All right, so we don’t spend as many hours on Unreal Tournament 3 as we did on earlier versions. There are no 12-hour all-night fragfests (that came out gross, didn’t it?), nor are there the grudge SMSes of “You and me, Mobius Deathmatch, tonight!” But that still doesn’t mean we should be forced to wait indefinitely for the next iteration of one of the greatest first-person-shooter multiplayer games of all time.
And that’s exactly what Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has planned, as he announced that the company has no plans for another UT game “for several years”.
Talking to G4TV, he said: “Unreal Tournament is certainly a major long-term priority but we’re planning not to release a major retail game in the series for several years. So we have that effort somewhat on hold while we work on a few other initiatives.”
Translation: We made lots of money with Gears of War and MS M$ is actually considering us as its leading console title for the Xbox 360, over their own Halo. Plus, the Unreal 3 engine is selling brilliantly and is making us more money than the game ever could.
Sweeney added that the UT franchise is best served by its loyal base of fans, who continually bring out great mods and maps.
“The really interesting thing about Unreal Tournament is that once we’ve defined the game in this generation, the community takes it and runs with it. So you’ve seen the community create this massive set of maps and mods that go far beyond anything we could ever do. We almost solve the Unreal Tournament 4 and 5 problem ourselves by just making this toolset available because the community has done more than we could have ever hoped to do internally.”
No, Mr. Sweeney, you don’t. The reason UT3 didn’t do very well was that it was felt like the first UT on steroids. Build something new, get different guns in and some innovative gameplay and you could still take over the multiplayer FPS genre, Tim!