When we asked about the plan for vehicles in UT 2007, the answer we got was, "more, bigger, more." Yes, if all you want is a re-creation of ONS-Torlan, the now-famous multiplayer level featured in the UT 2004 demo, with that same environment and with those same vehicles, you'll be able to make that happen in UT 2007 using the game's modification tools, which we'll touch on later. But while UT 2004 featured vehicles created by the militaristic Axon Research Corporation (which largely ended up resembling futuristic Earth vehicles, such as tanks and buggies, as well as a few sci-vehicles like the manta hovercraft), the new game will feature an all-new line of vehicles from the Necris race--the pale-faced humanoid warriors who have been a part of the UT series since 1999. Details on this new line of vehicles remain under wraps, but the Necris will certainly have much more "outlandish" vehicles that look and handle very differently from those in 2004--and you'll be able to choose to play games using only Necris vehicles (or only Axon vehicles from 2004, or team games pitting one set of vehicles against the other).

The new game will also push even harder on one of the series' strongest, but perhaps not quite as famous, traits--the artificial intelligence used for its "bot characters" in the single-player game. Epic's Steven Polge, who was the AI programmer for the original Unreal Tournament, is the lead designer on UT 2007, and he and the development team are putting more emphasis on voice chat--both how characters react to commands and also what sort of on-the-fly chatter bots will use. Currently, the team hopes to make UT 2007's bots just as chatty as they were before but with more context--for instance, they may call out to you that they've sighted two enemies coming up over the next hill (rather than giving out a more-generic warning that some enemies have been sighted somewhere). The new game will also continue to support the less-well-known voice commands that were featured in UT 2004--if you have a headset, you'll still be able to give vocal commands to your teammates to converge on key points or give you backup.