In an epic interview with GamaSutra’s Brandon Sheffield and Christian Nutt, Epic Game’s VP and key creator of the Unreal Engine Mark Rein went into detail about Unreal Tournament 3 and other official UE3 licensee titles.

Among other useful niblets of information, Mr. Rein highlights the importance of Sony consoles this holiday season, stating, “I think Sony’s going to have a good Christmas this year. Games like Unreal Tournament 3 will hopefully get out the door.”

Coming from PC roots, Mark realizes that user generated content plays host to some of the most memorable experiences ever created. When asked about the difference between the Unreal Tournament 3 map system and Little Big Planet, he went on to say:

CN: I bet they’re going to police LittleBigPlanet and other stuff.

MR: Well, LittleBigPlanet is more of an example of rearranging chairs on the deck, right?

CN: It’s pretty robust.

MR: This is the real thing. You can’t import your own models in LittleBigPlanet. You can’t write script code in LittleBigPlanet.

That’s all well and good, but what about the problems with the PS3’s development cycle? Brandon Sheffield went on to ask:

BS: Do you think Unreal Engine 3 running on the PS3 now is going to help people surmount the difficulties they’ve been having?
MR: I think that’s generally how it works. That’s part of the reason why we build a game — to prove out the technology, and iron all the kinks out of it and make it good. As I’ve said before, a year after the Xbox 360 was on the market, we had a really good game — Gears of War — and that kind of became version 1.0 of Unreal Engine 3 for the Xbox 360. That became a roadmap. It was well-optimized, and licensees could go look at that code. We released it so they could say, “If I want to do at least what Epic’s doing with Unreal Engine 3 and get that kind of framerate and performance and visual look or move some of those levers up and down to be different, I can do that.”

I think it’s the same thing with Unreal Tournament [3 on PS3] so absolutely. I think now, people can see, “Okay, they’ve got the engine running with this much content.” Everybody’s mileage varies, because not everybody’s making the same game. But, “They have the engine running with this many characters, explosions, and vehicles, and the level’s this size, and if I follow that idea, I can get that kind of performance, and if I do less of this, I can do more of that. If I do more of this, I can do less than that.” So, absolutely, I think we’re at that kind of version 1.0 on PlayStation 3 a year after the PlayStation 3 shipped, the same way we were with Xbox 360 a year after the Xbox 360 shipped. That was a pretty predictable thing, and was what we expected that was going to occur and what we’ve been telling people.

In addition to all of this, Mark Rein went on to comment about the relevancy of the Blu-ray player in the PS3:

CN: The 40-gig PS3 has been out in Europe for a little while now, and the numbers shot way up.

MR: Well, good for Sony. When I said they were going to have a good Christmas, I didn’t necessarily mean because of our game. They’ve got a lot going for them right now. It’s a great Blu-ray player. They’re going to push that really hard.
BS: I got Phil Harrison to admit that the PS2 was not the best DVD player in the past, but the PS3 is a great Blu-ray player.

MR: And a great DVD player, too. They did a really good job on that. It really feels like it was designed for that kind of thing.

CN: They do that multimedia thing…

MR: But it can confuse people.

Mark Rein has always been an outspoken character, rivaled only by Cliffy B in terms of press coverage. It’s refreshing to see this level of candor, given the frequent stonewalling we get from most developers. This may be indicative of the fact that Epic Games is an independent company, and most development teams seem to enjoy the financial umbrella provided by larger companies such as EA or Activision.

While we hope this will be a prelude of things to come such that all developers will want to express their opinions without an army of PR and marketing agents at their side, we won’t hold our breath.

via GamaSutra

Tags: Gamasutra-Interview-Mark-Rein, Interview-Mark-Rein, Mark-Rein, Sony, UE3, Unreal-Tournament-3

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