One thing I missed from Unreal Tournament, which too few other games adopted IMHO, was the concept of mutators. Effectively server-level mods which, as the name implied, mutated the gameplay in some way.
There were silly ones like the one making your characters head larger for each kill, and those which made it just different like low gravity, and so on.
It was also relatively easy to make your own, thanks to UnrealScript.
Really wish more multiplayer games embraced this concept, it really increased replayability by changing things up.
Counter-Strike 1.6 (and other Goldsrc based games) greatly benefited from AMX Mod X's scripting capabilities. I miss the days where people were playing modded servers.
Obscuring server browser and/or not allowing self-hosting dedicated servers killed modding in modern games. A real shame.
While most seemed to prefer Counter-strike, my childhood gaming was dominated by an Unreal Tournament mod called Tac Ops. While the games looked similar, the mechanics felt very different than Counter-strike. It was a much faster-paced game.
There were a ton of servers with wacky mods. I spent a ton of time on the low-grav servers. There were also some that made the top-scoring player huge. Those odd game modes were a blast.
Same. My favorite mutator was the exploding ammo cases. So much fun to see an enemy run to pick up an ammo box and just shoot it with a pistol blowing it up in his face. That was apretty revolutionary game mechanic 20 years ago. Do any modern games have such a thing?
That volatile ammo mutator was made even more awesome because it actually spawned "shots" of that type, so a plasma pile wouldn't just explode but rather spread various plasma shots around it. The granade one would have the granades bouncing around a bit before exploding. It was so easy for things to go wrong and backfire on you :)
I remember the one where you got physically bigger every time you killed someone, until you couldn't fit through doorways etc. And smaller and smaller every time you died. It was pretty hilarious.
This reminds me of Quake with the DeFrag mode "sub-game", but also gameplay available in Quake Live in which you could have a Railgun only match, but they could also behave like Rocket Launchers for rocket jumps.
Also allowing players to change the configuration of their game through the dev console was cool. My favorite visual change was to configure the railgun trails to persist for multiple seconds.
We modified Action Quake II (somehow, I forget how) to change gravity (I think it was in the map itself) and we would bounce around Cheyenne in a completely different playstyle - and everything would send you flying.
There was a number of games that allowed similar things in these days. My favourite was San Andreas Multiplayer. All you needed was a copy of GTA: San Andreas and download the client, the server was community scripted. This gave birth to a number of unique servers: racing, deathmatch, role play, etc.
Multi Theft Auto (another GTA multiplayer mod, still alive today) allowed for similar things. And so did the source games (Counter Strike, HL2: DM, Day of Defeat, etc.).
Mutators were amazing at the peak of unreal tournament, but towards the end of life they made it die that much quicker. I remember feeling a little nostalgic and wanting to play unreal tournament, but the only service I could find had a huge amount of mutators and mods installed where it was very much unlike the normal gameplay experience that I was looking for
These were my favorite part of Starsiege: Tribes. There was a modpack called Ultra Renegades that totally changed the gameplay and made it so twitchy and fun.
A standing applause for those undertaking this effort as I look forward to losing even more of my future time given how much I lost to it in the past.
Many moons ago I worked with an individual whose wife was employed in marketing by a large well known video game company involved around UT. One day he came into the office and brought a load of leftover UT swag and it was a feeding frenzy. I still have and wear my long sleeve black UT embroidered tee and as a point of fact I just wore it again last week. Looking forward to the progress on this effort as an old head UT fan still.
I have a special place in my heart for UT2004 because it was one of the very few games that had an official native Linux version at the time. I think I enjoyed the fact that it was running on Linux more than I enjoyed the game itself.
Yes! I remember at the time I had just gotten linux to reliably work on my dual Opteron workstation so that I could migrate away from Win2K64. UT2K3 and UT2K4 were just about the only games I could run because Wine didn't work very well back then.
In retrospect, I have a much greater appreciation for Windows 2000. User experience was really front and center in a way that we seem to have gotten away from since Web 2.0. It basically never blue screened. Games ran well. Personal computing seems to have taken some steps backwards since then.
There are big companies, that are actively doing harmful things to undermine personal computing, in order to farm engagement, attention and show us ads. Phones become more and more locked down, except for very niche products. Many people don't even have a PC any longer, and only have phones, with none of the freedom of personal computing that we enjoy(ed). Only people in the know are able to and willing to put in the effort to run an OS that includes freedom. Trying to help a friend or family member with a computer or phone problem, one will quickly notice the efforts that big tech makes to undermine freedom respecting solutions.
