Unreal 2 goes solo
Sequel sheds multiplayer support
Epic's Mark Rein has revealed in an interview with HomeLAN Fed that Unreal 2 will no longer include multiplayer support. Given the recent announcement of Unreal Tournament 2 this is perhaps not entirely surprising, and Mark admitted that the new multiplayer-focused game was a recent idea which "was not anticipated at any time during the design of Unreal 2 nor during much of the development". The dropping of online support will also help developers Legend to get the game out the door in a timely fashion, as Unreal 2's expected release date has now been pushed back from summer to Christmas. "Now that we have UT2 clearly in the picture and ready to go before Unreal 2, it doesn't make a lot of sense for the dev team to expend their time and energy polishing multiplayer when they can use that time to polish an exceptional single player experience", according to Mark. Which is a shame, because by all accounts Legend had some kind of class-based mode planned for the multiplayer portion of Unreal 2, with players able to capture territory and build force field and sentry guns to help defend their team's gains. On the bright side, we should at least see both games some time this year now, as well as Unreal Championship on the Xbox if Microsoft's online plans get off the ground. Related Feature - Unreal 2 screenshots