It seems you cannot stop this story, you can only hope to contain it. Legend Entertainment's Chris Hargrove has made a follow-up post to Infogrames Forums with what is hopefully the final update (for the moment, at least) to the story on whether or not the Flak Cannon and ASMD Shock Rifle will be included in Unreal II (story and story), saying: "I talked with Mike Verdu and he said (unbenownst to me at the time of my post) that at some point recently we did finally agree with Epic to put these two weapons in, so apparently that decision was finally made." He goes on to point out that it "hasn't necessarily been completely decided yet is the form the weapons will take in terms of gameplay, i.e. whether they'll be in the singleplayer game or only multiplayer, and other potential gameplay tweaks to help out balancing issues, etc... that kind of stuff still hasn't been worked out entirely yet. But apparently having the weapons in some form is now part of our baseline, so Mr. Frary wasn't entirely incorrect."