Yes! I had both a Linux (main) and a Windows box in my office back in the day, and a friend came over frequently and we would "kill things!" for hours :-)
IIRC, I bought the metal case for UT3, but the linux binaries never appeared ...
Not just working, but it actually ran better in Linux for me -- my university-mandated laptop could only run it at 1280x800 in Windows if you wanted to hit 60fps, but the Linux client was able to run at the panel's native 1920x1200.
Hell yeah! So many runs on that map. It’s so funny how it was basically a strategy-less map since there wasn’t much you could do other than trying your best avoid incoming fire while running like a madman up the slope in the middle of the map.
Camp out in the upper chamber, wait for Redeemer to spawn, grab it and nuke 'em all. Great for taking out snipers posted on the opposing tower who are preventing your guys from crossing.
UT99 was the first real FPS experience I had. My friend invited me to a LAN party (also first time), and the whole thing was mind blowing.
People all over the house shouting and laughing.
I have a distinct memory of someone attempting what you just described, but my friend just happened to be ready and he sniped the redeemer right as it was shot. Big explosion and nothing left of the player but a scorch mark on the building. I laughed myself to tears. Good times.
I found the CD earlier this year while I was packing for a move. Couldn't help myself and played a few DM-Morpheus bot matches. The graphics look dated but the fun was all still there. Few games ever since managed to hook me like this one did.
I honestly can't understand why Epic Games refuses to open-source Unreal 1 and UT99. They insist on licensing individual developers, instead of opening up the source so community forks can thrive. Look at the id tech community, with all the Doom and Quake forks, and all the amazing projects that spawned off of them.
The topic of "middleware" often comes up, as an excuse for them not being able to open the source. Well, just remove any third-party libraries and middleware, even EA did it with their C&C open-source releases. The C&C release did not even compile, but that did not stop the community from porting to Linux and other platforms, as well as modernizing the source and creating replacement libraries.
One explanation that was brought up before about this was licensing. A lot of the source code has been touched by other entities like Digital Extremes who may feel differently about releasing the source. That's even more true for UT2k4 which was worked on by many more companies behind the scenes, some of which are now defunct.
They taught a summer class at Stanford where the capstone was putting your 3D model into Ut4 as a new character. Classroom of networked commuters with all kinds of popular games on them…it was hard to get work done some times.
I discovered "secret level" on prime recently where there is an episode on UT2004 (with the original sound effects like "killing spree !!!" ). With this additional news, I now want to run it again...
This is great. I remember playing this for the first time at a Wizards of the Coast in the mall. They had 8 or so PCs on a LAN in the back of the store. My first true LAN party I guess.
I bought it in steam before they removed it. So I can still install and play this game from time to time. Capture the flag is something else in this game!
Yeah, I couldn't really get into UT2004. Not sure what it was that bugged me since it was so long ago. But I played a lot of UT99 and I was doing it on a 28.8 modem.
I think the tone of of UT2004 was slightly sillier than UT99 and the guns felt .. fatter? I'm definitely looking at this with some nostalgia but UT99 will always be my favorite shooter
UT2003 was the first online multiplayer game I ever played, and I played it a lot, mostly at the office with coworkers; we then moved to UT2004. So, so many fond memories of both. Glad is back.
I liked UT3 too, but I guess UT2004 was the peak, with all its different game modes. UT3 felt a little bit like a console thing, with fewer modes. Overall I had much more fun with UT2004, playing it with friends in LAN. UT3 simply didn't pack as much fun gameplay.
The most interesting part of UT2k4 to me is the software renderer. It actually worked on period hardware and many would argue it looks better. You should definitely give it a try if you've got the game on a modern machine.
Wow, this is great! I wonder if there is support for ray tracing and other modern tech, but even as it is I would not mind playing this again. Been a long time. Plus, moved to Mac recently and expecting the new fangled Mac support this brings will work well.
UT2004 (and its Xbox counterpart Unreal Championship 2) were great experiences. UT3 tried to set itself apart by tuning its pace significantly higher, and it lost its audience, and UT2016 was never going to be a significant title given its development history.
It was allowed to wither and then murdered in 2022. You can't even buy it now, not even on GOG (you could buy it on GOG previously, but it was removed).
