Qu: So you showed us Unreal Tournament 3, What is it like now?
Well were in the home stretch. Were really trying to wrap it up right now. So were in QA right now getting all the bugs ironed out and the game is basically finished; and what were doing now is just making sure everything is triple A, we want quadruple A polish on everything. So you know, Warfare is developed and all the maps are set up for it. It's a really cool vehicle focused carnage kind of game type.
And that’s the thing with UT. We're a zero time to spectacle kind of game. When you spawn in you see a car flipping over in front of you, three guys blowing each other away. That realistically - we don't have a death queue for instance - so when you die you are instantly back in. We don't have a targeting reticule that expands when you move. When you jump off a building you are just as accurate as when crouched in a corner.
And so all those things are coalescing into Warfare to make it a really memorable carnage game-type. It's got a lot of vehicles. It's got the focusing mechanisms of Onslaught so there's only one or two nodes that can be captured at any one time. And since vehicles are fast they have a pretty big wide open space we want to make sure people can find each other and get to the combat. So that works really well. The hover board is also a nice compromise so lets say through no fault of your own your spawn at a location where there’s no action going on. Well that's unacceptable to us if you have 2 minute walk before you see someone shooting someone else. So now everybody comes equipped with a hover board in Warfare and they can actually truck over there.
You can't shoot when your on a hover board and if you take even one point of damage you go flying. So it really is like a look around and make sure you're safe to go. There's nothing more stressful than a flag run on the hover board in vehicle CTF
cos it's on your back and you see couple of flak shells whizzing over your head and it's like "Am I gonna make it am I gonna make it". It's only got to touch you once and you’re gone. But for the most part it's really come together.
We have some great deployables too. We have this "slow volume" which is this huge thing that you deploy over your flag. It’s a big cube and anything that moves through it, weapons, people, vehicles move very slowly. And so you drop it on your flag or a command avenue to your node and people have to make a judgement call. I can take the long way around, but if no-one's around I can make it through this cube quick enough to make it to the other side. So you see guys check around to make sure its safe before they plunge into it. And then of course there's some guy waiting up there with a sniper rifle to get you. So just in general it feels really great. It's integrated very well into the single player campaign as well.
So in the single player campaign you have all these branches, so do I rebuff the invasion or do I do what my corporate masters wanted me to do originally. And those decisions have ramifications throughout the rest of the game. And in mission you can do things that aren't required to win. There's one mission has the Necris stealth
technology that you can go and steal and then in future missions down the line you're going to be able to use that technology yourself on your own vehicles. There's a lot of real persistence.
We were always amazed that for UT2004 how few people went on line for a multiplayer game. And we have kickass AI. Steve Polge is the lead programmer and the lead designer and he was the guy who did the original Reaper bot for Quake 1. He's a specialist at bot AI. We’re not trying to simulate like you know a world war two soldier. We're trying to simulate a 13 year old kid on his high school LAN. You know this is a guy who is going to play to exploit you and that's what are AI really specialises in. So just in general Warfare has really come together. And we are shipping 13 maps with it so actually just in MP alone that's over twice as many vehicle maps that we shipped with 2K4 for the most part we are thrilled to be here.
Qu: Which part of the game did you focus on for this single player right now and is it passed UT is it a bigger MP game?
Yeah, what we wanted to do was make sure that everything in the box was good. And we didn’t feel are single player experience in previous UT's was good enough. So we spent a lot of time getting that. That was probably the focus of probably the last 6 months. We had this cool globe that you chose where you go next. It's like a C&C's map branching thing where you can chose where you go. And you are working for all these different corporations and just cos you are fighting for one against another, doesn’t mean two missions you can make a decision and say well, I'm going to be fighting for my ex enemies against my old allies - and so you can do things like that as well.
At the same time we were trying to get everything well running on the PS3. And so a lot of work has gone on optimising our engine for the console and bringing things over. One thing we are really excited about is the mod support. Were going to be bringing mods to UT3 on the PS3 so finally now on your PC you can take your mod on your PC, cook it (format it so PS3 can read it), stick on a memory card, stick that memory card in a PS3, our game will see it, put it in the right place and you can run it. And you like any mod development its probably more work than most people think it is. And it'll be like that on the console so you'll have the same memory constraints that professional developers have, the same frame rate concerns, you have to take care of all those things that a real developer would have to concern themselves with. But for people interested getting into the game business this is going to be the best thing in the world. Because all of a sudden you can do console development without a 10 thousand dollar debt console. You have your PC you do your work there. You port it over to your console and share it there on the playstation. So it's a great thing that Sony is very interested in having. We are really excited to be able to really innovate on the console and it's probably one of the best features we are coming up with now specifically for the PS3.
