Well... the truth to my lack of opinion to actually charge forth with would come down to one thing:
I have completely no idea what I want in a new Unreal Tournament.
That's probably 95% of the whole chemistry I've mixed myself into right now. But the thing is, we DO want Unreal Tournament. Whether it be a new one or not is moot?
I'm not sure if, perhaps, a large number of individuals in the forums don't have a clue about exactly what they want either. Another gaze into the forums and people actually want an Unreal Tournament '99-2 or an Unreal Tournament 2004-2. I think I can rightly assume if Epic wanted to have an Unreal Tournament revival that appeases fans but NOT turn much of a profit... suddenly place more news and emphasis on community mods and content and maybe even do some uplifting. It'll be the nicest thing they can do to UT in general.
But Epic wants to turn a profit, so they have the monetized mods idea which, I must say, isn't bad at all. Everyone gets to put their idea in and eventually use a super cutting-edge toolset like UE4 and turn a profit through ye ol' mod culture practices. It's the best of both worlds. And the base game is frickin'
FREEEEEE.
But that latter bit is also a problem: maybe it's not actually the direction we want for UT to go but it isn't worthy of hate either so it's never in-mind. It feels somewhat useless because, really, we could just go install old mods with some amount of juice still being churned every now and then from our own aging community - which might as well be more worth while than a 'premium' 14.99 USD mod maybe that has AAA graphics most of us here can easily find in other games. And that, while UT has always had a face-mashing moody atmosphere that only good (or maybe just decent?) art direction could produce, we were only minimally interested in fancy shiny technical graphics.
It's clear when our focus here on USP in the maps schema, for example, is about things like architectural flow, atmosphere, conceptual grandness, layout, gameplay pace, gameplay balance... there's no spot in the schema for how some map manages to use DX10/11 effects and has things like Rembrandt rays or bloom. In fact, I can probably state for everyone here that we all don't actually like post-processing or new graphics techniques that much - because we all think a solid artistic sense is all that's necessary to push through and I totally DIG that idea.
Nobody has ever downrated a map here for not having DX10/11 crap.To top it all off... I showed SP-AHRG to a friend of mine and he thought, if it wasn't for the low poly 90's models, he'd think it was a PS2/3 game.
That comment came from a guy who does Call of Duty and Battlefield, game series that are actually known for trying to push technical graphics but, so to speak, having no imagination in terms of concept art. (although the futuristic CoD games are somehow becoming more liberated in the use of fantastical ideas)