They released UT 3 in 2007 but I think around that time the company shifted more towards their engine, which by then was already the most used game engine for high profile games (don't quote me on that one, it's a gut feeling).
They started working on a new title, but it was meandering for a long time; it seemed that they would do some of the ground work but relied on the community a lot to design and build maps and weapons. Then the Fortnite team released a Battle Royale mode and made it free to play and it completely dominated the market. The UT team was transitioned to Fortnite in 2017, and Fortnite became their money printer earning them hundreds of millions per month.
While I love Unreal Tournament and would love for them or some other party to fill the gap of a no-nonsense arena shooter, the reality is that it wouldn't be as popular or lucrative as Fortnite. It'd be competing with FPS games like CoD and Battlefield, which have more going for them - including an uneven playing field, depending on players' progression and paid-for unlocks.
UT3 was a dismal failure both critically and commercially, while Gears of War was a huge success. Epic rode that for a while as they worked on Fortnite, and then they put out the battle royale mode in 2017 and the thing took off.
Are there are any FPS shooters on the genre of UT (or even Quake3) but modern, not remasters?
I've been missing a lot the frenetic gameplay of those, used to play a lot of UT at a decent level but nowadays I only see tactical FPSs or the likes of Counter-Strike/Battlefield with a high player count.
Outing myself as a parent of young kids here, but I have been genuinely surprised how good Hypershot on Roblox is. It reminds me of Unreal Tournament a lot and is really easy to play, I've been hooked for a few weeks. It cuts everything down to the basics like UT without all the bells and whistles modern AAA games have. Oh and it's totally free (but with all the monetization attempts Roblox games tend to have, though they aren't necessary to play even at a high level).
I love Warsow but am I right that it's very hard to find an opponent these days? I just checked https://arena.sh/wa/ and there are 4 non-empty servers, but most (maybe all) of the players seem to be bots.
I haven't played a while so I cannot comment. When I last played I spun up a server for my friend group to play on. This is the beauty of old school games like these, no need to rely on a company to keep servers running. In a way Warsow is the perfect LAN game: everyone can run it and it's easy to host a server.
Arena shooters have been relegated to side modes in other, bigger games. Probably the last big shooter with that as its focus was Halo: Infinite, but that struggled to stay relevant and its next big update will be its last.
Not really unfortunately. This video goes a bit into why (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-t37idOfvk), but the short version is the skill floor (or ceiling?) was too high, making it unwelcoming for people to just pick up, unlike a COD-like shooter.
Overwatch is a objective-based game, and like Valorant is a "hero shooter". Apex and Fortnite are battle royales.
I think the closest I got was The Finals but still class-based, so reminds me more of Team Fortress.
I loved playing 1v1 on Quake 2/3 and UT, also team deathmatch, from the list you commented it feels like each game got one of those aspects but none that makes the genre of UT what it is: knowing where weapons/ammo/armor spawn, map knowledge to navigate around, emergent movement mechanics (rocket jumps, strafe-jumping, etc.).
Interesting to see this genre mostly died out, and remnants of it have been scattered across other genres.
This is being done by OldUnreal with written permission from Epic. They've been doing the same thing for Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament '99 under NDA and all.
Wow this is really exciting, especially the Mac support. UT was kinda my gateway to programming. They made it really easy to build and play your own maps.
I hope they fix the terrible SP campaign. The bot skill became too difficult too fast (if I remember correctly they after several stages also began to dodge your CROSSHAIR), you could not change base difficulty mid-run and the money system was punishing when you lost a match
One thing I missed from Unreal Tournament, which too few other games adopted IMHO, was the concept of mutators. Effectively server-level mods which, as the name implied, mutated the gameplay in some way.
There were silly ones like the one making your characters head larger for each kill, and those which made it just different like low gravity, and so on.
It was also relatively easy to make your own, thanks to UnrealScript.
Really wish more multiplayer games embraced this concept, it really increased replayability by changing things up.
Counter-Strike 1.6 (and other Goldsrc based games) greatly benefited from AMX Mod X's scripting capabilities. I miss the days where people were playing modded servers.
Obscuring server browser and/or not allowing self-hosting dedicated servers killed modding in modern games. A real shame.
https://www.amxmodx.org/
While most seemed to prefer Counter-strike, my childhood gaming was dominated by an Unreal Tournament mod called Tac Ops. While the games looked similar, the mechanics felt very different than Counter-strike. It was a much faster-paced game.
