Question about Unreal Tournament (PAL)

[MR RATCHET]

Does anyone know if the PAL version supported online multiplayer? I can't seem to find any information about it other than the NTSC version having online support.

I'm aware the servers are sadly still not back online but could anyone shed some light on whether the PAL version had it back in the day?

[ncman071]

i would venture to say no...just because other than pc...i dont believe any other versions supported online play....i know seganet for us supported it for usa..but i dont think sega pal or sega of japan did..but i could be wrong

[Tarnish]

Despite the whole "Up to 6 billion players" and all the other online-focused marketing campaigns in the PAL territory, they really cheaped out on online support. A lot of PAL releases had online modes removed, Unreal Tournament being of those cases.

[OlivusPrime]

Yeah once the Dreamcast's discontinuation was announced, a few PAL games in development had their online support dropped, most notably Unreal Tournament, Daytona USA 2001 and Outtrigger. Oddly this wasn't universal - Worms World Party for example came out after all of these and still had online support included.

The best idea if you want to be prepared for if/when these games come back online is to import the US versions, and use a swap disk like GameShark/Codebreaker/Dreamshell to run them on your PAL console. Though of course, Unreal in particular isn't likely to come back anytime soon.

[Jenkins]

Maybe it was because of the slower modem in PAL regions? Bundled with a 33.6k instead of 56k modem (like in the US).

[OlivusPrime]

Maybe it was because of the slower modem in PAL regions? Bundled with a 33.6k instead of 56k modem (like in the US).

It was purely due to support ending for the Dreamcast and developers not feeling the need to include online play due to the impending discontinuation.

Bear in mind that while SegaNet in the US lasted until the end of 2002, Dreamarena in Europe only lasted until March 2002, not even a full year after the above games had released.

Online play in Europe had been promised for a lot of these titles in pre-release materials, but the sudden lack of online functionality when they came out created a lot of bad feeling that remains prevalent to this day.

[MR RATCHET]

Good to know, especially Daytona USA. Will look to import those versions for my collection and if the day comes that multiplayer is restored, i'll be ready!

Thank you all for the quick responses.

[sh4]

Wasn't someone looking into back engineering this to get it back online?