Epic is turning off online services and servers for some older games.

Epic is turning off online services and servers for some older games - Epic Games

All Unreal games are removed from Steam already, they're still on GOG but not for long i bet. Really strange seeing even UT has a form of singleplayer, and Unreal 2 has no multiplayer at all.

 

If you have servers in your favourites for the UT games you’ll still be able to connect to those once the master server goes down so make sure any servers you enjoy playing on are in there.

There’s also a chance that a community ran master server for UT2004 will be a thing, but could take time.

 

And UT3 is going free to play. Too bad f2p wasn't a thing when it was new. Might of had a better chance. Man that thing was rough. Morphed, fat bodied Gears of War models bouncing around like 95lb light weights. I miss UT. UT4 isn't half bad now that there's been a solid amount of community made maps. Just takes time finding a server to connect to.

I hope someone remakes UT or UT2K4 with the rtx remix.

 

UT3 was a step back in pretty much every way, didn’t help that Midway was publishing it and they were on their last legs at that point.

The black edition restored a lot of lost features but the bulky and slower gameplay was just horrible.

 

I always want to get back into it. But unfortunately it's one of those games you had to keep on your pc and not remove. It requires so many different community maps, added maps from epic, skins, and so on. I get the urge, download, remember how bare it is, sigh, uninstall. Every year or two this happens.

 

I go through that same routine, UT2004 however hasn’t left my PC, it’s basically the first game I install on any new machine

 

Yeah, shame that services like GameSpy, MPlayer, Heat.net and the like are gone. They got around that problem by running their own master server lists.

 

Was someone a bit eager for the Christmas drinks?

'EPIC Games Turns Off Onlien Services for sevela older games'

Did you mean Online and Several by any chance?

 

UT99 is still Epic's main glory. good thing i purchased all of Unreal games on my Steam many years ago.

 

Yeah... insert your toxic comment here. I can never imagine that running basic servers for such old games is not commercially acceptable to a company. It can't cast that much to do this, and a multi million dollar company should be able to cover those expenses as a matter of community service.

Just shows that Epic is in no way more or less holy / gamer friendly / your buddy than anybody else.

 

Meanwhile they're making installation of their "epic online services" software mandatory.

 

@Serotonin
UT2004 was one of the first games that was Linux-native from release day, and one of the nice things about playing it on Linux is you can re-package the whole game with all the maps and mods fairly easily while still being registered. I even have it so the whole game fits on a single-layer DVD and can be played from that too (the high compression doesn't really make it load that much slower than a HDD).
I've been kinda wanting to re-play the game. It's been many years. The 2000s was, IMO, the best era of gaming. Games back then could run on systems powerful enough to supply lots of content and graphics that were "good enough" to [usually] not be distractingly ugly or just simply pixel art. They had new innovative features that you would actually want to use and improved gameplay (compare that to games today where you have a trillion different controls for features you may only ever use once). They didn't take themselves too seriously, and were more focused on being fun than realistic, while still having a level of realism that 80s/90s games were never capable of. Most of such games you could learn how to play within a half hour. Unlike most modern games, they required real skill to play, but unlike 80s/90s games, they didn't require you to be a perfectionist to win.
Best of all, these games didn't have microtransactions, loot crates, or new iterations of basically the same thing. You paid once for a complete base game (which by itself had more than enough content), sometimes you got free additional content, and sometimes there were expansion packs for the game. Expansion packs/DLCs are great since you get to keep everything you like about the game but just add more to it. It's annoying to have to buy a new game and leave behind all your old stuff when it's otherwise the same code.

 

If anyone is still interested in playing UT2004 I help admin over on the Miasma community servers, we run modified game types like berserk VCTF which personally isn't my cup of tea but it's popular, and Freon which is basically round based freeze tag, first team to 10 rounds wins which is a lot of fun, a guide for players new to Freon was also created https://freon.miasma.rocks/

IP's for the servers can be found here https://miasma.rocks/

Servers are hosted in the UK and we have ping compensation to help people playing from further away.

 

My question would be: how much does it cost you to keep those running?
Aren't you getting enough money from Fortnite to keep something running that was available in over 2 decades ago?

"we have plans to bring online services back in the future"
Maybe give those first, then turn off the old servers?

 

I can understand that Epic and other don`t want to continue to support old games that very few play nowadays, because that costs time and money.

What i can`t understand is companies preventing gamers from using private servers to play those same games!!!

It`s an extremely anti friendly gamer move and should be fordbidden, compaies should release tools so gamers could continue to play their games without the need for company servers.

 

I have the Unreal Deal Pack, which was gifted to me by a Epic staff member a couple of years ago

I do own CDs and boxed copies of Unreal, UT99 (two boxed copies), UT03 and UT04.

 

Thanks, I'll have to check this out. Last Summer I reinstalled UT2004 for the first time in years. I was both shocked and happy to see that the server browser still worked - what a bummer that Epic is killing off the browser though.

It was one thing a decade ago when Epic was still this small company, toying around with doing the community-involved UT remake and trying to push UE to devs. But now? Present day (with all the Fortnite money), it's hard to understand why Epic isn't willing to give any love to the UT fans. It would take, what, maybe a few minutes worth of a single day's Fortnite profits to fund the master list servers in perpetuity?

 

ohh i still play UT3 sometimes with my friends! So what now? Tunngle is abandoned, what's the alternative to make a virtual local lan?

Edit: Tried Radmin VPN and it works

 

I never understand why companies drop master servers completely, if there are 0 players sure, but if there are still people playing like ut3 or ut2004, Even if there are only dozens of players I can't imagine it costs hardly anything to host such a thing.

 

Everyone is welcome, the two most popular servers we run do get busy still!