Gaming

Unreal Tournament: Why the arena shooter is back

By the fans, for the fans – how Unreal Tournament’s community could shape a new eSport right now.

Written by Jon Partridge

10 min readPublished on 27.07.2016 · 0:10 UTC

Epic Games surprised fans early last month with news of a brand new game – a welcome return, but not the one anybody expected. It’s not a new title in the recently off-handed Gears of War franchise, nor is it anything to do with the studio’s upcoming next-gen game, Fortnite. Instead it was a whole new instalment in Epic’s classic, long dormant Unreal franchise. The kicker here though, is that it’s set to be made by the fans.

Speaking with PC Gamer, Epic Games senior programmer Steve Polge said: “We wanted to bring back Unreal Tournament in collaboration with our passionate fans and mod community. Community-created content and mods have always played a huge part in the appeal and success of the Unreal Tournament series. With Unreal Engine 4 now available to everyone, we see a unique opportunity to re-invent the competitive FPS.”

The pitch is simple, if ambitious: a small team of Unreal Tournament veterans will work with the community in the open from the first line of code, asking for input on each and every design decision, all to make the first instalment in the franchise since 2007’s disappointing Unreal Tournament 3 – but with the fans who have never forgotten about late nights fragging friends in team deathmatch on board, each decision made should hopefully keep the game on the right path.

“We know that fans of the game are as passionate about Unreal Tournament as we are,” said Polge on the project’s announcement page. ”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.”

As surprising as the move is, there’s no denying it’s the perfect series to test such a model with. Fan support and Unreal Tournament have always gone hand in hand – it’s written into the franchise’s DNA. From the very first Unreal game launched back in 1998: fans, designers, coders and modders have all taken to the Unreal engine to create maps, mutators (small tweaks), new game modes, and even complete, brand new games using Epic’s game engine with each new engine and Unreal title, and that could prove to be the next game's ultimate core feature: fan involvement.

Polge told PC Gamer, “Epic's roots are as a small independent game developer, and introducing game development to aspiring designers, artists, and programmers has always been part of our DNA. Unreal Tournament still has a lot of passionate fans. We think there is a desire and a place in today’s PC FPS community for a modern competitive shooter that brings back the kind of pure, fast action, skill-based gameplay for which the series is known.”

Epic, with its Unreal series, is well known for its vocal support of the community. You only have to look at its Make Something Unreal international game development contest to see how dedicated the company is to giving back to its audience, and its fans have been cooking up all sorts of goodies over the years. Over one thousand entrants alone submitted mods to the 2004 edition, but only one winner could scoop the $50,000 cash reward and Unreal Engine 3 license grand prize, and that was Tripwire Interactive, which has been able to keep on making games since its total conversion mod, Red Orchestra: Combined Arms, took the top honours.

Just like the thousands of other entrants, Red Orchestra was built in the bedroom too – all by a core group of people united by one engine and one vision. Alan Wilson, vice-president of Tripwire Interactive, tells Red Bull that Red Orchestra started off simply as “the classic mod team with an idea of a game we wanted to play, a few people, a website and settling on an engine (Unreal Tournament 2003, after a couple of trials elsewhere). The team was already building momentum when the Make Something Unreal contest was announced, and that gave us some fairly concrete deadlines, which helped focus the mind.”

That community support is what Epic is looking to tap into once more. “There is that obvious learning point, but less obvious is the community involvement,” says Wilson. “As a mod team, we could try stuff out, pitch it out to the players, get feedback. Sometimes try stuff and throw it out because people hated it, sometimes amend and improve. Now, as an established developer, we still look for that feedback, so we can continually improve on the games. We also brought forward the idea from the mod days that you could simply give people new stuff, which we still do today. There are still plenty of developers and publishers who just don't get it, even now. Give people free stuff (maps, special events, unlockable characters, game modes and more) and they'll keep coming back, they'll encourage their friends to buy, too. Everyone wins.”

Wilson’s busy with his own projects at Tripwire, such as the recently announced Killing Floor 2, but he’s interested in seeing what Epic has up its sleeve: “I'll be fascinated to see how the game works out. Epic has always really just ‘got’ the modders, the community of fans. This time, they are really taking all of that back to the core of UT itself. Why not build the game that the players want? Let the players influence it heavily, direct it, steer it, even mod it as it is created. It may be a challenge to direct all of that input to create a finished product – or maybe it will be a game that is constantly evolving! You can make a game without fan input – that's what the average developer/publisher does anyway – but if you stop and listen, pick out all the best bits, try those ideas out, find out what works well (and what doesn't), you should wind up with a better product.”

