Unreal Tournament III full blast on PCs, throttled on consoles

In a recent interview conducted by community fansite BeyondUnreal, Steve Polge sat down down with BU’s hal to finalize the first of many details as Unreal Tournament III preps for an all-out invasion on the PlayStation 3, Windows PC, Mac and Xbox 360. We know start of the story, and we know what enemies we’ll face, but what we still don’t know, Epic Games‘ Polge helped single out.

 

Unreal Tournament first debuted on the PC, and in honor of that tradition the PC version has been engineered to accept low-level hardware rig setups, while allowing monster machines to take full advantage of Unreal Engine 3.  Enthusiasts will have another title to gauge their systems’ performance, but budget performance PCs won’t be left in the dust.

In fact, Polge mentioned low level hardware performance was a focus for UT3. “Visually, the game scales very well to a wide variety of hardware,” added Polge. But it didn’t turn out well for the next generation consoles: although Unreal Engine 3 has been optimized for each platform, as Epic claimed, it won’t be running like liquid mercury on the Xenon-based Xbox 360 or even the CELL-packing PlayStation 3.

“The game plays a bit slower on the console versions. … Of course, the user interface will be significantly different on PC to take advantage of mouse and keyboard input, as well as PC monitor resolution,” said Polge, but he maintained that every version will be completely identical to each other in content, albeit not in features.

Epic did announce previously that PC mods can be utilized over PlayStation 3, but cross-platform multiplayer is still a question that has yet to be addressed. Polge said, “There is some aiming help [on consoles] (although the system weÂ’ve developed, while very effective, feels quite subtle),” which probably means while Epic is considering the idea, it’s unlikely to push through without additional time consumed for a control balancing act.

There has been no mention of a demo yet as of press time, but we’ll be keeping tabs on that.

In a recent interview conducted by community fansite BeyondUnreal, Steve Polge sat down down with BU’s hal to finalize the first of many details as Unreal Tournament III preps for an all-out invasion on the PlayStation 3, Windows PC, Mac and Xbox 360. We know start of the story, and we know what enemies we’ll face, but what we still don’t know, Epic Games‘ Polge helped single out.

 

Unreal Tournament first debuted on the PC, and in honor of that tradition the PC version has been engineered to accept low-level hardware rig setups, while allowing monster machines to take full advantage of Unreal Engine 3.  Enthusiasts will have another title to gauge their systems’ performance, but budget performance PCs won’t be left in the dust.

In fact, Polge mentioned low level hardware performance was a focus for UT3. “Visually, the game scales very well to a wide variety of hardware,” added Polge. But it didn’t turn out well for the next generation consoles: although Unreal Engine 3 has been optimized for each platform, as Epic claimed, it won’t be running like liquid mercury on the Xenon-based Xbox 360 or even the CELL-packing PlayStation 3.

“The game plays a bit slower on the console versions. … Of course, the user interface will be significantly different on PC to take advantage of mouse and keyboard input, as well as PC monitor resolution,” said Polge, but he maintained that every version will be completely identical to each other in content, albeit not in features.

Epic did announce previously that PC mods can be utilized over PlayStation 3, but cross-platform multiplayer is still a question that has yet to be addressed. Polge said, “There is some aiming help [on consoles] (although the system weÂ’ve developed, while very effective, feels quite subtle),” which probably means while Epic is considering the idea, it’s unlikely to push through without additional time consumed for a control balancing act.

There has been no mention of a demo yet as of press time, but we’ll be keeping tabs on that.