With Fallout 3 using the Oblivion engine, how much of the gameplay mechanics are also carrying over? For example, will enemies and their loot level up with the player character as in Oblivion?

A few gameplay mechanics will feel similar, I'm sure. We've been able to iterate a few times now on the whole "big open world" style of game. So there are things that we feel work well in that context. That said, there's nothing that we won't look at closely to make sure it fits in with Fallout 3 specifically, and level-scaling is one of them. We've created tools that allow us much more control to tie the leveling into individual locations rather than making everything happen globally as with Oblivion. We're also not letting creatures level up their abilities with you; a Deathclaw will always be a Deathclaw.

Does Half-Life have an end? Do you guys have an idea of how you're going to wrap up this whole franchise?

Game Newell: Well, there's specific stories and character arcs or plot lines that we know terminate. We have this bible that covers a lot, and there's a lot of interesting stories to tell. Portal, for example, is bringing out stuff about Aperture Science way before we had originally thought we'd be telling stories set in the Half-Life universe. We'd certainly love to be working in other universes because any time you get two Valve people together they come up with five game ideas and thirteen universes that they would like to tell and play them in. So there's a lot of Half-Life left at Valve.

Gaming Heaven: Performance, the main question every gamer has. What will be needed to run the game at playable framerates? How about playing with everything maxed? Will current rigs be able to run the game at 1920x1200 without making sacrifices? Do you recommend ATI or Nvidia and have you any performance figures for us for the Nvidia 8800 and ATi 2900?

Cevat: Everything maxed and at that resolution, you will need a seriously high rig of the latest generation available now. Bear in mind we don't expose, but have built in scaleability for the upcoming 1-2 years. That will be available as hardware catches up. So when I say maxed, its maxed for now.

Gaming Heaven: The enemy AI - in Far Cry players often accused the AI of cheating, firing at Jack even though he was well hidden in foliage. Will staying behind a bush actually make us 'invisible' this time around?

Cevat: That was never a cheat. What happened is that the AI enemies saw the player going behind a bush, effectively blind shooting into the bush and potentially hitting the player. We improved this though this time so it feels more right and not like a cheat.

Gaming Heaven: While on the subject of AI, does the Crysis AI code support squad combat? If you were to pit two 10 men AI teams against each other, would they try to flank one another? Is suppressing fire a tactic they can use?

Cevat: The core AI system supports it. In Crysis if you are fighting alongside a squad member or friendly AI, the AI will handle either you or the AI that is attacking him. Suppressing and flanking along other tactics are part of their intelligence.

Shack: Any exclusive features or content in the PC and Mac edition?

Jay Gordon: Gamers will find the same great content and tracklist in the PC and Mac versions as they'll find in the console versions. Other than the keyboard/mouse options listed above, one unique feature will be the ability to compete online across both the PC and Mac platforms.

Shack: Are you aiming at a simultaneous release with the console versions?

Jay Gordon: We're definitely aiming for a simultaneous release, and we'll be able to talk more accurately about our ship date soon. We're certain you'll see Guitar Hero III for PC and Mac before the holidays.

Shack: Are you concerned that the PC and Mac editions won't provide the same social experience of gathering around the television as the console editions?

Jay Gordon: Well, more and more PCs are making it into the living room every day, and those machines are often hooked up to big, fancy TVs - so those people who have integrated their entertainment systems will get the same experience. But yes, Guitar Hero has a magnetism drawing people together in front of the TV and kicks a party into another gear.

I don't think it's realistic that we can completely recreate that experience with a PC and Mac version, but I think we can create different kinds of social experiences around this powerful franchise. For example, a young child may not be able to grip a guitar controller. But young kids are so used to keyboards and computers these days, they could play the game on their keyboard and jam on some co-op while an older sibling or parent uses the guitar controller.

The game is also more "dorm friendly"--not every college kid has a game console, but they all have a PC or Mac. And now that Guitar Hero III is more portable, there will be gamers showing it off to their family over the holidays or even taking it on the road to pass time on long plane rides or in a hotel. There is tremendous flexibility with this game and we believe that Guitar Hero III for PC and Mac is only going to make the franchise bigger by enabling even more gamers than ever before.

PCGH: Is there enough space "between" Dual and Quadcore CPUs to optimize for? I.E. is it feasible to optimize for two cores, three cores etc. or rather optimize for "many cores", regardless of the exact number?

Tim: Yes. Unreal Engine 3 runs two primary threads and a scalable pool of helper threads. The primary threads handle gameplay and rendering, and provide a constant heavy computing load. The helper threads are scalable to many cores, and handle physics updates, streaming, and decompression now, with threading support being added to other systems over time. In this architecture, a 3-core PC would provide measurably more physics performance than a dual-core PC.

