Ultra-realistic tactical shooters may have taken center-stage in recent years, but Unreal Tournament 3 proves there's still demand for brutal, flag snatching deathmatch amongst PC gamers, and with Epic Games' strengthened investment in console versions - no doubt fuelled by a certain 360 shooter that recently found success - rocket-flinging frag fests may become king of the couch again as well.
Last week we sat down with UT3 producer and all-round good guy Jeff Morris to chat-up the recently-renamed shooter instalment, what's in store for the finally-announced 360 version and the ever-rosy future of the Gears of War studio.
So without more dithering, it's over to him...
So first off - why the name change? Does that mean Epic is stepping away from the yearly, sports angle for Unreal Tournament?
Jeff Morris: Well we were never really going to do it on a yearly rotation so it didn't make a lot of sense from that angle. The technology was a good reason to do it as well; Unreal Tournament 2004 included all of the content from Unreal Tournament 2003 so in the hardcore players' eyes they were always sort of the same product. Also UT '99 was UE1, UE2 and then this is UE3 so that was a good angle as well.
And in order the deliver a good single-player component we needed to make sure that people knew this was a break from what we'd done in the past where we just had the basic ladder for you to go through. And you know, we want to ship in 2007 but if the game's not done we're not going to and because of that, we don't want to try and sell a game that says 2007 in 2008.
I will say though we were really surprised by how well received it was by the fans, because weeks ago when we decided to do this we were looking at the forums and they were already calling it UT3 then and didn't like 2007, today they were doing wallpapers for UT3 and we were like "did it leak?!" No - that's just what they thought it was going to be and it turned out on the forums they just loved it, they thought it was a return to what they wanted in the first place.
When you get the hardcore on your side and have that ground swell of word of mouth - normally you've got this big surprise and everybody's all 'that's no big surprise!' but with this they were like 'whoa!' They just felt really gratified.
You've finally announced Unreal Tournament 3 for Xbox 360 - what were your reasons behind the decision?
Morris: I think part of it is we want to make sure people know that our engine works on all the different platforms. Gears of War also made it a lot easier do a 360 port - they got our engine totally to a shippable state. We were never really an exclusive on PlayStation 3, but this made sense for us now with Gears of War - to sort of capitalise on that and get it on the platform while also having the PS3 and PC version.
And there's a lot of really great multiplayer shooters on the 360 and a lot of them are tactical shooters and things like that, so I think our over-the-top carnage attitude is something that people would like. And I always think that the Xbox 360 is the gateway drug for PC gamers - you know, you're a PC gamer and then the 360 warped in to the fold - and we think it's actually a really good platform to bring a lot of our fans our dedicated PC gamers.
Are there going to be any big differences between the PC and Xbox 360 versions?
Morris: It'll all be the same game. A mouse is awesome for looking here, then looking here really fast and really precise and I don't know if there's a controller analogy for that. So we make sure that movement speed is down , we may increase the collision cylinder slightly but nothing too fundamental - it's all the same maps and all the same single-player.
And to be honest I really like the vehicles with a controller because if you're driving with WASD you're tap turning; "I'm turning, I'm not turning, I'm turning, I'm not turning..." where as with an analogue controller it's a lot more natural and I can have a lot more precision. It really depends on what it is but fundamentally you want them all to be the same, so no more like 'Unreal Championship is the Xbox version of UT' - that's not really worked for us in the past.
This is one of the longest development spans of any of your games - why is that?
Morris: I think for the most part because we keep trying to get it right. We also have the disadvantage of not having a stable platform to start with - it's tech that was still in development while we were developing the game and that extended the development time quite a bit. When Gears was shipping there was certainly a pitch-in help phase and that had a small impact. The multiplayer in Gears for instance - there was a lot of feedback by Steve Polge who is our lead designer and lead programmer and we think that caused it to be as good as it was.
Then when we evaluated things like a multiplayer-focused game on consoles we looked out there and apart from Star Wars and Counter-Strike there really aren't any; they all have a good single-player and a good multiplayer, and so we really had to start looking at single-player as a solid element of the game and not just something that we stick together at the end, and so that took time as well.
Next-gen stuff also takes a hell of a lot longer to build, there's no doubt about it. Some of our characters took two months from beginning to end, concept to animation - that is significantly longer that what we've done in the past.
How do you balance keeping fan favourites and adding new content?
Morris: It's a lot of work. We're the best deathmatch game out there; we're the best pure capture the flag game hands down. And that's what those hardcore guys want; they want instagib capture the flag and so we're going to give that to them in staves.
At the same time we need to fulfil the people who were maybe turned off by it -science fiction is really cool because it's like 'wouldn't it be cool if...' and you don't have to worry about if it's reality or not, but for some people sci-fi is really alienating and so we're doing a lot of things to try and tone it down with weapons and stuff.
