Hoverboard
"The hoverboard allows you to tool around the map at three times the normal walking speed, so you can get into the fight quickly. For balance reasons we made it so you can't use any of your weapons on it and you're pretty vulnerable. If you take any amount of damage, you're going to get knocked off and it'll take you a second to get back on your feet - and that's usually all it takes to get you killed.
"As soon as we introduced the hoverboard we were like 'wouldn't it be cool if...' - and Epic is nothing if not a 'wouldn't it be cool if'company - so we were like, 'okay.' It doesn't affect gameplay, but we added some tricks for the hoverboard and it was actually kind of cool.
"So, when you do a flag capture everybody's doing these tricks as they're slamming the flag home and if it's the last capture of the map the game freezes while the scores come up and you can orbit around it and everybody is holding on to their boards and doing tricks... I was pretty sceptical at first, but it turned out to be pretty cool.
"Then we were like, 'wouldn't it be cool if you could lock on to another vehicle?' So we tried that and it worked out pretty well. If you tether up to a much faster vehicle it will pull you along behind it and if it's an air vehicle it will actually air lift you to another location and you can just hop off the hoverboard to sever the tie.
"The level designers weren't thrilled about that, because now you could just drag people anywhere on a map and they had always had restrictions on where people could go. So, it adds a little bit of a challenge to the maps that have the hoverboard in it, but it's cool, so we're happy with the way it's worked out."
