UT 2k7 renamed and delayed

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"You've seen the movies; you've heard the blurbs - basically it's all true: there are tons of nods back to the original Unreal Tournament. Dodging is very much like UT, the characters are large like UT, Death and feigning death are reminiscent to UT, and the weapons are loud and dangerous like UT. The answer to the question of the century: yes, the Shock Rifle primary and secondary fires at a rate much more similar to that of UT. And, of course, the game looks very good."

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Game Informer: One of the things you announced today is that you’re bringing Unreal 3 to Xbox 360. Was this something that was always happening, or is this something new?

Mark Rein: I think it was the realization that we might be able to sell a few copies on this PS3. We had a little success on Xbox 360, and we might be able to sell a few copies there.

GI: Was this something that you guys were planning on doing from day one?

Rein: Not necessarily. One of our big concerns was the ability to bring mods to the platform, and it’s still a bit of an open issue, but we’ve had some pretty clear indications that we’ll be able to do it, and we’re pretty excited about that. That was kind of the one thing, we wanted to make sure we’d be able to bring user-created content to the platform before we made a firm commitment to it. Honestly, we view Gears of War as our showcase title for the 360, and we really view UT as our showcase title for the PS3. Now that we shipped Gears, people who are interested in licensing our technology can see we have a mature title that works, it plays really well, it sold great. We’ve always felt that UT was our poster child for PS3, you know getting UT done and up and running and running well would give us the same sort of benefits that Gears has given us on 360. So that was always our focus, and now you’ve obviously seen that we have this ability to potentially sell a lot of copies. There’s a large audience, and it just makes sense to do. I don’t think it’s anything we thought we weren’t going to do–we just want to focus on UT3 on PS3 to start.

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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.