14 DAY TRIAL // Video game developer Epic Games surprised a lot of gamers when it announced that it was finally reviving the classic Unreal Tournament shooter series and that it was planning to offer it using an entirely free business model, with no hidden costs attached.
But the company does believe that the pedigree of the franchise and the love that fans have for it, even after all these years, is a sign that the coming title is well placed to innovate and introduce a new model that the rest of the industry might follow.
Steve Polge, the senior programmer and the project leader working on the title, tells Edge that, “Unreal Tournament is uniquely well-suited for this development approach – it combines an established franchise tailor-made for distributed development with passionate fans who have already tremendously enriched our past Unreal Tournament titles by creating mods, levels, and other content.”
Epic Games says that a small group of programmers and artists are currently working on the project, collaborating closely with the much bigger section that is enhancing Unreal Engine 4 at the moment.
They will consult with the community at every step, using the official forums and a dedicated Twitch channel, and they expect to have a playable prototype running in a matter of months.
Once that is running, the players will be able to use it directly to create their own content, although the official marketplace might take some time to be set up.
Polge adds, “A lot of companies spend tens of thousands of hours of development on a game and only then do market research testing to determine what people like. From that point, it’s hard to pivot. Especially with Unreal Tournament, we have fans that have been passionate about the franchise for years and have valuable insight and opinions about how we should evolve. Getting that from day one is going to help us make a better experience, with them and for them.”
At the moment, Epic Games is also working on Fortnite, an innovative shooter experience that should be launched before the end of the year and will serve as a showcase for Unreal Engine 4.
It’s unclear whether more resources will be allocated to Unreal Tournament after it is launched.
More titles from third-party developers that use Unreal Tournament 4 will be launched on the PC, the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 in late 2014 and early next year.