Qu. So there will be no difference between the PC and the console version.
Yeah that's right. People kept asking us what are you cutting from the PS version that's in the PC. It's really the exact opposite. We are bringing things that are PC staples, like mods to the console. There's no visual degradation between the two. They look the same. And the out demos started on the same level looking in the same direction on the PC and PS3 to prove it. So for the most part it is the exact same game. Consoles definitely slowed down the movement a little bit and the collision cylinders are a little larger; were talking like 5% or 6% or something like that. And one thing we've seen in our play tests is on the PC, we have some of the best UT players in the world on the PC the best players are up here, and the worst players are down there. On consoles they get closer. Like the worst player in the world can occasionally smoke the best player in the world on a console because of those little tweaks.
For the most part the controls feel good. We certainly have some people prefer the console cos they are more console gamers then PC but at the same time PC Gamers can get into it because it feels right, it feels good, feels right, so for the most part we are really happy with the way its gone.
Qu. How many people can play on the PC and PS3. Are they any different?
Not especially. All the maps are designed with between 8 and 24 players, that's what we consider the sweet spot. During development we tried 64 players and big open worlds and it stopped feeling like UT. It felt to spread out; the carnage wasn't quick enough. On the PC for multiple if you have the pipe for network and the quad core processor you can do 64 players. There's no hard limit on the player count on the PC. On the console we'll probably limit to what ever the map supports, 24 at the high end but we are still fussing around with it.
Qu. In the last year you showed us the Levi. Are the maps huge compared with UT2004?
The maps are probably about the same size, possibly a bit bigger. The Levi is very closely integrated into a number of maps. And that's something we really like about our warfare maps in UT3. When we did the maps for ONS for UT2K4 the game play was still evolving while the maps were being made. And some of those maps were built well before we new what ONS was really going to be about. And we think the maps suffered for that. This time we knew exactly what the game type was before we built the maps and so the Levi which was sort of an afterthought in some of those 2K4 maps are very closely integrated into some of the maps like Serenity and so they fit perfectly. There are some huge maps that on foot would take you a minute or two to get across. But for the most part the sizes are probably smaller than some of the other big wide open FPSs out there but for us we prefer the constant action without worrying about whether you have someone to shoot at or not. When you’re in UT it's a zero time to spectacle game; carnage, carnage, carnage all the time.
Qu. Are there classic maps coming back?
We went back and did a few redos, like Torlan for example. Deck is certainly in there. There's some that tweaked sufficiently that we thought we would change the name. So Phobos, was a previous map, UT3 has Deimos (mars' smallest moon) its basically the same map but it has enough differences that we wanted to rename it. So yeah we do those. So for downloadable content don't be surprised to see a version of Face or some of the other staples. That's one of the things when you work with a franchise. You want to appeal to people that passed on your game before but you also include a lot of stuff that like the game and bought the previous one. And redoing those maps in all UE3's visual splendour is cool and appealing to our level designers. They love those maps more than anyone. So there's plenty of them that they did that we are not shipping because we didn't have the time to polish them up. So yeah there will be some returning favourites.
Qu. In terms of new modifications. You have new modifications and possibilities because of the hover board - maybe there's a race with a hover board.
I wouldn't be surprised. And that's the cool thing. When we cut BR from UT3 which was a game type that was in 2K4 and the reason for that was that no-one really played it. Sure some people played it but we had built 7 maps for it and you just wouldn't find it on-line. So what we wanted to do was focus on game types that we knew people would play a lot of. The hover board is a really neat solution to getting around the map. It's really neat to be able to tether onto another thing, a vehicle, and have it pull you. We started doing air lifts - so a Raptor would come down and three guys would tether onto it and the hover board would lift them to where they go and they cut, land on their hover boards and do this very dramatic attack.
Qu. So you have GoW, UT3, GoW for PC. What's next?
Well, everybody at Epic always has 100 games they want to make there's never a shortage of good ideas. People have always been talking about doing another Unreal. Since U2 they've been wanting to do an Unreal 3. Now that we have a good single player experience under our belt with GoW and soon UT3 the likelihood of doing it is not bad. Another SP Unreal game will come out. We certainly haven't started on it but that's one of the ideas that keeps getting kicked around. We also did a multiple title deal with midway so you should expect more UT titles down the line. At the same time we've done a lot of good free mod packs and bonus packs and free content and we intend to do the same with UT3 after we ship both on the PS3 and PC. New maps, new character customisation bits, new vehicles, things like that are all on the table for additional bonus packs.