There were a ton of servers with wacky mods. I spent a ton of time on the low-grav servers. There were also some that made the top-scoring player huge. Those odd game modes were a blast.
EDIT: Also looks like people are still playing!
https://www.gog.com/dreamlist/game/tactical-ops-assault-on-t...
https://tactical-ops.eu/
This is brilliant, I had complete forgotten about this one!! Thank you very much.
Same. My favorite mutator was the exploding ammo cases. So much fun to see an enemy run to pick up an ammo box and just shoot it with a pistol blowing it up in his face. That was apretty revolutionary game mechanic 20 years ago. Do any modern games have such a thing?
That volatile ammo mutator was made even more awesome because it actually spawned "shots" of that type, so a plasma pile wouldn't just explode but rather spread various plasma shots around it. The granade one would have the granades bouncing around a bit before exploding. It was so easy for things to go wrong and backfire on you :)
I remember the one where you got physically bigger every time you killed someone, until you couldn't fit through doorways etc. And smaller and smaller every time you died. It was pretty hilarious.
Warcraft 3 had some of the greatest mods that kept the player base alive for decades
Instagib with ASMD shock rifles.
This reminds me of Quake with the DeFrag mode "sub-game", but also gameplay available in Quake Live in which you could have a Railgun only match, but they could also behave like Rocket Launchers for rocket jumps.
Also allowing players to change the configuration of their game through the dev console was cool. My favorite visual change was to configure the railgun trails to persist for multiple seconds.
We modified Action Quake II (somehow, I forget how) to change gravity (I think it was in the map itself) and we would bounce around Cheyenne in a completely different playstyle - and everything would send you flying.
Railgun trail to match the reload time, always!
My favorite was the one that spawned monsters, so you could have enemies that would attack either side during vehicle CTF or Onslaught game modes
Those are in TF2 and Minecraft, perhaps one reason they’re still popular
Luckily it seems modern games (e.g. TF2, Overwatch) make this even more accessible with so called "workshops".
There was a number of games that allowed similar things in these days. My favourite was San Andreas Multiplayer. All you needed was a copy of GTA: San Andreas and download the client, the server was community scripted. This gave birth to a number of unique servers: racing, deathmatch, role play, etc.
Multi Theft Auto (another GTA multiplayer mod, still alive today) allowed for similar things. And so did the source games (Counter Strike, HL2: DM, Day of Defeat, etc.).
UnrealScript was the bomb, it was what got me started coding. Specifically replicating the gravity gun from Half Life 2.
those ant-sized man in house maps were the best. i dont think ive ever seen anything like it since.
The game Grounded almost has that feel, but it's open world.
There's another game called Hypercharge:Unboxed that is definitely giving me the feeling of those old UT maps, but I haven't actually played it.
My favorite game of all time was Quake, similarly extended with QuakeC, into the QuakeWorld CTF game. I still dream about those maps.
Mutators are about the only thing keeping Starcraft 2 Co-Op players going in 2025 (and by extension, the community).
Earliest memory I have in the multiplayer FPS context was probably the 'cheat' menu unlocks for Goldeneye on the N64 in 1997.
Me and my friend are somehow still playing co-op without mutators. My friend is max level, I'm like 100 away
Red Eclipse has mutators: https://github.com/redeclipse/base
Mutators were amazing at the peak of unreal tournament, but towards the end of life they made it die that much quicker. I remember feeling a little nostalgic and wanting to play unreal tournament, but the only service I could find had a huge amount of mutators and mods installed where it was very much unlike the normal gameplay experience that I was looking for
These were my favorite part of Starsiege: Tribes. There was a modpack called Ultra Renegades that totally changed the gameplay and made it so twitchy and fun.
Loved Tribes! I mostly played Paintball mod from 2000-2004!
Can't happen anymore because every multiplayer game is chasing esports.
I have always hated esports conceptually, from jump.
A standing applause for those undertaking this effort as I look forward to losing even more of my future time given how much I lost to it in the past.
Many moons ago I worked with an individual whose wife was employed in marketing by a large well known video game company involved around UT. One day he came into the office and brought a load of leftover UT swag and it was a feeding frenzy. I still have and wear my long sleeve black UT embroidered tee and as a point of fact I just wore it again last week. Looking forward to the progress on this effort as an old head UT fan still.
