No Unreal Tournament “For Several Years”

I’m a bit disappointed by Tim Sweeney’s remark in an interview with G4tv that there are no plans to release a new version of Unreal Tournament in the near future.

While I was not a big fan of the original Unreal Tournament (I was into Decent 3 and Quake II online at the time), I did like UT2K3 and UT2K4, and think they messed it up in UT3 when they toned down the game play and seriously messed up the weapons balance.

The people I played with loved the acrobatics and the jumps you could do and were totally pissed at how “grounded” the characters were in UT3.  The other thing disappointing were that they reduced the damage that skill based weapons like the lighting gun (replaced by sniper rifle) and shock rifle did.  The problem was that they made things more “noob” & console friendly by upping the damage of the rockets and flac.  I think that it would have been much better received if thay had not tried to make a story out of the basic game modes … CTF to shut down the enemies' spawners … give me a break.

Now don’t get me totally wrong the Warfare mode was nice as I was always a fan of Onslaught and the VCTF was pretty solid if a very limited selection of maps.  But obviously most players that were playing UT2K4 did not find UT3 very compelling and most that I knew went to other games after UT2K4 lost it’s appeal for them.

I had hoped that Epic would make a tweaked version of UT3 (UT3.5) where they brought back the bounciness and life of the prior games, similar to what they did to UT2K3 to add content and fix things the community wanted.  The Titan bonus pack, while it was an attempt to bring life to UT3, ended up making the game even less appealing to players of previous versions.