Gamecloud - What can you tell us about the new gameplay mode for UT 2007, Conquest?

Jeff Morris - The RTS meets FPS genre has been around since Cyclone's groundbreaking Uprising in 1997. Since then there's been a lot of attempts at melding the two, but we feel our take gets the balance right. UT has always been about fast action and very short "time to spectacle" and we want to ensure we maintain that focus in this new game type. It's important to us that while we want a "commander" role for players to adopt, we don't want to penalize a team that doesn't have one. We're planning to introduce a level of resource management as well, but we definitely don't want players to have to manually collect those resources themselves. We especially don't want a situation that translates into a defacto loss if one team doesn't take resources seriously while the other does.

One feature that I'm most excited about is idea of player triggered missions. The general idea is that players will be able to work together on a map specific objective, such as destroying a bridge or stealing the enemy's war plans. Once a team begins to embark on this, a "mirror" mission becomes available for the enemy. In the examples I just mentioned, these would be defend that bridge or protect the war plans. We're also very interested in really mixing up the actual mission types quite a bit, so they're not always destroy/protect X. One idea being prototyped is the idea of a convoy mission where one team's group of vehicles needs to get from point A to point B, while the enemy tries to shut them down. To mix it up even more, we may have ground as well as aerial versions of those missions.

There's a lot more exciting things I could talk about with regards to conquest, but we need to keep some surprises to ourselves for now.