hile Epic’s Mark Rein gave us an overarching look at Unreal Tournament III, we went even deeper for our next part of our Unreal Tournament coverage. We sit down for a lengthy conversation with Epic’s Lead Producer Jeff Morris to find out even more about this highly anticipated first-person shooter. Get the down-low on all the new vehicles, when we can expect a demo (if all goes well, mind you) and much more.
Game Informer: I guess the first thing is that you announced the new name. Why did you decide to change the name?
Jeff Morris: If you look at the Unreal Tournament timeline, you can really draw up two lines there. There was the original Unreal tech, which we used for Unreal 1 and UT. Draw a line there. Then there was UT2003 and 2004, which used Unreal Engine 2. We drew a line after that and said that the new technology is worth bringing up. It really is enabling us to do a visually realized game like we wanted to. That’s the thing. Unreal has been running in people’s heads at Epic for a long time. We’re getting closer to what we saw in our brain.
The other thing is that it is a big evolutionary step for single player this time around. It used to be this sort of ladder you’d work your way through. We fooled around with different ideas like swapping teammates and stuff, but it really was a ladder. The single-player story we’re doing in UTIII is very different. It really has a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s four acts right now. It’s still being written and it still in development. It allows us to really take all the people who never went online with UT, which is a staggering number of people–like 50 percent of UT buyers never went online–and give them something that really merits their offline experience, not just slugging through this ladder.
Those are probably the biggest reasons. Believe it or not, the fans were really into it. They look at it the same way. Weeks ago, before we announced it, people were doing UTIII wallpapers on our forum. It was like, “That’s kind of cool,” because we knew we were going that direction, and they wanted it. I remember when we did the announcement for the Gears [of War] ship date, we said, “Ooh, this big, secret announcement is coming out,” and when it was a ship date, a lot of people were like, “That’s not a big announcement.” Meanwhile, everyone on the forums was doing the online version of spiking the football in the end zone. If we can make our fans happy—and I won’t deny the whole, “When the game’s done,” methodology we have—we didn’t want to sell the game called 2007 if it took us more than 2007 to do. All around, it feels like a great decision.
GI: So, you’re planning on shipping in the second half of 2007?
Morris: That’s when we think we’re going to be done. That’s our current plan on all the platforms. Who knows if that’s what it’s really going to be, but again, since our commitment is to our customers that everything with everything they buy from us is worth buying, we’ll never screw them to hit that date. Everybody’s happy to have that as a target, and I think we’re well on our way. I think we’re a couple of months away from alpha, where we’re totally feature-locked down, and we’re just gearing up to finish up our maps, polishing the weapons—all that kind of stuff. The big brainstorming phase is definitely coming to an end.
GI: Are you simultaneously shipping them, or will any versions ship early?
Morris: We sure would like to. We have a lot of expertise on the 360 and the PC, and so that’s allowing us to look at those platforms very seriously. Sony has provided us great support on the PS3. We’re hoping that’s the case, but it’s difficult for us to predict really when it’s going to be done. Simultaneous shipping has a lot of advantages, like combined marketing budgets. We’ll get great TV ads and spots all over the place, and we really have a big incentive to exploit that. We also want to hit Christmas. Gears is a great game, but hitting Christmas really allowed us to maximize that, and we want to hit Christmas as well. So, we’re motivated.
GI: At CES, Bill Gates talked about Shadowrun being able to play PC versus Xbox 360. Are you going to allow for that in UTIII?
Morris: There’s certainly no technical reasons why we couldn’t do interplay between platforms, but the one thing with that is the input between the two. We’re a fast-paced action game. With the mouse, you’re looking here, and then you swing over here, and you stop and you swing up there and you stop. You’ve got all these quick movements, and I don’t know that a 360 controller is ever going to have an analogy to that. If it’s not fun or balanced to do it, we don’t do it.
The Live network also makes it not a trivial task to make it integrate with the open network of the PC and the PS3. We’re very interested to see how Shadowrun does it and if people will want that. As a consumer of games myself, with Battlestations: Midway I’ll violate my rule, because I really love Battlestations: Midway. There’s a great PC version and there’s a great 360 version, but I want to play with the biggest number of players. I want the biggest server pool. I don’t want to have to decide and artificially split my audience between the two. I’m going to go where the bigger audience is. With UT, I don’t want to have the PC players to play with just half of the UT players just because of the platform. There’s a real motivation to make it interchangeable with one big pool of servers out there that everybody can play in. If I can have a hundred servers with great ping to me by having all those servers shared, that’s really compelling to me. Oftentimes, you’ll see something like Battlefront 2, which is another game I love - there are much more players on Xbox, more servers, than there ever were on PC. As a player, I want to play better servers with more people.
GI: Are you guys going to support Vista and Live for PC?
Morris: We’ll be supporting it on some level. It’s still being negotiated and discussed right now. There’s no real official announcement about it. We’re really excited about Vista, but there’s no way we’re going to leave all the XP players behind. We want to be as inclusive and sell our game to as many people as possible. Vista’s cool, and the game browser really solves a lot of problems with saves and things like that, and consumers should have a very real reason to be excited about it. There’s also elements like we don’t want people to have to subscribe to play our game on the PC. There’s a real trade-off, and we need to figure out what the best way to approach that. Right now, it’s TBD.