Wilcox admits that the dev team struggled to stay on top of code contributions. “It’s true that it wasn’t super easy to get code in front of us,” he tells me. “People could submit pulls which I was way behind on reviewing, or make something cool and post about it. But I don’t remember many super cool programming projects that showed up in the forums with a big ‘Hey, look at me!’”
With developers going quiet on the official channels, toxic elements began to appear. Valuable contributors, like “Tidal Blast”, a modder who created the
3D model for the Enforcer gun, were turning adversarial. “Tidal Blast repeatedly evaded bans and derailed discussion, to the point of pathology,” says community developer “Cafe”. “There were several other people similar to him that were oppressive to the atmosphere.”
Despite growing uncertainty, the community continued pouring its efforts into the game; “N0niz”, maker of the Bombing Run mode, estimates he put 600 hours in, while raxxy invested plenty of time and money into hosting “top-tier servers used worldwide by players and developers for playtesting”, according to Wailing. A few select contributors earned Unreal Dev Grants (estimated to be worth around $1000 each), or even jobs at Epic, but for the majority, who just wanted to see a new Unreal Tournament game, it was looking more like a thankless slog.
Epic’s frugal approach extended to the soundtrack. Michiel van den Bos, composer on the original Unreal Tournament, offered to make the music for the game, but Epic told him it would be crowdsourced and there would be no financial compensation. “They were just sticking to their guidelines so no harm done,” says van den Bos. “In the end, I wound up doing a
test song with some new synths and it ended up similar to a UT track from back in the day, so I sent it off no strings attached and it made it into the game”.
Meanwhile, the dev team began rolling out game modes with Duel, Capture The Flag, and the new Blitz mode (the Elimination, Assault, Bunnytrack and Bombing Run modes were all community made). Blitz was designed with eSports in mind; a 5-v-5 flag run in which one team had to either deliver a flag into the enemy base or wipe out their entire team. The rollout caused more fissures. “Most of the vocal community members I’m aware of didn’t have a problem with Blitz,” says Sir_Brizz. “They were frustrated that new game modes were being built and the foundation of the game was poor.”
Wilcox admits there were disagreements with players over the introduction of new game modes, and suggests they stemmed from the open development process, and the community not understanding how much influence they would actually have. “We started tweaking various things for Blitz that had consequences to Capture The Flag, Duel or even Deathmatch”, he says. “In normal development, that’s 100% okay. In open development, it’s total chaos”.
Vocal minorities in the community opposed changes to the more sacrosanct modes. “We played around with half-time in CTF and short-timed powerups in Duel”, says Wilcox. “Both ideas had important potential roles in controlling the ebb and flow of a game and both, from my point of view, were decried without a fair shake”. But despite difficulties integrating the community, Wilcox doesn’t believe this had anything to do with the game’s eventual breakdown. There’s a big purple llama piñata in the room we haven’t mentioned yet.
The unfathomable success of Fortnite after it launched its Battle Royale mode in March 2017 changed the whole company. “Epic paused UT because of a great opportunity,” says Wilcox. “One that took off beyond comprehension.”
Eventually, community members including Cafe and Sir_Brizz were banned from various channels for expressing frustration at the pace of development. In contrast, Wilcox believes that the alpha was progressing at a good pace and could have moved onto the beta given more resources. “The mechanics felt good, the maps felt good. We had just started really looking at progression and monetisation,” he says. “Could it be completed with a small team? No, but that was never the point. We would have had to increase the team size, especially in terms of testing to finish the game.”
But Epic had no intention of pushing the project forward that way. By 2018, this could well be attributed to the success of Fortnite, but it also seemed consistent with Epic’s philosophy from the very beginning to keep Unreal Tournament as a side-project on a minimal budget. By August 2018, Wilcox and other freelancers had stopped working on the alpha. The fact that development had stopped, however, wasn’t made public until Tim Sweeney revealed it in an
interview with Variety in December 2018. It was an inelegant yet strangely apt way to mark the end of a project shaped by confusion and poor communication.
“The small team at Epic that worked on the new Unreal Tournament, as well as many other developers across our organization, were passionate about the project. We’re grateful for and impressed by the community and modders and their outstanding contributions,” project lead Steve Polge tells me, in an emailed statement. “Even though we’re no longer actively developing Unreal Tournament, both the current released version and the UT editor are available on the Epic Games store, so that the community can continue to play the game and create new content and mods for it.”
The community developers who continue to work in the Unreal Tournament alpha are gathered in the UT Renaissance Discord channel. Tamzid Farhan Mogno is one of the its founders. “The channel has helped contributors communicate better, help each other & experiment with the current state,” he says. “Those who are not actively developing help others with their knowledge.” UT Renaissance did their own
community development streama few months ago. Wailing and a few other UT exiles, meanwhile, have returned to working on a long-standing open-source slant on Unreal Tournament called
Open Tournament.
It’s possible — probable, even — that the Fortnite juggernaut would’ve subsumed Unreal Tournament’s development anyway, just like it did Paragon’s. But there’s a sense here that the idea of open development was never really clarified by Epic, or solidified within the company itself. It was a utopian vision, but as is often the case with such visions, it lacked a plan on how to get there; it was a moonshot, but in a rocket built from some designs sketched on a napkin.
The community doesn’t hold the game’s demise against Epic, but it remains stranded between the nostalgia of the past and faint hopes for some kind of future for the series. At this point, the likelihood of a new Unreal Tournament game is a distant glimmer, even more remote than before the project began.