I have a special place in my heart for UT2004 because it was one of the very few games that had an official native Linux version at the time. I think I enjoyed the fact that it was running on Linux more than I enjoyed the game itself.
Yes! I remember at the time I had just gotten linux to reliably work on my dual Opteron workstation so that I could migrate away from Win2K64. UT2K3 and UT2K4 were just about the only games I could run because Wine didn't work very well back then.
In retrospect, I have a much greater appreciation for Windows 2000. User experience was really front and center in a way that we seem to have gotten away from since Web 2.0. It basically never blue screened. Games ran well. Personal computing seems to have taken some steps backwards since then.
There are big companies, that are actively doing harmful things to undermine personal computing, in order to farm engagement, attention and show us ads. Phones become more and more locked down, except for very niche products. Many people don't even have a PC any longer, and only have phones, with none of the freedom of personal computing that we enjoy(ed). Only people in the know are able to and willing to put in the effort to run an OS that includes freedom. Trying to help a friend or family member with a computer or phone problem, one will quickly notice the efforts that big tech makes to undermine freedom respecting solutions.
Yes! I had both a Linux (main) and a Windows box in my office back in the day, and a friend came over frequently and we would "kill things!" for hours :-)
IIRC, I bought the metal case for UT3, but the linux binaries never appeared ...
I'll never forget installing ut2k4 on my linux box and having it Just Work. Magical.
Not just working, but it actually ran better in Linux for me -- my university-mandated laptop could only run it at 1280x800 in Windows if you wanted to hit 60fps, but the Linux client was able to run at the panel's native 1920x1200.
I had it working without issues from Steam (I bought UT 99 and 2004 before Epic de-listed from Steam)
i remember playing it on linux on my dell inspiron 8k which was a beautiful machine.
I'm still playing ut99 GOTY with my son (yeah, I'm that old)... and nothing else matterrrrrrrrrrrr
Still an amazing FPS, your son is lucky. So many great memories playing CTF at lan parties.
Facing Worlds was absolutely peak.
Hell yeah! So many runs on that map. It’s so funny how it was basically a strategy-less map since there wasn’t much you could do other than trying your best avoid incoming fire while running like a madman up the slope in the middle of the map.
Camp out in the upper chamber, wait for Redeemer to spawn, grab it and nuke 'em all. Great for taking out snipers posted on the opposing tower who are preventing your guys from crossing.
Fuck, CTF-Face was a vibe.
UT99 was the first real FPS experience I had. My friend invited me to a LAN party (also first time), and the whole thing was mind blowing.
People all over the house shouting and laughing.
I have a distinct memory of someone attempting what you just described, but my friend just happened to be ready and he sniped the redeemer right as it was shot. Big explosion and nothing left of the player but a scorch mark on the building. I laughed myself to tears. Good times.
It's a terrible map by almost every metric...
... except fun.
But guess what metric matters most?
With the best gaming OST of all time.
Still my favorite FPS of all time. Low gravity sniper rifle CTF was my favorite. Was in the NTHZ clan.
I found the CD earlier this year while I was packing for a move. Couldn't help myself and played a few DM-Morpheus bot matches. The graphics look dated but the fun was all still there. Few games ever since managed to hook me like this one did.
I honestly can't understand why Epic Games refuses to open-source Unreal 1 and UT99. They insist on licensing individual developers, instead of opening up the source so community forks can thrive. Look at the id tech community, with all the Doom and Quake forks, and all the amazing projects that spawned off of them.
The topic of "middleware" often comes up, as an excuse for them not being able to open the source. Well, just remove any third-party libraries and middleware, even EA did it with their C&C open-source releases. The C&C release did not even compile, but that did not stop the community from porting to Linux and other platforms, as well as modernizing the source and creating replacement libraries.
One explanation that was brought up before about this was licensing. A lot of the source code has been touched by other entities like Digital Extremes who may feel differently about releasing the source. That's even more true for UT2k4 which was worked on by many more companies behind the scenes, some of which are now defunct.
A while back I kinda got Unreal Tournament running inside Unreal Engine, okay, more like a VM running UT inside Unreal Engine, but still...
For those looking for silliness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVO2VDPnI0Y
Epic Games have been surprisingly generous with their older library. Refreshing to see.
They taught a summer class at Stanford where the capstone was putting your 3D model into Ut4 as a new character. Classroom of networked commuters with all kinds of popular games on them…it was hard to get work done some times.
