As if our massive hands-on preview and coverage of the Unreal Tournament III launch event in Birmingham wasn't already enough, Geoff Holland managed to accost the very obliging Tanya Jessen, Associate Producer at Epic Games, for a one-to-one interview to dive even further in depth about this upcoming classic in the making.

Geoff Holland: How long have you been working on UT3?

Tanya Jessen: Well technically it goes back to... when did Unreal come out? Let's see... 1998! We've actually been working on UT3 since the release of Unreal Championship 2, but this is an ongoing development phase and there are still people who work on UT2004, so there's never really a definitive end to development.

GH: With a huge fanbase and expectations sky high, have you been feeling the pressure and has this helped inspire you during the design and development process?

TJ: Obviously when there's so much hype you want to deliver - you want it to be what everyone is hoping for it to be. So yes, it makes everybody want to think outside the box and the development team always want to do due diligence to the product, because it's such a hardcore franchise that's so loved, so Pete is always thinking of ways to put in another homage to the fans. The pressure definitely makes us work harder to come up with innovative solutions to problems. Sometimes there's a new gameplay feature we want to introduce but we worry that a section of our audience wouldn't like it - we've got a lot of hardcore UT players at Epic though, so they have a pretty good grip on the fanbase, which I think is kind of unusual for a development company.

GH: Yeah, I think it's a good thing that the developers are fans as well, and that they're taking feedback from the gamers too.

TJ: Exactly. There's always a fine line to tread but we're constantly checking the forums and when people get hold of the demo it's such a blessing and a curse at the same time, but all the feedback is taken into consideration.

GH: What have you done to evolve and innovate the UT series in what is now a very crowded genre?

TJ: We talked about this earlier - at the end of the day what is UT and why would we want to change that? This has been the theme all throughout the development in that other games evolve, changing the gameplay, becoming more tactical for example, but UT has remained the same and there aren't a lot of changes. In the late Nineties it seemed like every game was going that way, and now they've all moved on except for Unreal, and that's a really beneficial thing because it makes our section of the genre much less crowded. This is a game to really look forward to because now there aren't a million of them out there.

GH: What new game modes are there in UT3 and can you tell us a bit about the all-new Warfare mode?

TJ: So the new game type is Warfare and the idea behind it was to take the best gameplay aspects of Assault and Onslaught. Warfare is basically what you would think of as connect the dots - you have your power core and the other team have a core, and the goal is to connect the cores by capturing nodes. There are lots of ways to do this, but the most important thing is the orb, which you can use to capture a node instantaneously. So you always need to keep track of the other team's orb and your own orb, because if the enemy takes an orb to a node then they can capture it instantly, whereas otherwise it could take around thirty seconds. This creates real team gameplay, so one guy might be in charge of getting the orb and capturing a node, one guy might be in charge of defending the core or a node, then a bunch of guys would be moving forward and trying to destroy the core and taking out enemies to pave the way, and whenever you capture a node, everything moves - you respawn there, your vehicles move, your teleport moves. So this makes for a very fast-paced, moving battlefield and sometimes nodes can be captured that don't connect to the enemy core but give you something new, like a Leviathan, and that's where the turn in gameplay can happen. If one team has access to the core, the other team knows that it will just be a back and forth battle for that node right next to their core, so they might just go and get the tank and set it up, and that can completely turn the gameplay. We've actually had some crazy Warfare matches where the other team's core is down to 5% and then they'll capture a node that gives them a vehicle and turns the whole game around.

GH: So if you've got the power core right down and someone captures a node that severs the link, does that mean that you can't finish off the power core?

TJ: Exactly, the shield will come back. If you sever the link at any point then the shielding comes up.

GH: So in some ways that's a good strategy then, because if your shield is down and everyone's focusing on your core then they might not be guarding the other links?

TJ: Yes you definitely should want to do that, but for some maps there are alternate paths and extra options. You might spend forty minutes and then you're cheated - you get so close and then the game turns and it can be pretty awesome.

GH: If you're the winning team!

TJ: Yeah! It's weird to say but when I first heard of Warfare I thought, "I just like to shoot things, I don't know if I want to play this new game type," but then the more I played it, it became the way I always want to play, with these more strategic elements.

GH: Fragging's fun but working together as a team and coming out on top because you were the best team...

TJ: It's just so rewarding! But I mean it's always rewarding to be on top of the list in terms of kills - like you were!

