Amazingly, even the first load wasn't long. Unoptimized and running on development hardware / software, UT 2007 still booted up in less time than the average Half-Life 2 or Far Cry game. Good stuff!

But James isn't a programmer, so we cut out of the technology talk and jumped into his specialty, design. He was the ideal man to tell us a bit about Unreal's new environments and how they're being modeled to be places with purpose, so that's what we focused on.

"They're environments, not levels." What James is getting at is how each distinct killing field is intended to be a believable place. The Carbon Fire deathmatch environment we were demonstrated, for instance, was a robot manufacturing facility. In different areas robots were being constructed, painted, shipped, and distributed. Each area also serves as a landmark. Of course, Epic is big on ensuring that all of UT 2007's environments are built to include similar landmarks.

James went on to explain how each environment will also tie into a larger whole. "It's subtle, and many people didn't notice it, but you could see the next level in a singleplayer ladder in old UT. You could see it off in the distance." For 2007, Epic hopes to noticeably bind each environment to another to create a believable world upon which all the action can take place. The "Liandri planet," as it's tentatively being referred to, will at least feature lower areas of rubble and ruin, middle environments with industrialized themes, upper realms of glitzy urban life, and encircling space / sky areas. Epic hopes that kind of structure will give UT 2007 a real cohesive feel.

We also talked with Brown about the physics in Unreal Tournament 2007. The team is working hard to integrate it into the gameplay in meaningful ways. In one level they're experimenting with, there are two nodes that need to be connected by an energy beam. One team can start an avalanche of boulders down a hillside that will block the beam, at least until the other team clears it out with whatever rockets or grenades they can find. Whether or not all of that comes together -- and whether it works in the context of the game to make it more fun -- is yet to be seen.