Epic Games Provides No Hope For UT3 On Linux

With Valve's Steam client and Source Engine coming to Linux in the coming months, we decided to check with Epic Games to see how Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux is coming along. After all, the game was released in November of 2007 and nearly three years later the client is still missing with few words having come from Epic Games or Ryan Gordon (a.k.a. "Icculus"), the well known Linux game porter that was contracted to port UT3 to Linux and has done previous Unreal Engine projects.

In August of 2009, Epic Games had reported to us that the UT3 Linux client was slowly being worked on, which came months after Ryan Gordon made it sound like the port was just being optimized and going through bug-fixes. In October, Epic Games still was unsure if or when the UT3 Linux client would be complete.

This morning we heard from Steve Polge at Epic Games who is the lead designer of Unreal Tournament 3. Here's his e-mail to Phoronix.

There are no other reasons for its delay. Unfortunately, given the lack of progress it seems unlikely the UT3 Linux client will ever be completed.

- Steve

So it's unlikely we will ever see the Unreal Tournament 3 Linux client; even though in 2008, Ryan Gordon posted a screenshot of UT3 running on Linux. While we pretty much figured that the UT3 Linux client was dead some 550 days after the game first appeared in the hands of Windows gamers, this run-around by Epic Games and Ryan Gordon is disappointing. This is especially disappointing considering Ryan hasn't been working on any other exciting games or projects -- at least acknowledging them publicly -- in many months. He hasn't even updated his blog in nearly five months, which previously was home to exciting reports on the progress of his different game ports and other open-source projects like his work on SDL. His last exciting Linux game port would probably be Prey for Linux, which came back in 2008.

This is also while Linux Game Publishing hasn't been doing much either. LGP has some game ports that have now been "in development" for a number of years. About LGP's only exciting project in the past year was Shadowgrounds: Survivor.

id Software also won't have any new games out until next year when Rage is expected to launch atop the id Tech 5 engine, which should have a Linux version.

It's very sad times right now for tier-one commercial games on Linux, which should make it very easy for Valve Software to conquer and control with their Steam software on the Linux desktop and then the game titles running off their very advanced Source Engine.