Thursday, May 05, 2005

"Actually, we don't think [Unreal Tournament] 2K4 was very successful," Steve offers. Jim and Jeff nod their heads in agreement, while I'm certain mine is spinning in disbelief. Steve continues, "It wasn't a bad game...I just wish it had been a better game than it was."

Apparently, members of the hardcore UT community agree. "We've paid a lot of attention to what the guys in the community are saying, and we take that feedback to heart. We've got guys that troll the forums every day [and read feedback]," Jim says. What's their biggest critique? "I would say mobility. Mobility and weapon balance. That's more for the hardcore guy who plays every day or on a regular basis, but balancing that out overall will make the whole game feel better, and so everybody will benefit."

"We think there's a lot we can improve. This is a completely new game, new engine. All the code is really being rewritten. No assets from UT2K4 appear in here again. In fact, in terms of how the games have evolved, this is more of a leap, I would say, than the original Unreal Tournament to UT2K4."

This is not an iteration, it's an entirely new game -- which is why it's entirely possible it won't be called Unreal Tournament 2006. "Yeah," Steve says, "It's a real generational change."

The polygon jump is going from thousands to millions, courtesy of the Unreal Engine 3. New technology, new engine, new gameplay...new everything. "You can tell from our [demo] levels," Steve says, "we're not trying to make a prettier UT2K4. We're really trying to make a very new game."

The finished product is still well over a year away (there are 13 "milestones" in the creation process, and we're visiting just after the completion of No. 3), but that suits everyone at Epic just fine. Long before the entire game world gets prettied up, Steve and company plan to have put together a gameplay framework that's tweaked to within an inch of perfection.

"We want to have all [the parts of this game] working for probably about a year before we ship. I think a big part of the success of Unreal Tournament will be that we've had such a long cycle of playing the game and improving it based on the idea, 'This is fun, but it would be more fun if' and then really refining it -- tweaking weapon balance, tweaking movement, tweaking vehicles, tweaking gameplay mechanics," Steve says. "We have to have a lot of time where we really playtest it and try all the different kinds of things you can do."

"Our goal is to make a much better UT than anything anyone's ever seen."