14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Epic Games has revealed the future of the long-running Unreal Tournament first-person shooter and the company says that it plans to deliver an entirely free game for fans that is mainly driven by the desires of the community.
The official announcement states that, "We know that fans of the game are as passionate about Unreal Tournament as we are. We know that you have great ideas and strong opinions about where the game should go and what it should be. So let’s do something radical and make this game together, in the open, and for all of us."
Epic says that it has put together a solid but small team of veterans of the series in order to start working on Unreal Tournament right now. They are mandated to work with the core Unreal Engine 4 team and the fan community in order to create the best possible experience.
They will use forums of discussions and Twitch to stream the results of their work and all code that's created will be shared with other developers using GitHub.
Unreal Tournament will remain a competitive shooter at its core and will first be created for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Epic Games says that it will not offer the title under a free-to-play system, but that all code created will be entirely free.
It adds, "We’ll eventually create a marketplace where developers, modders, artists and gamers can give away, buy and sell mods and content. Earnings from the marketplace will be split between the mod/content developer, and Epic. That’s how we plan to pay for the game."
The company acknowledges that not all core decisions linked to the new Unreal Tournament have been made yet and that it can make mistakes along the way, but it also makes it clear that they are trying to create a title that satisfies the fans first and foremost.
The announcement will probably surprise a lot of long-term fans of Unreal Tournament, who thought the series to be entirely abandoned, and it will be interesting to see whether the collaborative development process can actually work.
Probably more resources for the title will be delivered after Epic Games launched Fortnite at some point in the fall.
It's unclear whether Unreal Tournament is the big franchise that the leaders of the studio were previously talking about or if another big title is still kept secret from fans.