The open nature of PlayStation Network has meant it's not been a problem bringing UT III mods to PS3, but Xbox Live's essentially closed network is causing a stumbling block. However, Epic VP Mark Rein has said the dev hopes "to find a way to bring mods over to the Xbox 360".

"That's part of the reason we announced we were shipping the game on PC and PS3 this Fall, but we don't have a date for the Xbox 360 version - it'll be some time after the new year. Part of that is because we haven't been able to figure out just how we're going to do the mods. And Microsoft's got a very busy Christmas schedule... We just couldn't get enough attention from them to solve that problem", Rein said.

So Epic currently doesn't have the answers to how the UT III mod scene on Xbox 360 is going to work, and it's something the developer isn't 100 percent guaranteeing will materialise - but it wants it to happen. "Worst case scenario is, we port them and we put them through certification and we put them up as downloadable content," Rein added.

IGN: I know you talked about this a bit in the demo, but can you explain the inspiration for creating a single-input combat system?

Peter Molyneux: This is actually quite a complex answer. Put simply, the inspiration was to get much more depth but also make it much simpler. To go into detail, we wanted to simplify the blending of the three combat types: melee, ranged and magic. I felt that in the original Fable, whilst individually the systems were okay put together, they weren't as good as they should have been. So after sitting down and talking about it we wanted players to be able easily mix and match combat styles whilst also allowing them to specialize in just one. This is what led to us putting melee combat on the blue button, ranged combat on the yellow button and magic on the red button.

IGN: Are all of the combos in combat open from the start of the game and it's up to the player to figure them out or will you need to unlock them as you progress?

Molyneux: When I look back at Fable I think we did rather throw everything at the player at the start of the game, so in Fable 2 it will be more gradual, your ability in melee, ranged and magic will dictate the pace of this.

Shack: What thinking went into the recent Mac support announcement? Do you see the gaming market there increasing, or are you maybe hoping to help drive such an increase?

Steve Nix: Well, Apple has obviously been doing well. iPod sales have been strong, and that's driving a new audience of people who have never owned Macs before. There was that existing audience of people who have always been Mac users, but now you're getting new Mac users too. At the same time, with the new Intel architecture, it's really easy to get that code over there. Plus, we use OpenGL, and Macs use OpenGL, so the rendering path was already there. We've been very pleased with the performance results on Mac.

Shack: How about less nitty-gritty developer-side things? What can people expect out of the engine on the front end?

Steve Nix: Sure, I mean first and foremost it runs really well across the core platforms we're addressing--Mac, PC, Xbox 360, PS3. We're already at a high framerate on all those platforms with the exact same assets. There's no stepchild platform, it runs equally well across all of them.  We'll share more very soon, but it's also an extension of our MegaTexture solution, to where it's not just MegaTexture on the base terrain anymore. The MegaTexture extends to the entire world, including objects and characters. Really, you're completely eliminating texture constraints, and for console developers it's one of the major constraints they deal with. Everyone makes the game look really good at the beginning--they pile on textures, pile on textures--but then you make the game look worse and worse as you approach ship. You absolutely don't have that concern with id Tech 5. You can make the game look better and better--you can lock gameplay and just have artists go to town, with six artists working a map simultaneously with zero impact on performance or stability. That's a huge win.

IGN: Have any gameplay elements or weapons been added to the PC version?

Cliff Bleszinski: We've added five new chapters to the single player campaign. These chapters take place later in the campaign, right in the middle of Act Five. Marcus and Delta Squad are driving away from Adam's House - and the hungry Brumak creature - when they encounter an open drawbridge. They've got to figure out a way to get the bridge closed while the four story tall beast is stalking them the entire time.

Rod Fergusson: It really is a sight to behold. In "Gears of War" for 360, the Brumak, aka "40 feet of guns, armor and teeth," was a cinematic character but in "Gears of War" for Windows, the Brumak is a relentless beast that chases you throughout the five new campaign chapters and ultimately climaxes in a boss fight where you can finally take the big guy down.

IGN: Will Xbox 360 gamers ever receive the extra features in the PC version, either as a downloadable pack or in another retail release?

Rod Fergusson: There is no plan to provide the PC exclusive content to Xbox 360 gamers for a number of technical reasons. One is simply the size and scope of the new content which would be difficult to deliver as an update. But more importantly, "Gears of War" for Windows was not created with the same version of Unreal Engine 3 as "Gears of War" for 360. We wanted to take advantage of all the latest and greatest optimizations and features that are constantly being added to UE3 and as such, this new content is not easily compatible with the Xbox 360 version.

BU: Are all three platforms really going to be identical, despite the different hardware and software that is built into/available for each?

SP: UT will feature the same levels, weapons, vehicles, and game types on each platform. Having said that, the game will not feel identical on each platform, as we've tweaked the game for each platform so as not to compromise the game play on any system. The game plays a bit slower on the console versions, and there is some aiming help (although the system we've developed, while very effective, feels quite subtle). Visually, the game scales very well to a wide variety of hardware. We've always placed a lot of emphasis on getting UT to run well on lower end hardware, and we've also got high end features to push your monster PC to its limits.

