Unreal Tournament 3 - interview

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 capitalize 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 analog 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.