I discovered "secret level" on prime recently where there is an episode on UT2004 (with the original sound effects like "killing spree !!!" ). With this additional news, I now want to run it again...
This is great. I remember playing this for the first time at a Wizards of the Coast in the mall. They had 8 or so PCs on a LAN in the back of the store. My first true LAN party I guess.
Plaay >>
In the mystique female voice!
I bought it in steam before they removed it. So I can still install and play this game from time to time. Capture the flag is something else in this game!
UT99>
Yeah, I couldn't really get into UT2004. Not sure what it was that bugged me since it was so long ago. But I played a lot of UT99 and I was doing it on a 28.8 modem.
I think the tone of of UT2004 was slightly sillier than UT99 and the guns felt .. fatter? I'm definitely looking at this with some nostalgia but UT99 will always be my favorite shooter
That skyscraper map is etched in my mind I played it so much
UT2003 was the first online multiplayer game I ever played, and I played it a lot, mostly at the office with coworkers; we then moved to UT2004. So, so many fond memories of both. Glad is back.
do you remember the map called Phobos II? for some reason they didn't include it with 2004, it was my favorite map
I'm still sad that Epic Games axed UT4 (2014).
I liked UT3 too, but I guess UT2004 was the peak, with all its different game modes. UT3 felt a little bit like a console thing, with fewer modes. Overall I had much more fun with UT2004, playing it with friends in LAN. UT3 simply didn't pack as much fun gameplay.
UT3 felt sluggish at the time. Both in gameplay and graphics performance. Still much faster than most games today of course.
Fortnite is it's spiritual successor.
The most interesting part of UT2k4 to me is the software renderer. It actually worked on period hardware and many would argue it looks better. You should definitely give it a try if you've got the game on a modern machine.
Still holding out for UT1 code to be officially released.
Wow, this is great! I wonder if there is support for ray tracing and other modern tech, but even as it is I would not mind playing this again. Been a long time. Plus, moved to Mac recently and expecting the new fangled Mac support this brings will work well.
UT2k4 was a LAN party favorite of mine. One of the last good multiplayer FPS games before Epic lost its way.
UT2004 (and its Xbox counterpart Unreal Championship 2) were great experiences. UT3 tried to set itself apart by tuning its pace significantly higher, and it lost its audience, and UT2016 was never going to be a significant title given its development history.
Hopefully they can compile it to web as well.
Such a good game- very ahead of its time, great look and feel. Weird that it was allowed to wither and die.
> Weird that it was allowed to wither and die.
It was allowed to wither and then murdered in 2022. You can't even buy it now, not even on GOG (you could buy it on GOG previously, but it was removed).
What happened if you bought it when it was available? Hopefully no Amazon Swindle 1984...
AFAIK those who have it, can still play it (but no official multiplayer servers anymore).
They released UT 3 in 2007 but I think around that time the company shifted more towards their engine, which by then was already the most used game engine for high profile games (don't quote me on that one, it's a gut feeling).
They started working on a new title, but it was meandering for a long time; it seemed that they would do some of the ground work but relied on the community a lot to design and build maps and weapons. Then the Fortnite team released a Battle Royale mode and made it free to play and it completely dominated the market. The UT team was transitioned to Fortnite in 2017, and Fortnite became their money printer earning them hundreds of millions per month.
While I love Unreal Tournament and would love for them or some other party to fill the gap of a no-nonsense arena shooter, the reality is that it wouldn't be as popular or lucrative as Fortnite. It'd be competing with FPS games like CoD and Battlefield, which have more going for them - including an uneven playing field, depending on players' progression and paid-for unlocks.
UT3 was a dismal failure both critically and commercially, while Gears of War was a huge success. Epic rode that for a while as they worked on Fortnite, and then they put out the battle royale mode in 2017 and the thing took off.
I loved Instagib.
Still can't forgive what epic did to UT4...
Are there are any FPS shooters on the genre of UT (or even Quake3) but modern, not remasters?
I've been missing a lot the frenetic gameplay of those, used to play a lot of UT at a decent level but nowadays I only see tactical FPSs or the likes of Counter-Strike/Battlefield with a high player count.
Tribes 3: Rivals is a load of fun. Flying around on jetpacks helps raise the skill ceiling.
