Epic announces livestream to reveal "future of Unreal Tournament" on May 8

Be still, my heart. Epic Games vice president Mark Rein has posted the words on Twitter I've been waiting years for: Unreal Tournament is coming back. We don't know what form it will take, but Rein followed up his original tweet "I love Unreal Tournament, so excited for the comeback" with a confirmation—"Yes UT coming back!"—and a link to Epic's Unreal Engine Twitch account , where the future of Unreal Tournament will be revealed Thursday, May 8 at 2PM EST.

Since Epic plans to unveil its plans for Unreal Tournament on the Unreal Engine Twitch channel, and not the Epic Games channel , we can make a few guesses about the game. It may be a showpiece for Unreal Engine 4 in the way Gears of War was for Unreal Engine 3. It may simply be a tech demo for Unreal Engine 4 and not a full game. Wouldn't that be a drag.

Another tweet from Epic's Paul Meegan makes us think this is more than a throwaway project. "UE4 Dev Community + Epic. The future of Unreal Tournament," he tweeted:

The future of Unreal Tournament could be on consoles or—dare I say it—mobile. Don't make us play Unreal Tournament on iPhones, Epic. Don't you dare. Give us a new game on PC, whether it's a Quake Live-style update of classic UT or a Unreal Engine 4 juggernaut.

In the meantime, we'll be over here playing UT2004 at 4K . There are still busy servers out there, and the game looks pretty damn good a decade later.

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

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