And now what?

Well, the day has arrived. All of Epic's master servers for all Unreal games have been rendered inaccessible and Epic's own version of Unreal Tournament 4 has officially been scrubbed from view. The only game that apparently seemed to have escaped the black shutdown purge is Unreal Tournament 3, as it's going to be re-released on EGS, Steam and GOG as the actually free-to-play (-hopefully- not "BYWTV" free-to-play) Unreal Tournament 3 X. However, not all's lost, as Sly. has put this nice resume of how to continue playing Unreal games after the black shutdown:

Preface[]

"The following is a two-post summary of the franchise's situation based on what's known at the time of writing. It is meant to calm the spirits of the community and inform on what steps one has to take to keep playing online. So please reshare this with Discord mods / admins who are looking for a properly formatted summary explaining how the situation is like at the moment. Feel free to edit and update this file and make variations thereof.

Keep on fragging!"

– Sly.

Unreal[]

Unreal Gold has OldUnreal's 227 patches: These patches add community master servers to your ini next to fixes and new editing content that improve its engine. Do NOT copy your old ini files (or saves) over to your System folder after patching! Bear in mind that v226* clients are network-incompatible with 227* (in layman's terms, while 227 clients can join 226 servers, the opposite isn't true unless a specific setting is turned on the v227 server). 227 is the de facto standard in the community. Most mods and maps need it!

If you have issues with 227i or resolution to big too read the HUD, try the 227j release, though be wary with issues with XOpenGL. It has an HD HUD though.

Oh, and a full version v227k is also on the works!

Unreal Tournament[]

Unreal Tournament for both retail and GOTY editions have OldUnreal's v469c patch. A v469d version is also on the works and about to be released soon.

The patch is network-compatible with v436, the latest official version. It adds fixes, QOL additions and community master servers to your ini. I recommend NOT to copy your old ini files to a patched installation just in case of issues.

Info page about 469
v469c, as of this writing the latest version
Much like v227, the patch is maintained by the guys at OldU, so putting contact links here is redundant, lol!

Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Tournament 2004[]

OpenSpy[]

Did you know you can play UT2003 online matches in 2023? The solution is called OpenSpy, a master server replacement for both UT2003 and UT2004 allowing you to keep playing online.

UT2004 Community Patch[]

I'd wrote a description about this one, but I'll let OJMoody, the man behind the updated Ballistic Weapons mod, sum it up:

"The patch is intended to ensure people are on the latest version of the game with a RAM patch, not RAM boost. (...) The patch mainly concentrates on ensuring people are aware of the master server change, since the mod doesn't adjust the ut2004.ini, working on getting all up to date content to players, 3369 and ECE and fixing the ram crash up to 4 GB."

– OJMoody

The patch combines the Large Address Aware Patch (to allow UT2004 to use more RAM as it is 32bit) with the OpenSpy ini entries. It should be applied to a fresh installation! This, of course, is the first of many patches to come, so stay tuned!

ModDB page
UT2004 Relics and Rayguns Discord server, where the 2004 patch and BW itself are being developed

Unreal Tournament 4[]

UT4 was delisted, can't be added to your library anymore, neither UT Editor (a separate EGS "game"). However, perhaps knowing this was bound to happen at some point, after Epic Games stopped updating UT4, a part of the community has been crafting updates for the game in order to keep it updated and as bug-free as possible. The update is called UT4UU (literally UT4 Unofficial Update) If you added it to your library prior to the announcement, you can still download and play online.

"UT4UU is essentially just a plugin with a nice installer for it. If you want, it can also upgrade some of the game modules. UT4UU is practically limitless of what it can potentially change in UT4. It is supported on both Windows and Linux operating systems and it works in the game, server and editor. While some mutators may already provide some of the same features, UT4UU makes it possible for them to work across the whole game, not just in specific servers.

Due to the nature of this plugin it could potentially be expanded upon to create cheats, that is why it is currently not open-source. This repository is just meant to be used to track bugs, feature requests and other matters regarding UT4UU."

– UT4UU Github page

There's also UT4 Master Server, "a reimplementation of EpicGames servers, just enough to be able to serve as a master server for Unreal Tournament pre-alpha".

I think that's all for the moment. Again, credits to Sly. for most of the data. We'll see you in the arena!