[Tanya is referring to our gaming session earlier on PS3 where I dominated the deathmatches!]

GH: Well, what can I say? I've wasted my youth and most of my adult life playing games!

TJ: So have I!

GH: If you're having fun it's not really a waste.

TJ: Exactly! This is something that people forget.

GH: It's a passion though isn't it, as well as a leisure pursuit it's a passion.

TJ: Yes, and that's the thing, because everyone at Epic is so passionate, especially about UT. It was almost hard to do Gears to be honest because everybody loves UT so much - it was always about UT, but now we've got this other game that people are so passionate about, so everybody's just... we're overflowing!

GH: What techniques have you used to ensure that UT3 will be one of the best, if not the best, looking and sounding shooters on the market?

TJ: Well, we use UE3!

GH: I guess as the creators of the engine you know it better than anyone else.

TJ: Yes, that's part of it. And also I'd like to say that we have some of the best if not the best artists in the industry and they just know the engine really, really well, so they know exactly how to exploit it. We've got some really crazy, creative level designs - one of the things that makes the engine so great is the editor. You can take anything and combine it with another thing and make a new object just like that, so you don't have to wait for an artist to model exactly what you want, you can just take objects from the levels, like making a Lego world - you've got two pieces that you can just stick together, put a shader on it, colour it differently, add a new texture, add a new light and you've got something completely different. And this is something that our level designers are just insanely good at.

GH: Sure, I mean that Deimos map is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

TJ: Yes, some of the stuff they do is really crazy, and of course they love the game. Steve Polge, the lead designer, is incredibly passionate about it and so in touch with his fans that he kind of can't go wrong.

GH: I noticed that your background graphics often look better than the main game of other people's releases, like the space backdrop in Deimos looks incredible with the warp and Earth and the asteroid belt, and I noticed that the water surrounding the island on Sanctuary looks amazing, so I like the way you're putting in all this stuff that people might not even notice unless they actually stop fragging for a minute to smell the roses!

TJ: Months ago when the game started to get polished you'd go into a level and be like, "damn, this is just so amazing looking!" I'm not the type of person who would only buy a game for its graphics, but some of the things that the team has done just blow your mind. The way the game is built, the more assets you have the more memory is used, and because the level designers do what they do, using the same assets that they already have, it takes less time, uses less memory and looks more polished because there are things that artists have already spent a lot of time on. This is where a lot of the game's looks come from. Then we have a team of seven engineers working on the engine for PS3 who have optimised the hell out of the game.

GH: That does show, because I've seen some really jerky games on PS3 but Unreal is so smooth and never once did it even think about juddering - it doesn't even know what juddering means!

TJ: This is such a painstaking process, not just on PS3, but it's something we needed to do anyway because Unreal has always been such an accessible game for PC gamers, so we really wanted our min spec to be acceptable - but this is so hard, because do you realise how big the PC gaming market is? It's huge! The difference between a dual core processor and a single core processor is huge in terms of performance, so for us to support our min spec of a P4 2Ghz single core CPU and a G4 card is just nuts! That's a PC I would have bought two or three years ago. It's all down to the engine team and the test teams - every single day they're getting the performance test results and reviewing the effects of changes to make sure it doesn't take too much memory or slow things down.

GH: The hoverboards have been thrown in as a replacement for the translocator on some modes.

TJ: If there are no vehicles then you've got a translocator.

GH: Okay - so how did you come up with this idea?

TJ: It came about when the maps got larger for Warfare. It was like a progression -at first we just stuck vehicles in CTF maps, but then it became its own genre through Warfare and Vehicle CTF. We noticed that the gameplay slowed way down because the maps were so huge; when we actually started creating maps for Vehicle CTF we discovered the problem of spawning in when all the vehicles are gone and then it's very slow to get from one end to the other. The same is true of Warfare - how do you get to a node fast enough to stop someone from capturing it? Well, the hoverboard was the crazy solution! When I first heard about it I thought it was weird, but now we absolutely love it. And then with the translocator it's the same thing - if somebody grabs your flag how do you get ahead of them when you're so far behind in terms of the size of the maps? The translocator is the answer!

GH: In the style of Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future you can grapple onto vehicles and get a ride as well.

TJ: We didn't know if this feature was going to make it in and I don't know if it'll 'catch on' - literally! But in terms of gameplay once it became polished it was awesome. Everyone kind of hated it at first - we used it in the development phase but in the end the work that the coders did on it made it really effective.

