If you don’t know, Unreal Tournament 2014 was a first-person shooter developed by Epic Games. The ninth installment in the Unreal franchise for PC also had crowdsourced help, meaning work on the game was open to contribution from anyone. However, the game is dead as of now and Epic’s CEO, Tim Sweeney, reportedly says the team doesn’t know how to finish the game.
Back in the day, Epic Games would publish and release games like Tyrian, One Must Fall, and Jazz Jackrabbit — staple titles of their time. However, the company moved on to the first-person space during the late 1990s with Unreal in 1998.
After 1998, Unreal Tournament would jump onto the scene in 1999 followed by the 2002 Unreal Championship. 2002 would also bring Unreal Tournament 2003. Unreal 2: The Awakening stepped into the picture in 2003. The year 2004 would mark the release of Unreal Tournament 2004, which 2005 brought Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict. And lastly, 2007 would offer gamers Unreal Tournament 3.
After all of that, Unreal Tournament 2014 would pop up where the devs from Epic would help random people make the game.
Do you want to know the reason why the game has fallen out of the light and has been shelved for five years? Sweeney has the “answer” thanks to website DSOG:
There are two considerations. First, many core developers on Unreal Tournament drove early Fortnite Battle Royale and are still key contributors. Second, we don’t know how to “finish” UT as the project was highly experimental and hadn’t found its essence.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) July 27, 2019
In summary, developers on Unreal Tournament helped the early stages of Fortnite Battle Royale and are still contributing. The “reason” is that the team doesn’t know how to “finish” Unreal Tournament since the project “was highly experimental” with its essence lost.
On a RockPaperShotgun’s comment section back in 2018, a user by the name of Hamburger_Cheesedoodle offered some insight on the program by saying:
“The worst part is that most of us were willing to do the work, and in fact did – but the process to actually get content contributed to the game was so arduous it might as well not have existed, and the developers were rarely on the forums. All of the gameplay decisions were handed down to the unwashed modder masses from on high, and were almost always kept intact regardless of the community reactions. In the year and a half I worked on it, nothing of mine was ever officially accepted, and only two people I knew had anything go into an official build. Everyone saw that the development was going nowhere, and people gradually left. It didn’t help that more than once the developers explicitly confirmed that they were primarily being tasked to work on Paragon, the MOBA that got cancelled, with UT being more of an afterthought.”
And if the now dead game Paragon was a top priority to Epic and now Fortnite Battle Royale over Unreal Tournament, then don’t hold your breath for the 2014 game making a speedy come back.
