14 DAY TRIAL // If you're not familiar with the name of Unreal Tournament, you have been living on the moon this entire time and you must find out the name is practically synonym with revolution. Every time that some Epic official makes a statement on the forum the world stops and when Mark Rein is the one posting, there are usually bad news, like the one I'm about to give you.
Epic is set to send Unreal Tournament 3 to all the major platforms, including Linux and Macintosh. This being said, you must know that optical drive of Xbox 360 will be the major issue because there can be stored only so much information on a DVD. This means that 360 users will have a diminished version of the game with less multiplayer levels and God knows what else. For a better understanding of the apology please read the entire post of Mark Rein:
"I continue to be disappointed that folks on the internet treat any positive thing we say about one platform as some sort of critique of another platform. We're a multi-platform company folks please come to grips with that. We like the PC. We like the 360. We like the PS3. We like the Macintosh. We like Linux. We will deliver UT3 for all of these platforms and it will rock on every one.
The simple facts state that the optical disc on the PS3 holds more data than the optical disc on the 360. If we exceed size of the 360's optical disc then we'll have to find alternative ways to get the content to 360 users such as making it downloadable. Adding a second DVD to a game like UT3 would be a challenge because when playing online you might not know exactly what map you're going to be playing next and we have to be able to accommodate users of the core system. So does that mean the disc on the 360 might have a map or two less? Possibly although it is too early to tell for sure. People love Unreal Tournament because we always ship it with tons of great content but that also makes it a bit of a disc hog - in a good way
Obviously, and as is true with most major games on 360 and PS3, you're going to be putting your hard drive to good use if you want to experience the full richness of content that UT3 will have to offer over the lifetime of the game. the fact that you can do this is a good thing.
I don't know the exact numbers but I suspect the version of Gears of War that most of our customers play today on their 360s, when you combine the downloadable content with the content on the disc, is larger than what we could fit on the 360's optical disc alone. So clearly there are perfectly good strategies to cope with this situation. We're all very used to downloading extra content for console games and with UT3 there will be lots of it for all supported platforms. In fact the cool thing about our engine is that when you make content for one platform it can run on all of them. If history is any indication, the vast majority of UT3 content won't even come from Epic - it will come from some very brilliant end users with lots of cool and innovative ideas."
Some Sony exec will probably brag about his great idea of using the Blu-Ray on the PS3 and the reactions will dent a little the image of Microsoft's console. On the other hand, Epic has always delivered the goods and there is no reason to think otherwise. We'll just have to wait and see.