Unreal Tournament 3 PS3

We got a quick glimpse of the PS3 version of the game which Epic still has hopes of coming out sometime before the end of the year (Midway's CEO recently announced that it would be delayed until the first quarter of 2008). The game looks pretty much identical to the PC version and with the extra development time Epic will be able to put in all of the levels in the PC version into the PS3 port.

Of course one of the more interesting things is that the PS3 version will fully support mods made for the PC version.

PS3 owners can simply download the mod when they go to a server that has it installed, or download and save it to a PC USB flash drive and transfer it to the PS3 (Epic told us Sony has made special arrangements to have a folder on the hard drive for PS3 UT 3 mods).

And what about all the inevitable mods that are based on an existing IP (Star Wars; Star Trek, etc) or even porn mods?

Epic told us they have a list of potential mods that will be blacklisted for PS3 owners (in theory a UT 3 mod based on Star Wars could leave Sony open to a copyright lawsuit rather than just the mod team that made it). Epic's UT3 limited edition will have 15 hours of video tutorials on how to make mods for the game (made by the 3DBuzz team which have done similar work for previous Unreal games) and yes, Epic will have a "Make Something Unreal 2" mod contest for UT 3; they plan to announce details as soon as they get sponsors lined up.

And what about the planned Xbox 360 version? Epic told us that they plan to discuss having mod support with Microsoft after the PC game is done but made no promises since Xbox Live is a closed system rather than the PS3's open network setup.

We also got to see a little bit of UT 3's single player campaign. As we said this is a story-driven campaign rather than a rather lame story thread designed only to link bot battles in multiplayer games. The storyline is pretty basic; humans are being overrun by the alien Necris and your character has to go out and fight the good fight alongside a heavily armed special ops unit. We got to see a couple of single player trailers for the game (they were created in Unreal Engine 3 but will be presented as film files rather than in-game cut-scenes) that show the aliens devatasting human locations, including a rather modern day city via some kind of giant tendrils that seemingly come out of rifts in the space time continuum.

While we didnt play any of the single player campaign it looks like it will be much more enjoyable than just a simulated bot battle.