On a sunny Friday afternoon in Melbourne, UgLyPuNk and I were sitting in a press room tucked away in the depths of the Convention Centre, chatting to Chris Wells, who is a Senior Character Artist from Epic Games. He was in the country for Game Connect Asia Pacific, and was ready to tell us all we wanted to know about the upcoming Unreal Tournament 3.

First things first though, the interview got off to a good start when UgLyPuNk gushed happily about how much he loved the Unreal series - ever since he first played the original game, oh so many years ago! Chris only joined the Epic team a couple of years ago, and didn't get a chance to work on the earlier titles in the series, but has more than ten years of game animation under his belt - and, while at Epic, was involved with artwork for Gears of War before starting development on Unreal Tournament 3.

Work on the game itself started in 2005, not long after the release of UT2K4, and Chris explained a bit of what the development process was like, from his perspective.

"A lot of it was initially working on the new gametype - Onslaught, which came to be known as Warfare - tricking that out... we would playtest every week also. Playtest and test and test the balance of the vehicles, the balance of the weapons and all that stuff.

"The cool thing is, as it's an existing franchise, you know it's fun already, so now it's just polish and tweak. We had been playing these maps for more than a year and a half, to tweak them and make them absolutely fun. Then, when the artists are finished with the assets - whether that's characters or environments or whatever - then we replace those parts, but we already know that the core layout is done."

This set up meant that the coders and programmers weren't held up by the artists - but at the same time - the artists weren't delayed by the programmers, effectively giving both parties more time to work on their individual parts of the project. This proved useful, as Chris explained further:

"This game, I think, has probably the most amount of content we've ever put in a game. There are so many environmental pieces, and they're so wildly different - they're extremely varied. Shangri-La, for example, had a lot of Chinese architecture, and you could also be on a space station too, so it's all over the place. The challenge was to get that level of detail that we had in Gears, with a high amount of content."

Early artwork from Unreal Tournament 3
Now - those of you who've been following the franchise will know that the Unreal series have always been front runners, with gamers either choosing the Quake path or the Unreal path in terms of what they'd push their computers to try to achieve. From what we've seen of the beta, UT3 looks like it's shaping up to be top-notch, yet again... but there's one thing we wanted to clarify.

While traditionally most of the UT releases have been incredibly polished to the point where it's hard to find any bugs, the most recent version of the UT3 beta seemed not quite up to scratch, in some ways - and it was quite a surprise to hear, seemingly "suddenly" that the game had gone gold, without many of the issues being addressed. Console delays aside, was there any kind of rush to get the PC game out by Christmas?

"There were some things that, once the beta had gone out, we were working on simultaneously. There were some things that were known bugs that we were like, 'Okay, we're going to get that set up, we'll get that working'. None of us were really worried - there were no bugs in there that we didn't think we couldn't get to in time.

"Really, [the beta] is a very small portion of the whole game, what's in there - I'm not even sure that the whole customisable character option is even in the beta. There's a huge variety of stuff - and I think most if not all of the concerns will be fixed."

Given that UT has traditionally been a PC only title, we wanted to know what it was like developing for PS3 and Xbox 360, rather than just for the desktop. Obviously, it hadn't been going as smoothly as had been anticipated, with the last update I saw pushing the PS3 version back again to "early 2008".

"Making a game that's cross-platform is difficult, and having one that has mod tools that go with it - that's tricky too. On the art side, I haven't experienced any of the pains that go along with the cross-platform thing. The game - the Unreal Tournament series in general - is pretty scalable, so you can have a modest machine and still have a good time on it, and if you want to take it up a notch, you can.

Another interesting thing I brought up was that I was amused that the media would refer to "Unreal Tournament 3 - from the makers of Gears of War" - when the Unreal franchise had been around for years before Marcus Fenix and his pals showed up. Chris explained that this was not solely capitalising on the success of the more recent game, but that it had some more strategic roots.

"We have a very low following for the PC, and we wanted to create something that was identifiable to the new console owners. They identify with Gears of War, so that was the thing behind that. We also put a new single player campaign into [Unreal Tournament 3], and a story around it - which is really a good way of training for the multiplayer matches, and also it explains a little bit about why certain things in the game function the way they do."

Hopefully also enticing the console gamers to the UT3 side is the fact that the team are already looking at extra content for the game - on PS3 and Xbox 360 as well as their standard PC platform.

"We have a pretty good tradition of expansion packs and bonus packs - and there's the modding community having the access to the tools and being able to make the maps, change the maps, add characters. You get access to Matinee and Kismet now (recording and scripting tools), so you can make the cinematics and all that, too."

Chris says that he's really pleased with the way the game's turned out - and even though he's played it (and playtested it) to death, he says it still excites him, and he still really enjoys playing it. He explained that a highlight for him is that it is really easy to just jump in and play a game - it's simple enough to sit down and play a quick match, with no need for the drawn out sequences that some of today's games make you sit through. Well... that and the character art is really good, honest!

Unreal Tournament 3 is out for PC this Friday 23rd November in Australia, with the PS3 version following "some time" later, and the Xbox 360 showing up some time after that.