Weapons are like the FPS's version of a character; in next-gen you see a lot of third-person because you've got this cool character right in front of you with all the detail. In a first-person game that's the weapon and now we have the polygon budget to have it all move around. Sure, it's not based on reality, but it could be in its universe. So that's one of the things we do to try and appeal to the people who weren't necessarily in to it before.
We've got the same problem with any franchise; you can't piss off people who liked your game before in an attempt to appeal to an audience that you may never get. You've got to bring them along while at the same time trying to appeal to people who haven't played before.
What about the new Necris vehicles? Was it difficult coming up with new ideas?
Morris: We did a lot of tweaking in UT 2004, we knew how the vehicles were going to stack up; the manta was going to fly around the Goliath but if the Goliath had a guy in the machine gun nest he was going to own it because the manta couldn't move around fast enough. So that kind of base balancing we already took care of, so we spent most of our capital on the Necris vehicles which we wanted radically different.
The Darkwalker is the analogy for the Goliath but it's about as different as you can get. It's the same in that it's heavily armoured, it's slow, it's got a short rate of fire but it's incredibly damaging; it's got all those elements that the Goliath has but because it's a walker it can crouch, it can climb, you can fly between its legs, it's got all these other elements that make it feel very different to a tank.
The ability to focus most of our design on the new vehicles helped us get this other range of vehicles that were really safe balance-wise.
How are you finding fitting the massive wads of game data onto the Xbox 360's DVDs, as opposed to larger PC HDD and PS3 Blu-ray discs?
Morris: Blue-ray is certainly appealing for guys coming from a hard drive background to have a much larger footprint to store that sort of data, but because we want the game to be the same on all platforms the chances are it'll be the same sort of size that will fit on all of them.
But while we want all of the versions to be the same that's not to say we won't do exclusive patches for each platform and that would enable us to do some pretty spectacular exclusive content.
I can tell you we have 30GB versions here today and we copied two versions to each of those PCs, so by the end of it we had about a terabyte of copies over there. So we've got to get smaller - big is cool, it lets you have more environment diversity and stuff like that but at the same time you have to deal with the actual load times. We don't know the exact number of maps we'll ship with but we want it to be between 30 and 40 - that's substantially more than other games in the genre.
What do you think of Microsoft's latest PC gaming pushes, the Games for Windows brand and Live Anywhere?
Morris: Well the short advantage is - and we learnt this with stuff like IRC chat and voice-over data - why invent from scratch something that another company already makes available? Having a unified experience - having every bug fix that benefits everybody using that tech - that's really appealing, not having to build that kind of stuff from scratch.
At the same time there are downsides, so we're not announcing that we're being branded by Games For Windows or anything like that because there are still negotiations going on.
Epic's Make Something Unreal contest was massively successful - can we expect a follow-up for contest for UT3?
Morris: Yeah we'd certainly love to. There's nothing to announce but Make Something Unreal was such a great success with mods like Red Orchestra - and just because that's not going to sell to a million people doesn't mean that game doesn't need to exist. I mean, I played those old SSI war games back in the day and Red Orchestra is the new version of that; armour penetration, order of battle and the classes that you can do. Being able to help that team get a commercial deal is immensely gratifying.
The other thing is that it keeps you on center shelf, it keeps you relevant. The mainstream press always love that whole 'little Johnny's mum thought he was wasting his life until he got $50,000 for the Make Something Unreal contest'.
We hire a lot of mod guys, it's great that instead of bringing a dry resume we play their map and they know our tech. Universities are using us now so they're out of collage and they know the tools, and it's not as if we're developing the editor just to put a bullet on the back of the box - it's what we needed to make the game, so when we give that away to them they've got everything they need to get started.
What have you learnt from Gears development that's benefited UT3?
Morris: Well we benefited immensely on the 360 version of the game by having them reach completion on it, so we have a highly optimised version of the engine that's making the Xbox 360 version of UT3 that much better and that much faster - that's an immediate benefit absolutely.
We also got a lot of experience with certification and the whole process of what it takes to get a game on to the Xbox and then also a lot of great Live experience, so now when we implement Live all the neat little features that are available to us we're going to do to a good degree and still have plenty of time to nail.
There's a lot of things like achievements that are different in a 360 title from a PC title even though the game is "the same", and that's where our in-house expertise will prove invaluable.
Epic used to be very much 'the Unreal Tournament company', how does it feel to have Gears of War surpass UT in notoriety?
Morris: Well it's the biggest hit virtually any one of us has ever had so it's hard to be sad with the units we've been getting.
