Mark Rein is always one our favourites interviewees here on CVG. Never short of an opinion or two his comments and views of the gaming industry are sometimes controversial, always insightful and absolutely guaranteed to be entertaining.
So it was with a great deal of pleasure and anticipation we sat down with Mr Rein recently to talk about Unreal Tournament 2007, surely the hottest first-person shooter hitting next-gen consoles and PC and to get the inside scoop on the latest developments on the ahem epic flagship 360 blaster Gears of War, which is surely set to rule the Xbox 360 charts and push sales of the console this Christmas.
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Herein part one Mr Rein discusses the development of UT 2007, how the team developed those iconic hoverboards and Dark Walkers, reveals plans for a new Make It Unreal contest and how important the community has been to the game's development before moving on to all things Gears of War.
Enjoy part one and be sure to tune back into CVG for part two arriving before the week is out, to learn more about Rein's always intriguing views on Windows VIsta 'MS dropped the ball', where the future of the PC lies and what he thinks the prospects are for Nintendo's Wii.
But for the moment, it's over to you Mr Rein...
UT2007 has been in development for a while now. How is everything progressing?
Mark Rein: It's coming along pretty well, there's a lot of work to do. You know, UT is a game that has a lot of content, a lot of levels; it takes a long time - especially now with next-generation-quality artwork to get that all done and polished. Plus UT is such an important franchise to us we really want to take our time and get it right - that's why we've never really had a release date for this game, it's just when it's done, which really surprised us when people wrote 'the game is delayed' - what do you mean the game is delayed? All we said was that it's not coming this year, that doesn't mean it's delayed. We confirmed to people; don't save you money for this game for Christmas because you won't be getting it. Buy Gears of War (laughs).
One of the most exciting additions we've seen so far are the hover boards. How did you guys come up with those?
Mark Rein: Well one of the problems we found with UT2004 is if you died and accidentally spawned in a location where everybody had taken all the vehicles you ended up being stuck running as fast as you could on a fairly-long distance - you're out of the game for a long period of time and it's very hard to catch-up if somebody took-off in a vehicle, and we thought It'd be really nice if we could give people the ability to traverse areas of the map two-to-three times faster than they can now. It's not as fast as the Scorpion but it's a lot faster than running on foot.
So that's really how it was born; you have this kind of portable hover board and you can get around the map a lot quicker. You're at a disadvantage when you're on it because you can't use your weapons, but one of the things you can do - which we used to call when I was a kid up in Canada; 'bumper hitch'. You have a tether which you can tether on to other vehicles and get a ride. So the cool thing is somebody can come by in a Mantas or Scorpion and give you a lift, so that's kind of nice. So I just think it's a really smart way to make sure you're always in the action or always about to be in the action - that's the whole point of UT.
Where did the idea for tricks come from?
Mark Rein: If you've got a hover board you've got to do tricks! It just seemed like a natural thing: people want to show off. It's really funny when you get smacked by somebody and they jump on their hover board and they do one of the tricks as a taunt. It's really sad; it's happened to me too often.
The Dark Walkers look great as well - a bit of a War of the Worlds vibe there?
Mark Rein: Isn't that a beautiful, beautiful piece of art? That really is - that's art in action. The Dark Walker can scale much steeper terrain than any of the vehicles can, so it has a bit of an advantage. Of course it moves extremely slowly and it's got two weapons on it, but the main weapon is just so fun to use. I think it's something that we always wanted to do but didn't really have the capability or the power to do it in the past and do it in multiplayer. It uses procedural animation instead of hand-code animation - it actually uses a mix of physics and procedural animation to make sure that the feet are planted properly and you can actually go places that you're trying to go. It's pretty believable.
You talked a bit about physics there - obviously '2003 was one of the first games to incorporate rag doll physics, how are physics affecting gameplay in 2007?
Mark Rein: Nicely, nicely. We've started to use physics for a lot more of the effects than we have in the past, like if you noticed in Onslaught the power core has pieces falling off it. It just makes in more immersive and more believable that these pieces are flying properly and colliding with each other, things like that. We have some physics-based particle effects, the Dark Walker uses physics to navigate, the vehicles now have lots of articulations and suspension. The characters if you look really carefully - we don't just do rag doll anymore, we actually mix; we blend animation, rag doll and physics together to produce some really, really cool animation effects.
The maps are looking gorgeous as well. Will any familiar locales be coming back?
