Epic Games may have since left the BSP-carved valleys of Unreal in favour of the cartoonish hills of Fortnite, but at least it hasn’t locked the series that put the company on the map deep in a digital vault somewhere. In the last few years, it has given permission for the Internet Archive to assume hosting duties for its older shooters, which is why you can download both Unreal Gold and the original Unreal Tournament from archive.org.
Now, the latest of these rehabilitated shooters has been released into the wild, bounding across the fields in search of flags to capture. Yep, Unreal Tournament 2004 is available to download for free, with Epic’s approval.
“Please note that this is the first public patch for Unreal Tournament 2004 in over 20 years,” writes UT project manager and computer science professor Stijn-volckaert. “We have implemented numerous fixes and improvements, written a new SDL backend for Linux and macOS, and even a new renderer. We have also migrated the entire codebase to modern build systems. Some new bugs may have slipped in!”
If you’ve never played Unreal Tournament 2004 and are wondering whether you should, the answer is yes, as soon as possible. It’s generally regarded as the high-point of the series, certainly on a par with the 1999 original. UT 2004 combines the visual upgrades from UT 2003 with a much wider array of game modes.
Crucially, UT 2004 introduced the vehicle-based Onslaught modes, and brought back UT’s innovative, objective-based Assault mode missing from UT 2003. One of those Assault maps, AS-Mothership, takes the action into space, with you duking it out with the opposing team in fighter craft before the attacking team boards the titular mothership in an attempt to blow up the core. It’s rad.
Whether you’ll be able to find a game for a multiplayer shooter that’s been out of action for years is another matter. But I should imagine this new release will coax a few players back online. Even if it doesn’t, UT-2004’s bot AI is pretty robust from what I recall. Either way, Stijn-volckaert says the community patch “works in online games except on servers with AntiTCC”.
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