I think UT has always struggled as a brand on consoles and so if we can leverage Gears as a way to get people excited about UT that's a great way to do it. So people love to corner the market like 'tell me about Gears of War 2', 'Well you want to see what the team that did Gears of War is doing next? Check out UT', and if that gets more people looking at our game we love it.
As a creator you want to get stuff out of your brain and in to as many different people's hands a possible and if leveraging Gears of War's success enables us to do that then by all means we're going to do that.
And surely there's some sort of cross-over potential as well? Is Marcus Fenix going to crop-up in UT3?
Morris: That'd be cool, though I don't know if the publishers would be too jazzed about that. We have Mortal Kombat's Raiden in UC2 because that was a Midway character and stuff, so we love doing those kind of easter eggs and stuff but we're certainly not planning anything like that.
I will say though that since they're both science fiction, action, gory kind of games we do try and invest a lot of effort to make sure that the two brands don't sort of merge in together, and so there might be a lot of strategic reasons why that doesn't make sense.
Riding on the massive success of both Unreal Engine 3 and Gears, is a big expansion in Epic's future?
Morris: The Epic philosophy is to have talented people work really hard and so generally we are growing but at the same time I still don't think it's excessive.
Our success has certainly enabled us to take some risks but at the same time we're not in denial about what has made us successful; we understand what has made has successful. I'm a producer but I don't know any producers on the team who have fifteen meetings every day just to get business done, so I think the spirit's going to be the same even though we are certainly growing and expanding.
Considering Gears of War was a bit of an escape from developing more UT titles, is there perhaps a feeling inside Epic of being shackled to another franchise after Gears' massive success?
Morris: It's funny because I think Gears started because a lot of people were a little fatigued working on UT, and now they're all probably making Gears for the rest of their lives, so the shoe has turned.
But yeah, you just want to leverage the success. I read somewhere that every sequel sells 10% less or more than the previous did and yeah we'd love to sell another 3 million copies of another Gears product. Success is an addiction.
If people want another one I'm sure there'll be another one but there are certainly no announcements.
Great interview, liked to hear what has been said many times over: how most cross platform games will NOT make use of Blu ray...however if everyone was using a 'next-gen' disk format the game could have possibly have been bigger.
'A mouse is awesome for looking here, then looking here really fast and really precise and I don't know if there's a controller analogy for that. So we make sure that movement speed is down'
Here is the reason many PC gamers find it hard to switch to Console...FPS are somewhat a diluted experience.
Consoles have steering wheels for racers, lightguns, motion sensing, rumble, arcade joysticks.. blah blah blah....cant someone give us something better for FPS??
'A mouse is awesome for looking here, then looking here really fast and really precise and I don't know if there's a controller analogy for that. So we make sure that movement speed is down'
Here is the reason many PC gamers find it hard to switch to Console...FPS are somewhat a diluted experience.
Consoles have steering wheels for racers, lightguns, motion sensing, rumble, arcade joysticks.. blah blah blah....cant someone give us something better for FPS??
Wasn't their talk of a controller specifically designed for FPS's a while back? I've a vague memory of that but haven't heard anything since.
'A mouse is awesome for looking here, then looking here really fast and really precise and I don't know if there's a controller analogy for that. So we make sure that movement speed is down'
Here is the reason many PC gamers find it hard to switch to Console...FPS are somewhat a diluted experience.
Consoles have steering wheels for racers, lightguns, motion sensing, rumble, arcade joysticks.. blah blah blah....cant someone give us something better for FPS??
Wasn't their talk of a controller specifically designed for FPS's a while back? I've a vague memory of that but haven't heard anything since.
Yeah I remember reading that there was something maybe for 360. Does PS3 support mouse from the off I heard ??
someones got to do better than the thumb sticks. Massive genre looking great on consoles but handicaped by the lack of true aim.
'A mouse is awesome for looking here, then looking here really fast and really precise and I don't know if there's a controller analogy for that. So we make sure that movement speed is down'
This is one reason that the game will lose hardcore UT players. Slowing the movement and diluting the dodge/jumps will destroy much of what makes UT2K4 unique and enjoyable. It will be as if they are reinflating Quake III with prettier graphics. It's a shame really, to dumb down a great PC game to allow console players to play with PC gamers online.
I love UT2K4. From what I'm reading I'm not so sure that UT 3 will be much fun for me, given the planned changes. I play DM,TDM and TAM, so vehicles are of no concern to me.
Next time you interview Epic about UTC3 please ask them how the game is going to take advantage of my Agiea physics card.
There has been very little information on how they ar implementing and using the physics card.
Mainly because physics cards always have been and probably always will be completely superfalous, or however you spell that. They're too narrow, barely anyone owns one so building anything into a game that specifically takes advantage of a very little used piece of hardware is, in terms of development times, a waste. I wouldn't get your hopes up.
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