way.
Such a good game- very ahead of its time, great look and feel. Weird that it was allowed to wither and die.
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.
Hopefully they can compile it to web as well.
Amazing, can’t wait to play
… oh wait I have a 60 hour a week job
… oh wait I have a wife with PPD and 2 young kids and I have to hire a babysitter just to put up Christmas lights
… oh wait I have RSIs in my dominant hand
I think I’ll just make do with my memories of this game. I imagine much of my opinion was colored by being a teenager when it was released.
Still can't forgive what epic did to UT4...
That is great news! I hope we will have a few public servers left to play this online.
Instagib Face Classic Quad Jumps in 2026?
Sign me the f up!
Surely epic will shut this down. The installer downloads a copy of the original game, well that is my reading of it.
Speaking of shooters of roughly that era, the Timesplitters Rewind fan project also just put out their first release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzWSrgQ3eMI
It's basically a modernized anthology of the three Timesplitters games that were quite popular on consoles of the PS2 era.
Wow this is really exciting, especially the Mac support. UT was kinda my gateway to programming. They made it really easy to build and play your own maps.
Amazing, more companies need to do this.
Separately it's a shame most modern games have removed LAN gaming.
I hope they fix the terrible SP campaign. The bot skill became too difficult too fast (if I remember correctly they after several stages also began to dodge your CROSSHAIR), you could not change base difficulty mid-run and the money system was punishing when you lost a match
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 UnrealScript.
Really wish more multiplayer games embraced this concept, it really increased replayability by changing things up.