It’s almost like a dream come true for many modders and developers who would have killed to have worked on the next Unreal game – and it looks like it’s turning into a reality, all thanks to Epic – and it also means the community doesn’t have to wait until the game is launched to give feedback: they can pitch ideas right from the start, and the dev team will happily listen.

“The developers don't have the monopoly on good ideas, nor a monopoly on the way to solve complex game design issues,” says Wilson. ”So why not solicit them from the people who know your game the best – the fans? Do it well and you'll end up building the game that the players really want which should translate into sales and the opportunity to make more games that players really want.”

With his own experience with running a mod team, as well as listening to the Red Orchestra community, Wilson knows full well the dangers of attempting a project like this: the old-age tale that too many cooks spoil the broth – and Epic needs to make sure everyone’s on the same page when it comes to the new game, or else the project will just keep spinning its wheels, and ultimately, go nowhere.

“There are a couple of challenges for Epic that spring to mind,” Wilson tells us. “The first is working out which is the ‘best’ input from the community. Just because four people are rabidly enthusiastic about one feature doesn't mean that four million other people will be. Trying to balance all that input and ideas in the game can be really tough. One idea may be really cool, but it might make the game unbalanced, which usually isn't fun (except for the person in possession of the dramatically over-powered weapon). Then there is the problem of "when is the game done?" When do you stop taking input? What makes the cut for the first version and what doesn't? If you aren't careful, the game will be in development forever.”

With the plans in motion for how to make the next Unreal Tournament, the next part is to think about what happens when it’s finished. While Epic plans on making it a completely free game for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms that can sustain itself with an online store, it’s also set to stay true to its roots as a competitive first person shooter – and those plans could even extend to eSports too. Polge has said that developing in tandem with the fans will help build a much better balanced and finely tuned game, which Epic feels is “vital to the long-term success of a competitive shooter.”

“It’s already evident that there are many players contributing to our design discussions that have a thorough understanding of game mechanics and balance issues,” says Polge. “Their contributions will help make Unreal Tournament’s gameplay deeper and more balanced than any past title. In addition, having a large audience of developers and fans continuously playtesting the game and providing feedback will have a massive impact on our ability to make sure all elements of the game are well-balanced for a wide range of skill levels.”

Fans of the series will be pleased to hear that a slick, polished and up to date version of arena Deathmatch and team game modes will be first out the door, while features such as vehicles that arrived with the UT2004 and UT3 instalments could be next on the agenda – again, with community involvement too. But longer term, and as a whole, Epic would love to support the game as an eSport title – and this community-developed title could be the perfect arena game – it’s by the fans, for the fans, of course.

“[In the long term] we'd love to support UT as an eSport game,” Polge says, “And we'll need the community's help in designing and implementing many of the features that implies, like advanced match spectating, broadcasting and livestreaming.”

With game streaming services like Twitch on the rise, and shooters like Call of Duty and Counter-Strike already big-money spectator sports, complete with shoutcasters and commentators, those features could be implemented easily. “There’s absolutely no reason why not [it could take off],” Wilson tells us. “UT has been a hugely popular arena shooter for a long time. If [Epic] can steer the right course through all that input, they'll end up making the shooter that a very large number of people want to play.”

Don’t forget – some of the world’s biggest eSports started out as bedroom projects by fans too. From Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess "Cliffe" Cliffe’s mod work on Half-Life in 1999 that turned into the smash-hit FPS Counter-Strike, which is still going strong today, to Eul, Steve "Guinsoo" Feak and IceFrog’s work on WarCraft III for Defense of the Ancients, the ultra-popular map which has made way for both League of Legends and Dota 2 – arguably two of the most played eSports games in the world today. Fan involvement and the community have been testament to how these games have exploded – and with Unreal Tournament’s community at the helm of the next project, it too could fire off into the stratosphere as the arena shooter of choice around the globe.

Of course, the biggest challenge for Epic, the fans, and the gaming community at large will be playing the waiting game: “The biggest challenge for the community will be just the one of being patient to get your hands on finished product, I suspect!”, Wilson jokes.

We have to agree: we can’t wait.

Want to experience the best of RedBull.com on the move? Get the app at RedBull.com/app.