GH: Can you have multiple people grappling onto one vehicle?

TJ: No, because there are actual physics involved and it works both ways, so when the vehicle accelerates if you grapple it while it accelerates then you actually slow down the vehicle, and the same goes for the flying vehicles taking into account the weight associated with the rider.

GH: It seems like vehicles are playing a bigger part in UT3 than they have in Unreal before - what was the reason for taking things in that direction?

TJ: Well I can't answer that exactly because I can't read Steve's mind! But with Warfare we needed vehicles because these maps are huge, then we decided to make lots of vehicles and we wanted equivalent vehicles for each of the two factions, so we've got hover vehicles, flying vehicles, heavy assault vehicles, fast but less powerful vehicles - we've pretty much covered the gamut of styles. Once we had our list we made sure that each faction had each type and that's where we ended up. I thought at first that they wouldn't really fit, but you play it and it's so much fun and totally goes with UT being a super fast game. The coolest thing about our vehicles is that they're not hard to destroy - you don't need to sneak up behind a tank and plant a bomb to get it to explode. They're like an extension of your character - it doesn't feel like you're inside something and I think they did a really good job of balancing them.

GH: So can you tell us a little bit about the different vehicles that are available and the roles that they play?

TJ: So, like I said there are two factions of vehicles, the Necris type and the human type, and there's a whole list of different types. There's the Goliath, which is a tank, and on the Necris side there's the Scorpion. There are the fast hover type vehicles, the Viper for the Necris and the Manta for the humans - they hover over the ground and go very fast but have very little power - but they're so much fun to drive and they have specific attacks associated with them; you can use the Viper to get high into the air when you'll hear a beeping sound and then you can launch it like a rocket at your target.

GH: Can you leap out at the end or do you go down with it?

TJ: You do leap out.

GH: So you leap out and send it in to destroy your target then parachute down?

TJ: You just fall down - you're making yourself vulnerable by getting out and if you're too high in the air then you will take damage when you fall, but you can just pull out the hoverboard and you'll take less damage.

GH: So when you're in the air you can pull out your hoverboard to slow your descent?

TJ: Well it doesn't slow your descent but if you land on your hoverboard then it takes some of the impact. Then there's my personal favourite vehicle, the Scavenger. Once you get inside it you can pull its legs in and roll over people to kill them, and you can partially extend the legs and use them as spinning blades, so there's an area of effect for causing damage. You've also got your primary fire where you can launch yourself into the air - it's a real multi-purpose kind of vehicle. Also everyone loves the Dark Walker, the giant, tripod vehicle, which is the Necris's tank. Another really cool vehicle is the Hellbender, which doesn't shoot and so is completely defenceless, but it has deployables like spider mines and it has a cloak field generator. You didn't get to see it today, but it shoots a field that slows down everything inside of it, so you can put it on an area where everyone has to go through it. The Hellbender is completely invisible until you move, and then you can see the heat trails of the vehicle - when you're moving that's the vulnerability of using that vehicle.

GH: With the Necris Darkwalker vehicle, were Half-Life 2 or War of the Worlds a source of inspiration?

TJ: Well, I can't say "no" because everyone's played Half-Life 2 and people refer to War of the Worlds, but the Darkwalker has been around as long as I've worked at Epic so I'm not sure what the inspiration for it was. But the art style of the Necris is insectoid, like the Nemesis looks like a scorpion, so it fits perfectly with what we're trying to achieve for their style.

GH: Did I see one of those in action in one of the deathmatch multiplayer maps?

TJ: Yes, it's so cool, because there's a spaceship that comes in and drops off the Darkwalker and then there's the mad dash for it - it's just like the Redeemer in Sanctuary; you see it coming and you just have to get out the way so you don't die! I personally love it because long gone are the days of battlefields and maps that never change; now you've got the mechanics that actually make the maps different. This is coming from a Counter-Strike player who's played the same map probably fifty thousand times and it's always the same map, it never changes. Not that there's anything wrong with that because it's perfectly balanced, it's just cool that there are these extra elements.

GH: On the subject of balance, it can be tough to balance the weapons and vehicles in an online shooter so that none are too dominant or too weak. What have you done to keep the balance as even as possible?

TJ: A lot of playtesting - a lot, a lot, a lot - I am not kidding about this! It's hard when you're in the middle of making a game to stop and get hold of people on your team to come and play for two hours every single day, but they do!

