How do you balance keeping fan favorites and adding new content?
Morris: It's a lot of work. We're the best deathmatch game out there; we're the best pure capture the flag game hands down. And that's what those hardcore guys want; they want instagib capture the flag and so we're going to give that to them in staves.
At the same time we need to fulfill the people who were maybe turned off by it - science fiction is really cool because it's like "wouldn't it be cool if..." and you don't have to worry about if it's reality or not, but for some people sci-fi is really alienating and so we're doing a lot of things to try and tone it down with weapons and stuff.
Weapons are like the FPS's version of a character; in next-gen you see a lot of third-person because you've got this cool character right in front of you with all the detail. In a first-person game that's the weapon and now we have the polygon budget to have it all move around. Sure, it's not based on reality, but it could be in its universe. So that's one of the things we do to try and appeal to the people who weren't necessarily in to it before.
We've got the same problem with any franchise; you can't piss off people who liked your game before in an attempt to appeal to an audience that you may never get. You've got to bring them along while at the same time trying to appeal to people who haven't played before.
What about the new Necris vehicles? Was it difficult coming up with new ideas?
Morris: We did a lot of tweaking in UT 2004, we knew how the vehicles were going to stack up; the manta was going to fly around the Goliath but if the Goliath had a guy in the machine gun nest he was going to own it because the manta couldn't move around fast enough. So that kind of base balancing we already took care of, so we spent most of our capital on the Necris vehicles which we wanted radically different.
The Darkwalker is the analogy for the Goliath but it's about as different as you can get. It's the same in that it's heavily armoured, it's slow, it's got a short rate of fire but it's incredibly damaging; it's got all those elements that the Goliath has but because it's a walker it can crouch, it can climb, you can fly between its legs, it's got all these other elements that make it feel very different to a tank.
The ability to focus most of our design on the new vehicles helped us get this other range of vehicles that were really safe balance-wise.
How are you finding fitting the massive wads of game data onto the Xbox 360's DVDs, as opposed to larger PC HDD and PS3 Blu-ray discs?
Morris: Blue-ray is certainly appealing for guys coming from a hard drive background to have a much larger footprint to store that sort of data, but because we want the game to be the same on all platforms the chances are it'll be the same sort of size that will fit on all of them.
But while we want all of the versions to be the same that's not to say we won't do exclusive patches for each platform and that would enable us to do some pretty spectacular exclusive content.
I can tell you we have 30GB versions here today and we copied two versions to each of those PCs, so by the end of it we had about a terabyte of copies over there. So we've got to get smaller - big is cool, it lets you have more environment diversity and stuff like that but at the same time you have to deal with the actual load times. We don't know the exact number of maps we'll ship with but we want it to be between 30 and 40 - that's substantially more than other games in the genre.
