Epic Games has announced that it will begin turning off out-of-date online services and servers for many older games in the Epic family as the company moves to solely support Epic Online Services, a newer platform that supports a unified friends system, voice chat features, parental controls, and other modern benefits.
Most titles will be playable offline, while some will no longer be playable at all, Epic admitted before going on to apologize to players who are affected by the changes.
Here are the titles that will have all online services disabled on January 24, although players can continue playing their single or local multiplayer modes offline:
- 1000 Tiny Claws
- Dance Central 1-3
- Note: Dance Central VR online multiplayer will remain available
- Green Day: Rock Band
- Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess
- Rock Band 1-3
- Note: Rock Band 4 online multiplayer will remain available
- The Beatles: Rock Band
- Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars
- Unreal Gold
- Unreal II: The Awakening
- Unreal Tournament 2003
- Unreal Tournament 2004
- Unreal Tournament 3
- Note: We have plans to bring back online features via Epic Online Services in the future.
- Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition
“We have started removing games that were still available from all digital storefronts and are disabling any in-game DLC purchasing as of today,” Epic Games said in its announcement. “We also removed the Mac and Linux versions of Hatoful Boyfriend and Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star from storefronts today, as well as the mobile title DropMix. Players who already own these titles will still be able to play.”
Battle Breakers will shut down and will no longer be accessible to players on December 30, while Unreal Tournament (Alpha), Rock Band Blitz, the Rock Band Companion app, and SingSpace will be shut down and no longer accessible on January 24.
“We will automatically refund players for any in-game purchases made via Epic direct payment 180 days prior to today,” Epic Games added in regard to Battle Breakers, a free-to-play title that has been described by Epic as “an awesome, new RPG,” built as a passion project.
Discussion (3 replies)
Join Discussion →Did Unreal II have multiplayer? Honestly don't recall. How can UT1 and 2K3/2K4 lose online services, I thought those games use dedicated servers? Anyone can host a server. There's no way to turn off online services for those games. As for UT3, I thought it was the same deal with multiplayer. They did use cloud saves for the single-player campaign and for your account in general, including saving your settings (which I wasn't happy about). So I wonder how that might f*ck stuff up.
UT3 used to use GameSpy, but after GameSpy shut down they had to release a patch to restore that cloud save functionality and the multiplayer. Now it seems they are moving to some new service called "Epic Online Services." I don't trust Epic these days, so I'm gonna assume whatever they got planned is gonna be some sh1t.
So they removed all the games in the list, including all the Unreal games, from other storefronts, including Steam and GOG? Huh, well it seems they are indeed gone from Steam, but I still see them on GOG.
I bought a physical standalone copy of UT3 at launch in 2007, but later Epic allowed us to register our keys with Steam, so that we could have a Steam copy for free. We don't see that kind of stuff anymore.
Unreal II, yes and no. You had the ability to play the game co-op with friends using mods.
Unreal Tournament, UT2k3/4 and UT3 all use master servers for the in-game server browser. That is what will be going offline. Unreal Tournament (1999) has community run master servers though, so long as you edit your ini file to include the custom master server and the hosted server is also utilizing the custom master server it will remain online.
Aaaahhhh okay, thanks for clarifying.