GH: That sounds terrible, being forced to sit there and play for two hours!

TJ: Well it's always awesome, but in terms of productivity we have deadlines and so making time can be difficult. Even at the very end we'll be double checking and triple checking. Steve is just so great - even though he's the lead designer and the lead programmer he's always sitting in every single feedback session and making sure that everyone is being heard. Everybody is very vocal so if there's anything that bothers them then we get to hear about it. Also we have usability testing - not as much as I'd have liked, but we've done quite a bit of it.

GH: So what's the difference between usability testing and play testing?

TJ: Usability is all about bringing in somebody who's never seen the game before and getting their opinion. We'll ask them what weapons they use the most and watch them play, because it becomes apparent if one weapon is over-powered, as they'll be using it all the time. The team has a really good idea of the game dynamics of past UTs, which helps a lot. All the vehicles have someone who likes them, so there are certainly vehicles that I'll use more than others if they're available, but the fact that you don't have access to every single vehicle on every single map affects balance. The way the levels are designed affects balance. So it's not just about "oh, this vehicle like the Darkwalker is more powerful than everything else." It's slow as hell and if anything gets below you then you can't see it at all.

GH: I think I already know the answer to this, but what's your favourite game mode in UT3?

TJ: It's a tie probably between Warfare and Vehicle CTF. I love the Campaign too though - but I'd probably say Warfare.

GH: I think the fact that you're finding it hard to pick is a very good sign.

TJ: The thing is, no matter what you play it's fun - I've never been a fan of Deathmatch though, I like Team Deathmatch, and real team deathmatch where you're actually talking about where you're going and tactics to use, which in random play testing is hard to get. But in Warfare you always have to have that, because if you just go around killing each other then nothing happens. So there are very specific roles; this guy's going for the node or someone shouts "I'm going for the orb!" and people are talking to each other. This is why I play Counter-Strike because I have a plan and we all stick to our roles and Warfare brings that to Unreal.

GH: We've already covered your favourite vehicle, but what's your favourite weapon and your favourite race?

TJ: I love the Lliandri, the robots, just because they look so awesome, but for the favourite weapon... I'm a flak master, but again it's hard to say but there are all these situations where I'd definitely use one kind of weapon over another, like for example Suspense - you know, the level in the demo with the big suspension bridge? I use the rocket launcher and the Avril like nobody's business in that map - I get up high and the cool thing about the rocket launcher is that you can lock onto your target. It's so good when you're in a big, open space, because if somebody's trying to snipe far away you can snipe them with the rocket pretty easily. I don't use rocket launcher all that frequently, but there I definitely use it, and then the Avril, which I don't usually use, I would use in this case because it's just so great for that map. But in deathmatch, I love the flak cannon.

GH: We're really excited about the single player campaign and the ability to play co-op. Can you tell us a little bit about the Campaign, what the story is, the setting and what you do?

TJ: The basic story is that the Necris have come and invaded and killed everyone in the town where you lived, including your family, so just you and your sister are left. Even though you never wanted to in the past, you decide to join one of the teams in the tournament because it's all about making enough money to get back at the Necris. So this is the whole basis for why you've come to enter the tournament and why you need to kill the Necris.

GH: So the campaign is a series of tournaments with different modes and maps?

TJ: There's a world map and you have various locations to visit, and it's a branching storyline as well, so if you do a specific thing in a match then you'll receive a card that allows you to unlock a certain vehicle or gives you access to certain technology. So you might discover the Darkwalker and now you have access to it, and you just pull out these cards whenever you like. It's a feature that changes the gameplay rather than it being all in a similar style.

GH: So you can team up with one friend, one of you playing the brother and one the sister?

TJ: You can actually play with up to four people on co-op.

GH: Are there any new features in the editor this time around? What sort of things can you do?

TJ: Oh God, new features in the editor! Shall I start going through the list of new changes in my head? Because there are thousands of them! The engine itself gives you a different way of doing things. Typically when you're editing a map you're subtracting from a base, but with UE3 you've got these building blocks - you can build a level rather than subtracting from it, which takes a lot of the complexity out of it. We were talking about this earlier, taking two assets and combining them. Kismet is another huge thing - it's basically like a user interface for Unreal script. So, say that you're making a mod where whenever you get a head shot it unlocks a trapdoor randomly under someone, for example. What you can do with Kismet is take an action, put it in a box and put in exactly what happens, like triggering an event. And then you have another link to another box, with the next event that you want to trigger. It's kind of like using Visio, like a flow chart - it's the same thing that you did before except that you don't need to know a script language; you just need to know the name of the functions you need to call and have a vague idea of what will happen. I think this will be so huge for modding in general, because now we've taken something that's typically a little technical and made it less technical. You could even make a mod that's emulating single player, like a full on campaign, because with Kismet it's just a matter of defining what happens.

