Interviews

17:21 Unreal Championship will be one of the first titles to be released for Xbox Live, and with a strong pedigree backing it up, is regarded as one of the hot shots to debut with the dedicated online service.
Under development at Digital Extremes, the game is essentially an update of multiplayer first-person shooter Unreal Tournament. Comprising of five, differently themed homeworlds, each with their own levels and eight similarly-themed characters, the game will allow players to indulge in five different multiplayer game modes both online and offline.

Unreal Championship looks absolutely gorgeous, and this is thanks to the Unreal next-generation technology that lies at its heart. It plays damn well too, and in keeping with its roots is a faster, more frantic first-person shooter than Halo. If you've never dabbled with online action games before, then you'd be better off trying out the offline offerings first, when it finally drops into your hands.

So, Unreal Championship then. Is it going to be big?

Minor: Unreal Championship is going to be the premier first-person shooter you're going to play on Xbox, online. Obviously Halo made a big impression, but Unreal Championship's a completely class act [laughs].

Can you tell us about the different game modes in Unreal Championship, and your reasons behind choosing them?

Minor: Well, we basically looked at what was really successful with Unreal Tournament and what was not so popular, and then decided how we really wanted to tailor it toward the Xbox Live community. This is what we've done:

The three classics, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag are all in there. These are tried and tested game mode types and they're great fun.

For the fourth mode we took Domination from Unreal Tournament and we've turned it into Double Domination. Instead of just grabbing a control point as soon as you touch a plate (as would happen in Domination) you have to control two points out of four (two teams, with each team having two designated points to capture) and hold them for ten seconds to win. This makes it a lot more frantic than the original mode of play, because as soon as you're trying to control the points, you know that the enemy is running like a ***** trying to get to a point and stop you capturing it. It's pretty intense.

Finally we have Bombing Run. There's one bomb, and each team has a base, and the point of the game is to get the bomb into the other team's base. So you pick it up, you can pass it to team mates by targeting them and running toward them, or you can just throw it to them and hope they'll catch it. It's a tried and tested gameplay type - like soccer, American Football or basketball - but it's actually quite strategically interesting.

For example, when you have the bomb, you can't shoot. This makes you vulnerable, but to make up for that, the bomb recharges your life while you're carrying it. But imagine this: if you have the ball and you're confronted by an opponent who's about to attack you, you can turn around and shoot the bomb to the person who is attacking, so suddenly they can't attack, so you can then kill the person, get the bomb back and run away.

Saying that Bombing Run is like American Football suggests that you'll be able to select light, medium and heavy characters - different classes if you like - for the teams. Is this the case?

Minor: OK, this isn't a class game, but here's the deal: since we have such a rich character set and they're all different sizes and could, in theory, run at different speeds, we have a species mutator, which you can turn on if you want. This should be quite interesting as obviously you can choose a bigger character who might be slower, but they'll be able to absorb more damage.

Bombing Run sounds like it's going to be an incredibly popular multiplayer mode. Will it be as good in single-player with bots?

Minor: Although it's designed for multiplayer, it's actually very good in single-player. The way it works in single-player is that, you have a team of four to five people, and there's other bot teams who you play against in a league. The stats of your team will improve as you play, they'll get more accurate and stuff like that. And then there's also a player trade system, and as you get better you can trade players and get higher-skill characters from other teams.

As you progress through the league and climb up, you'll get to the playoffs and face a bad-ass team, and if you win that playoff you'll go into the next year. It's a lot richer than the stuff you'll see in your typical first-person shooter.

Will you take the single-player team game into multiplayer, so that one player can control a whole team against another player who has a whole team, and then take all the league and transfer stuff online as well?

Minor: Yes, I think that is very possible.

Presumably there'll be split-screen multiplayer too?

Minor: Yes, there will definitely be a split-screen mode. Probably two - I don't think we're going to do four. But what I'm really looking forward too - and I think this is the greatest - is if you have two Xbox machines linked together, then you can play two on two team games.

So what's the maximum number of online players Unreal Championship can support then?

Minor: Well, when you're online and playing on Xbox Live, you're looking at teams of six versus six or eight versus eight. But if you were running the game offline, using one Xbox as an offline server, then it would be more like four on four, in theory.Xbox doesn't have a huge amount of raw processing power, it's more of a graphics box.

What's your opinion of the Xbox Live voice communicator? Do you think it will work well, not just with Unreal Championship, but with Live-enabled games in general?

Minor: The Xbox Live voice communicator is one of the great things about Xbox online. The headsets are awesome because, when you're playing a first-person shooter, especially a team-based first-person shooter, you've really got to talk to your friends so you can chat about tactics and such. You can also modulate your voice - I was playing my boss last week and he sounded like a six year old boy, and was saying really inappropriate things in this little kiddie voice. He was trash-talking me and it was just hilarious.

Map-making for Unreal Tournament has been incredibly popular amongst the PC crowd. Will people be able to make their own maps for Unreal Championship using an editor?

Minor: I don't know how this would work exactly as a lot of things with Xbox Live haven't been clarified, but presumably we'll be able to provide that. You should be able to download the editor to your PC, make a map, upload it to Xbox Live and have it there so yourself and other players can make use of it. It all depends on what Microsoft plans with the online side, but that would be awesome.

One cool thing is that, if people want to make their own maps, a lot of the geometry that you see in the game's levels exists as prefabs. So you don't have to mess around making loads of different polygons, you can simply employ existing chunks/structures that are used and re-used in different levels in the game.

Other things you'll be able to do, in theory, is make new skins, and if you're really clever, make yourself a new character model.

Which territories will Unreal Championship launch in initially?

Minor: I think the initial launch, in the autumn, will be in English, German, Spanish, Italian, and maybe French languages. For the Japanese market we've got to do a bit more work, so they will be later.

Stuart Bishop