Epic Considering PC, Xbox 360 Interplay for UT3

In a lengthy interview with Game Informer, lead producer Jeff Morris was asked about the possibilities of having cross platform interplay between the Xbox 360 and PC version of Unreal Tournament 3, which was recently confirmed for Xbox 360 in addition to the PC and PlayStation 3.

At CES, Bill Gates talked about Shadowrun being able to play PC versus Xbox 360. Are you going to allow for that in UTIII?

Morris: "There's certainly no technical reasons why we couldn't do interplay between platforms, but the one thing with that is the input between the two. We're a fast-paced action game. With the mouse, you're looking here, and then you swing over here, and you stop and you swing up there and you stop. You've got all these quick movements, and I don't know that a 360 controller is ever going to have an analogy to that. If it's not fun or balanced to do it, we don't do it.

The Live network also makes it not a trivial task to make it integrate with the open network of the PC and the PS3. We're very interested to see how Shadowrun does it and if people will want that. As a consumer of games myself, with Battlestations: Midway I'll violate my rule, because I really love Battlestations: Midway. There's a great PC version and there's a great 360 version, but I want to play with the biggest number of players. I want the biggest server pool. I don't want to have to decide and artificially split my audience between the two. I'm going to go where the bigger audience is. With UT, I don't want to have the PC players to play with just half of the UT players just because of the platform. There's a real motivation to make it interchangeable with one big pool of servers out there that everybody can play in. If I can have a hundred servers with great ping to me by having all those servers shared, that's really compelling to me. Oftentimes, you'll see something like Battlefront 2, which is another game I love - there are much more players on Xbox, more servers, than there ever were on PC. As a player, I want to play better servers with more people."