GH: So you've given us an interface for the script language that allows us to just let our imaginations run riot?

TJ: Exactly, with UE3 you could buy UT3 and make a whole new game!

GH: And is the PS3 editor as versatile as the PC editor or have you had to cut out some of the options there?

TJ: The way it works for the PS3 is that you actually have to have access to a PC version because we couldn't import the editor- it would be like the equivalent of porting something like Photoshop or maybe something even more complicated, to a console, which would just be a nightmare. So what we do instead is that if you know someone who has the PC version then you can make a mod and then transfer it. Of course you don't need the editor, you can download mods and put them on your memory stick or download them onto your PS3.

GH: So there's no actual editor in the PS3 version, but you can port PC mods across?

TJ: Yes.

GH: So in theory any mods created on PC can be played on PS3?

TJ: There are technical limitations of course, like memory. So you may need to scale down the objects to make them compatible for PS3 - but in theory anything you do on PC can be ported across to PS3.

GH: Are there any plans for a new Make Something Unreal contest using the Unreal 3 engine?

TJ: There have been chatterings about it - I know for sure that we want to do it and I'm sure it's going to happen but there are no dates yet.

GH: Do you plan to release content packs or extras like you did for the original Unreal Tournament and UT2004?

TJ: Once again nothing is official and nothing has been announced, but at Epic Games, especially with Unreal, there's constant support - more content, more maps and I wouldn't be surprised if we even release mods. There are already people at Epic who are working on mods. And mutators too!

GH: That's one thing I haven't mentioned yet - can you give us a couple of examples of the types of mutators on offer?

TJ: Insta-Gib, you know, instant kill, or Big Head where everyone has a big head, or Low Gravity. There are less by default in UT3 than there were in UT2004 but hopefully that will limit the selection of servers out there, because there were some really crazy mutators!

GH: What is the reason for the delay on the Xbox 360 version of UT3 and do you have any idea of when it might be released?

TJ: There's no date yet, especially because we have the exclusivity deal with Sony.

GH: So that's the main reason I take it? There haven't been any problems with the development on the 360?

TJ: I'm not sure what I can say about it, but for us what it really comes down to is that we knew that making a game on PS3 would be like getting the game running really well on a middle range PC. This has been so good for us, for observation and also learning the architecture of the PS3, its CPU, how memory handling is, we knew that this would be a really good decision for us - not that we weren't already working on that stuff, but we knew that we could ship a really great game onto PS3.

GH: I think the PS3 really needed something like UT3, I think you'll be shifting units off the shelves like Gears did for the 360.

TJ: That would be fantastic - personally I love the way it plays on PS3 so I would love to see it be a big hit for PS3.

GH: I expect it'll exceed all your figures again like it did for Gears.

TJ: I would love to see the PS3 pushing more units because competition in the marketplace is always a great thing. It's expensive to make a game and if you don't think you're going to make your money back then you don't want to commit.

GH: I guess some developers are a bit worried about supporting PS3, but you've done it and hopefully it'll pay back in dividends. I think it will, I think you're going to have a whole new fanbase lined up.

TJ: That's what we really want - it's all about accessibility, getting the game to run really well and bringing it out on different systems and getting as many people into it as we can. There's a huge market we're not touching at all with the consoles and that's what UT3 is all about - having that same PC experience on the consoles. This is something we're very much looking forward to.

GH: Just to wrap up then, can you you sum up for what is the essence of the UT3 experience for you personally?

TJ: Well, it's frenetic, fast-paced gameplay, amazing visuals - like drop dead gorgeous amazing - and incredibly creative level designs, weaponry and vehicles. Everything that UT fans love about UT but better!

GH: Well thank you for taking so long to talk to me today, it's been a pleasure!

TJ: Not a problem!

I'd like to thank Tanya once again for taking the time to talk with me - you don't need me to say any more about the game though, because Tanya summed it all up in her answer to my final question!

Interview conducted by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).