Good news for all Unreal Tournament fans out there, myself included. Epic Games announced via Twitter that the popular fps series is making a comeback, and that the upcoming UT will use Unreal Engine 4. Epic’s Paul Meegan also says that we should keep an eye on the Unreal Engine Twitch channel this Thursday. “UE4 Dev Community + Epic. The future of Unreal Tournament. Tune in to http://www.Twitch.tv/UnrealEngine Thursday at 2pm ET.”
Mark Rein, Vice President and Co-Founder of Epic Games followed up with his own tweets. “UT is coming back!? I’ve been begging for this very thing! <-Yes UT coming back”, he then added that “I love #Unreal Tournament – So excited for the comeback!”. The last game in the Unreal Tournament franchise was released back in 2007 and for a while it looked like there wasn’t going to be a sequel anytime soon.
Tim Sweeney,Epic Games founder and developer of the Unreal Engine series said during GDC 2014 that the company had a lot of projects on the way, but none of them involved a new Unreal Tournament game. “We have a lot of nostalgia for the game, but we’re actually not developing anything in the Unreal game universe at all at the moment.”
This sudden change of heart is unexpected, but surely not unwelcome. The lack of an Unreal Tournament title in recent years is very surprising considering how popular the series used to be. Unreal Tournament debuted back in 1999 and was followed by three sequels, UT 2003, UT 2004, and UT 2007, as well as a few remake attempts by fans.
Epic Games didn’t mention anything about release platforms, the last title in the series came out on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 but perhaps this one will come to next-gen as well. We’ll just have to wait until the developers will share some more details with us, and hopefully they will also show off some UE4 gameplay footage. Don’t forget to tune in Thursday, May 8 at 2 pm Eastern Time to the Unreal Engine Twitch channel for more details.