Mark Rein: Yeah, I don't know which ones for sure; I'm not really up on what classic maps we're bringing back, but the maps are just beautiful. One thing we did learn with UT2004 was to build the map as a shell first, make sure that we get all the playability correct, make sure that it's really a fun map to play before we start decorating it. In the past you would do those things together but you weren't dealing with such a high degree of decoration, static meshes and things going on in the maps that it was a big deal if you had to bust a hole in the wall. But now that's a big deal; it's so much easier to wire up a house when it's in its frame than it is once the dry-wall's in. We definitely learned a lot about how to make better gameplay by better level design.
The UT series is famous for its creative arsenal of weapons. Is it getting difficult to conjure up crazier and crazier guns?
Mark Rein: Well, part of the problem is we have a kind of limited arsenal obviously and we have to keep bringing back the weapons people really, really love and we have to improve on them as well. We're relatively conservative in terms of not going nuts with new weapons but making sure that the weapons we have are the best ever version of, you know, the Flak Cannon, the Rocket Launcher, the Shock Rifle. There's one or two new weapons as well, there's also turret-based weapons now -we had a little of that in 2004. We have much more variety in some of the vehicle-based weapons, like what you saw in the way the Dark Walker works.
So our goal isn't just to have more or new weapons every time but also to make sure that we have the best weapons for the game. It makes a big difference to make the Flak Cannon be just right - everybody wants a Flak Cannon. We don't want to take away what makes UT, UT.
A massive part of the series' success has been due to the mod community. How are you funding that in 2007?
Mark Rein: Well obviously Unreal Engine 3 is the basis for UT2007; it has by far the best quality tools we've ever had, the most productive set of tools we've ever had and more importantly, the most flexible set of tools we've ever had. Now with the Unreal Kismet scripting language mod makers and designers are going to be able to do things that programmers could barely figure out how to do in the previous generation. So It's going to be really exciting to give people this tool that allows them to really experiment and really build things that they otherwise needed a lot of programming assistance to build and see what they can do with it.
I mean people don't realise but, but you could take Unreal Kismet and you could build Tetris with it. I mean, without being a really genius programmer you could make a cool puzzle game with it, you could make a lot of real cool things happen inside your game. So that to me is really the freeing-up of creative resources to make their dreams happen. We also have a great particle system now - much more flexible, we have a great material system for building really cool shaders, we have a physics tool for basically building in physics capabilities to your assets. We have a facial animation tool with lip-syncing built in, the terrain tools are better, the editor itself is better, we have the ability to do stream loading of multiple-levels; the capabilities mod makers are going to have in their hands with Unreal Engine 3 is mind-boggling, significantly better that what they could do with Unreal Engine 2.
So we're just sort of chomping at the bit, liking our chops and rubbing our hands together waiting to see what mod guys do once we release this game. And of course people ask me 'will there be another nVidia $1,000,000 Make Something Unreal contest?' Sure, we'll round up some sponsors again and hopefully have another big, huge mod contest. This time I think it's going to be spectacular. You see so many companies have licensed the technology, mainly because of how great the tools are how productive and creative they can be with these tools, and it's going to be that much more-so for the mod guys.
Why do you think Gears of War has become the flagship game for Unreal Engine 3 over UT2007?
Mark Rein: Well we made a conscious effort to make a different kind of game with Gears of War. I mean, what we're trying to do with Gears of War is make the ultimate console game. It's really just put our blinders on and focus very cleanly on making a great console game, big single-player, epic, story-driven game with good character development and some cool emotion and some real close-up action. We've really made a plan to make a different kind of game. It's not a first-person shooter; that's the biggest misconception about Gear of War: 'well it's an FPS', it's not an FPS, it's a third-person action game with a lot of views of the character doing cool things in the environment, not just plucked on the screen in front of you but actually being part of the environment.
And so I think that's just sparked people's imagination. Obviously there's a lot of marketing dollars being spent on the next-generation consoles, so it's getting its fair share of that. And like I say we're just really trying to hone the best Xbox 360 game we can possibly make and do something a little different from Unreal, it's not trying to be UT. So I think that's just caught people's imagination. Clearly Microsoft are marketing it like crazy so that's helped. It's a really fun game to play, it's really well designed and well created. So I think that a big console game just generally has a larger potential for audience interest than a big PC game. UT' still a big PC game and it's also hopefully going to be a big console game.
But it's also the order of them; Gears of War was always coming first, it was never an option to do UT before Gears of War. Hopefully the buzz from Gears of War, some of it will carry over to UT, and certainly some of the things we've learned from Gears of War will carry over to UT. UT will have cinematics this time; not just a simple opening cinematic but the single-player game will have some cinematics and some story progression. It's not going to be the super-deep Gears of War style of game but it will have some and we will pull from our box of Gears' tricks to make UT a better game as well.