Open-source one: Xonotic
https://xonotic.org/
Outing myself as a parent of young kids here, but I have been genuinely surprised how good Hypershot on Roblox is. It reminds me of Unreal Tournament a lot and is really easy to play, I've been hooked for a few weeks. It cuts everything down to the basics like UT without all the bells and whistles modern AAA games have. Oh and it's totally free (but with all the monetization attempts Roblox games tend to have, though they aren't necessary to play even at a high level).
Diabotical was heavily inspired by Quakeworld/Quake3/UT arena shooter FPS.
https://www.diabotical.com
https://www.warsow.net/ is good and runs on pretty much everything. Plays like a mix between UT and Quake3.
I love Warsow but am I right that it's very hard to find an opponent these days? I just checked https://arena.sh/wa/ and there are 4 non-empty servers, but most (maybe all) of the players seem to be bots.
I haven't played a while so I cannot comment. When I last played I spun up a server for my friend group to play on. This is the beauty of old school games like these, no need to rely on a company to keep servers running. In a way Warsow is the perfect LAN game: everyone can run it and it's easy to host a server.
Arena shooters have been relegated to side modes in other, bigger games. Probably the last big shooter with that as its focus was Halo: Infinite, but that struggled to stay relevant and its next big update will be its last.
Splitgate captures the feel nicely. Simple, fast, and last I checked free. Very recommended.
https://www.reddit.com/r/boomershooters/
there are but they are pretty niche, so mostly you play against bots or against friends.
This one is the last one I heard of but I also haven't followed the scene much lately: https://store.steampowered.com/app/324810/TOXIKK/
TOXIKK was awesome. But very hard to find matches with players.
Not that I can really think of - there's the adjacent Sauerbraten, but that's a similar vintage!
Shootmania was supposed to be it.
Not really unfortunately. This video goes a bit into why (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-t37idOfvk), but the short version is the skill floor (or ceiling?) was too high, making it unwelcoming for people to just pick up, unlike a COD-like shooter.
Halo 3 multiplayer had this solved by maintaining a dynamic rating of the players so that it could match skill levels when random matches were made.
Please point me to the nearest meat grinder. I'm jonesing for breakneck speed mayhem!
Isn't that what Overwatch/Valorant/Apex/Fortnite etc are?
No, these are class based team FPS, core of UT and Quake is (team) deathmatch
The Unreal Tournament series are arena shooters[1] which has sadly died a death, partially due to Epic Games negligence.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arena_shooter
Overwatch is a objective-based game, and like Valorant is a "hero shooter". Apex and Fortnite are battle royales.
I think the closest I got was The Finals but still class-based, so reminds me more of Team Fortress.
I loved playing 1v1 on Quake 2/3 and UT, also team deathmatch, from the list you commented it feels like each game got one of those aspects but none that makes the genre of UT what it is: knowing where weapons/ammo/armor spawn, map knowledge to navigate around, emergent movement mechanics (rocket jumps, strafe-jumping, etc.).
Interesting to see this genre mostly died out, and remnants of it have been scattered across other genres.
maybe Splitgate if that's still alive?
Splitgate 2 is scheduled to launch later this month.
Dusk is more Quakeish than UTish, but well worth a look. The graphics are deliberately low fidelity 90s retro, but the gameplay is tight.
Quake Champions?
Do they have access to the source code then?
The code was floating around the Internet some years back, and was probably privately shared much sooner.
I just wish these groups making fan-made builds would share at least patches, so they don't become gatekeepers and others could build on their work.
That is great news! I hope we will have a few public servers left to play this online.
Instagib Face Classic Quad Jumps in 2026?
Sign me the f up!
Surely epic will shut this down. The installer downloads a copy of the original game, well that is my reading of it.
This is being done by OldUnreal with written permission from Epic. They've been doing the same thing for Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament '99 under NDA and all.
They clearly state so. But also say they have epic's blessing. Then this will stay up.
Speaking of shooters of roughly that era, the Timesplitters Rewind fan project also just put out their first release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzWSrgQ3eMI
It's basically a modernized anthology of the three Timesplitters games that were quite popular on consoles of the PS2 era.
Wow this is really exciting, especially the Mac support. UT was kinda my gateway to programming. They made it really easy to build and play your own maps.
Amazing, more companies need to do this.
Separately it's a shame most modern games have removed LAN gaming.
I hope they fix the terrible SP campaign. The bot skill became too difficult too fast (if I remember correctly they after several stages also began to dodge your CROSSHAIR), you could not change base difficulty mid-run and the money system was punishing when you lost a match