Unreal Tournament 2004 Master Server

[Osman Briseno]

InJuly 2014 the GameSpy master server has shut down. In order to keep using the server browser you will have to add one or more working master servers. The Unreal community is providing us with the following backup Master servers.

Unreal Tournament 2004 is was an incredibly popular game. On January 24th 2023 Epic Games decided to shut down their master servers for several of their classic titles which were for sale practically a month before the shut down. We strongly believe in supporting games. Unreal Tournament 2004 was one of the most modded games in history, with direct support AND ENCOURAGEMENT from the developer to add to the game.

When the news came of the shut down, it was clear at the time there needed to be a single source that everyone connected to. OpenSpy is a project that has brought online connectivity and had a reverse engineered Master Server nearly ready to go.

If the file is also not in the specified locations above, find the installation directory of your game manually: right-click on the Unreal Tournament icon on your desktop and select "Properties". This will show a dialog box similar to the one below.

The configuration file is called UnrealTournament.ini and is located in the System folder inside the folder that was specified during the installation. Look at the path in the "Start in" field. This path is the directory where System and UnrealTournament.ini are located.

Before making changes to your configuration, make sure to close your game first. Once you have located the configuration file, open it with a text editor of choice and find the [UBrowserAll] section. In this section, you replace the old GameSpy entry (red) with one or more of the 333networks-affiliated masterserver entries (green):

Restart your game for the changes to take effect. The first time that you restart the game, close and re-open your configuration file to see if the changes persisted. Go to "Multiplayer Games" and see whether the UBrowser now lists online Unreal Tournament servers. If this does not work for you, please visit our discord server, where we will try to help you set up the game properly.

As someone who purchased most of the Unreal games on Steam some time ago and have a history of playing against friends in Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition, I don't mind the decision to shut down the servers too much - it's less than ideal, but understandable, and there is the option of playing locally via LAN and/or with bots or using custom servers. But the delisting of the games on Steam does concern me. It's not so bad yet because they're still up on GOG, but there is no guarantee of them not also being removed on GOG in the future.

I don't think the drama around this is overreactive. If this was happening in isolation, it would be an overreaction, but it's part of a wider trend towards Games as a Service, limiting the range of time for which you can keep buying and playing older games so that more users will feel compelled to buy and play newer games which are more expensive and have more stringent copy protection, online-only requirements and microtransactions etc., at the cost of consumer freedoms and historical video game preservation. If they can get away with doing this, it increases the chances of companies being able to get away with more of this sort of thing in the future.

Can confirm i can still play UT99 on Steam despite being delisted. Which is good. If i wanted MP, ill just used the community servers. I play it offline with some custom stuff for leisure time, and for that, the game remains golden.

Epic could, however, left the games in unsupported mode and just made a redirect to the OldUnreal servers. That they didn't is actually a missed opportunity by them to put the hard and cherished work of the OldUnreal folks in the limelight.

This is basically the whole Digital-only and what to do with it topic. I do think that Epic's move is uncalled for, especially when it denotes games that are purely single player. It means a purchase on Steam isn't a purchase to a game, it is a validation to a certain game, nothing less, nothing more.

These kinds of arguments venture the emotions rather than providing facts: If you want to use this argument, have a list that highlights that it is more costly to keep Doom servers afloat than Unreal servers.

Nice attack, champ, bet you feel real big and mighty don'tcha. I merely made levels for the game, I'm not directly tied to the project nor make any money at this point from having done so. But thanks for showing how low you'd go to get some internet points.

To be completely clear - I agree that what Epic's doing is a real shame. I honestly do. But that said, again, the drama around it seems so overreactive compared to how invested in the game people were prior to this announcement.

If there's a strong community around the game then there's bound to be hundreds / thousands of talented people who will do whatever necessary to keep it alive in lieu of Epic's support / infrastructure; much like the members of this forum do for Doom, and as has been seen in countless other communities with the likes of private servers, community patches, etc. It's not all doom and gloom.

I don't know what is behind the Code for the Master Server, but without Epics blessing, there is this little Door open that they'll shoot with Canons on every Attempt to make an own Master Server that interacts with the (possible) properitary Software of the dedicated Servers.

I think its best explained as the age old problem of 'you don't appreciate what you have until its gone'. Unreal has, until now, never gone anywhere, its always been available and affordable, and freely purchasable on all kinds of platforms whenever someone felt the itch to get it, or in my case, get digital copies to replace the old obsolete CDs

To add more coal to the fire, Epic is very very disliked by a lot of vocal people due to aggressive business decisions and exclusivity deals with very poor support, and here they are apparently trying to drive their reputation down even further. They are basically poking embers with a stick and reigniting the fire for no reason.

It would be nice if a controversial topic in EE could be discussed in an adult manner without lame sarcasm and embarrassingly petty personal attacks one of these days, considering that most of the people posting here are adults.

I think Epic's decision sucks, but I'm not going to direct my ire at people who had nothing to do with that decision, and people who can do nothing about that decision. I'm also not understanding why people are so shocked that a corporation that has made itself famous in the modern era 50% from Fortnite and 50% from braindead cash-first-fuck-the-consumer business moves has made a braindead business move so they can focus on Fortnite cash. I can understand the disappointment, but it was inevitable disappointment. Did people really believe that Tim Sweeney was going to say "well, Unreal servers are only costing us 0.000007% of our budget, so we can keep it" as opposed to "Unreal is costing us a whole 0.000007% of our budget, bring me my axe"? I'll never cease to be amazed at how the same people who pride themselves on fighting the evil megacorps revel in shock everytime one of the evil megacorps they're fighting does something evil.

All points I wholeheartedly agree with. I can't fathom why they're removing the games from storefront, I only comprehend the reasoning behind shutting the servers down hence why that was the only component I weighed in on.

My point is that the "financial side" is a bunch of bullshit to excuse this decision. Again: It'd be totally understandable if Epic handed the keys for the games to OldUnreal, said "look you probably know more about these games than anybody currently working at Epic does," had them keep the flame, and turn the lights off on their end.

I can hem and haw and say "well yes Epic doesn't want to spend money where it doesn't think it means anything" but that's basically meaningless. As far as I'm concerned the inner machinations of a corporation aren't particularly interesting or relevant to what's actually happened, i.e. yet another corporate entity completely disregarding their own history in the endless quest to Make Number Go Up.

What I really don't like about hearing these truisms is that they basically serve as excuses for poor behavior. "Ahh, well I don't like the outcome, but it's the only way it'll ever be!" Do we really have to put up with this? Just sit back and say "yup, okay, dead game now, let's pretend Unreal never happened. Hey why is your company's product named that?"

As an aside I don't appreciate being told I have a bad attitude for having the temerity to rebuff the claim that I have no right to be angry at this because I haven't devoted sufficient time in my life to Unreal. If you're going to scold me you may as well scold the other people here who've been similarly nasty.

This makes no sense what so ever, especially in regards to the first 2 games which both have a full length single player campaigns. Personally I bought them years ago, but what of younger players who are just discovering the genre, probably through Doom or perhaps Dusk or something. They won't get the chance now to play these and Gold especially is a great game.

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