Unreal Tournament 3 - interview

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 mom 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 college 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 learned 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 optimized 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.