When Epic Games launches its competitive arena-based shooter later this year, for the first time ever it’ll put the game entirely in the hands of the modding community. Every line of code, every art asset and animation will be available for download. The inmates are about to take over the asylum.
To be fair, it’s less an asylum and more a marketplace. Anyone with an Unreal 4 Engine subscription and a bit of coding know-how can create their own mods and upload them to a shopfront for other players to purchase. Epic, naturally, gets a cut of the profits.
“We wanted to bring back Unreal Tournament in collaboration with our passionate fans and mod community,” project lead and senior programmer Steve Polge tells us. “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.” Think of it as one big community project: no microtransactions, no gated content, no paywalls.
“I believe this development model gives us the opportunity to build a much better balanced and finely tuned game, which is vital to the long-term success of a competitive shooter,” says Polge. “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. Their contributions will help make Unreal Tournament’s gameplay deeper and more balanced than any past title.”
