Free to Play Unreal Tournament is Coming

[king3pj]

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/05/08/epic-games-reveals-free-to-play-unreal-tournament

I only played a small amount of the older UT games but this sounds cool to me. The game will be made in Unreal Engine 4 and free-to-play without micro-transactions. Here is how they are going to support it financially. Anyone willing to pay $19 per month can have access to the same Unreal Engine 4 tools that game developers use. Anyone paying for that subscription is able to make their own content for this new Unreal Tournament game. People that make mods with this subscription have the option of letting the community have it for free or selling it. If they choose to sell it Epic Games gets a cut of the profits. They are strongly encouraging the community to come up with original mod ideas to sell or give away.

The whole idea of this sounds cool to me. There will likely be enough free maps that you could choose to play a new one every time and never see the same one twice. It has the gamer benefits of a free-to-play game without the downside of micro-transactions. The only way you ever need to pay for anything is if you want to create content yourself or you absolutely have to play content that some other gamer decided to create and charge for. My guess is that there will be enough free mods out there that paying for specific maps will be unnecessary.

The base game is free and they said it would be available to everyone as soon as they have a playable alpha build.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Very cool. Looks similar to the Team Fortress 2 model, and the fact that it will be supported with no end date is also cool. I love the UT games. Even with bots the original game is still a blast, and I remember playing 2K4 on my older PC for hours on end and LOVED the custom maps and mods people would contribute. You might say this is an, EPIC, announcement..

 

[king3pj]

Since it's a free game we might actually be able to get all the satellite guys PC gamers to get together for some multiplayer. I imagine the player base for something like this will be huge. TF2 is a hell of a lot of fun and the fact that it will run on anything is great. It's cartoony visuals still have charm but the game is pretty old at this point. Something along those lines with pretty graphics running on the brand new Unreal Engine 4 could be huge.

I don't think it will be DOTA 2 huge but if they offer it for free with Steamworks so people don't have to build up a new friends list I can see it overtaking Counter Strike to be number 2.