We haven't heard much from Epic Games lately. But is there a big announcement coming from the Unreal-Unreal Tournament-Gears of War developer? On Thursday, people who checked out Epic Games' forums saw this image above. However that image was taken down pretty quickly and it seems message threads about said image have been deleted from the message board.

What is it? Is it an announcement of a new Unreal game that got leaked before it should have? Perhaps an all new Epic Games project? Maybe even someone hacking into the forums and posting an image that means nothing? Even a news post about this image on the fan site Beyond Unreal was taken down (although the message board post is still there). We've emailed Epic to try to get a comment on just what might be going on.

Update: Our sister site Joystiq claims through their unnamed sources that the big announcement that might be tied into this image could be a version of Unreal Engine 3 priced so that regular consumers can purchase and use it. Meanwhile BeyondUnreal has now deleted the message board post where we got this image.