“Permanently.”
Until Epic arbitrarily decides they are no longer free.
I saw a comment the other day claiming Epic shut down the servers for Unreal and UT and I was really confused by that considering the servers for those games were never ran by Epic in the first place. Players host their own in those. Like all multiplayer games other than MMORPGs back in the day.
games that offer the option to self-host dedicated servers often have a central “master” server. dedicated servers advertise themselfs to the master server and clients can ask the master server for a list of servers. might be that the comment was talking about a server like that.
the master server for ut 2k4 that was run by epic had to be replaced by one from the community for two years now for example.
e:
all ut games have community run master servers thread at ut99.org
As someone who played a lot of U2:XMP back in the day, I can confirm this is the case. Honestly I’m not sure why Epic killed their master servers, since it seems like something that can run on a toaster in a supply closet, but good that it was relatively easy for the community to reverse engineer and adopt.
Unreal and Unreal Tournament
Saved you a click.
That story is weeks old by now.
The two best games in the series
Never uninstalled Unreal & Return to Na Pali. Once in a while it just beckons for a new playthrough. And the unforgettable soundtrack, still listen regularly to the original UMX files with XMPlay. 🤤
i was not into online PC gaming for early UT games. the only one i enjoyed was UT3