And of course, we'll be supporting mods on both the PC and PS3. Mod support has always been an important part of our success on PC, so we're very excited to be able to bring this feature to a console platform.

BU: Can you elaborate specifically about what will be different in the PC version: ie menu/gui/features/textures?

SP: We've authored our content to support scaling the visual bar to match your system's specs. With texture streaming support on all platforms, there won't be much difference in texture fidelity based on your hardware, but high end PCs will see differences in character detail, dynamic lighting, etc. Of course, the user interface will be significantly different on PC to take advantage of mouse and keyboard input, as well as PC monitor resolution.

Eurogamer: With a background developing the Elder Scrolls games, but taking on an Interplay title, which legacy do you think Fallout 3 follows?

Emil Pagliarulo: Me personally, I really feel like we're making a game in the legacy of the Fallout games. It's so different than working with the Elder Scrolls stuff. It's first-person, and that's it. Actually it's interesting for me - it harkens back for me to some of the most enjoyable first-person games I've ever played, the Terminator games Bethesda made. Fallout 3 is Bethesda's triumphant return to gunplay games, after swords and sorcery for so long. For me it's about bringing back /that/ legacy.

Gavin Carter: I feel like when people see it's first-person they're going to say, "Oh, there's Oblivion. It's Oblivion with guns." But honestly there's not a single thing we didn't look at and think, how are we going to do this for Fallout? We stripped out our entire character system. It's all Fallout now, with specials and experience, it's not skill based. The whole questing system is Fallout. There are different paths to all the quests, you can lock yourself out of quests. It's not like Oblivion where you can say, "I've just started in the Fighter's Guild, but I'm the Grey Fox." There's nothing in the game that we haven't looked at as its own thing.

IGN: Why no PC version this time?

Hasle: We wanted to focus on the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. That's really it.

IGN: A lot of people would argue that the ultimate in replay value these days are the types of online options that are offered. Condemned 2 has them but they haven't been talked about yet. What can you tell us?

Tarl: One of the goals we set about multiplayer early on is that we wanted to keep the same feel and tone of the single-player game with the added edge of facing human opponents. So without getting into too much detail, we've been playing around with a lot of different game modes and beating the hell out of your friends with a pipe can't be beat. That's at the heart of it obviously, it's what we're known for, and it's what we're trying to bring to the multiplayer space.

As far as game modes are concerned, nothing has been completely locked down at this point. We've been trying a ton of different stuff and one of the things that's coming out is this idea of pitting two teams against each other with one team tracking down forensic evidence, while the other team prevents them from doing so.

PCGH: How important will main memory be for the overall performance? How much memory would you recommend?

Tim Sweeney: We require at least 512MB, and you'll want at least 2 gigabytes for optimal performance and detail. Unreal Engine 3 is very scalable in terms of memory usage, so it runs well on low-memory machines at the low texture-detail setting.

PCGH: It is well known that your engine supports multi core CPUs. What is the maximum number of threads the engine can calculate? What is the performance gain when you play UT 3 with a quad core CPU? Will the engine even support future CPU with more than four cores?

Tim Sweeney: Unreal Engine 3's threading support is quite scalable. We run a primary thread for gameplay, and a secondary thread for rendering. On machines with more than two cores, we run additional threads to accelerate various computing tasks, including physics and data decompression. There are clear performance benefits to quad-core, and though we haven't looked beyond that yet, I expect further gains beyond quad-core in future games within the lifetime of Unreal Engine 3.

PCGH: Are there any things you learned while developing Gears of War for next gen consoles that you can now benefit from when finalizing UT 3 for the PC?

Tim Sweeney: The Gears of War experience on Xbox 360 taught us to optimize for multi-core, and to improve the low-level performance of the key engine systems. This has carried over very well to PC. The division of UE3's rendering and gameplay into separate threads, implemented originally for 360, has brought even more significant gains on PC where there is a more heavyweight hardware abstraction layer in DirectX, hence more CPU time spent in rendering relative to gameplay.

Also, the 360 work we did resulted in an engine that also runs well on low-end and mid-range PCs. This is very important for games today; the high-end PC gaming market alone is not big enough to support next-generation games with budgets in the $10-20M range. You need to run on ordinary mass-market PCs as well. In reading PC gaming websites, one might get the impression that everyone owns a dual-core PC with a pair of $600 GPUs in SLI configuration, but the reality is very different. More than 80% of PCs sold today are still single-core, and have very low-end DirectX9 graphics capabilities. Unreal Engine 3 supports those configurations well.

PCGH: Is there a possibility to make deferred shading and edge-smoothing work at the same time on DX9 graphics cards?
Epic: Unreal Engine 3 uses deferred shading to speed up the calculation of  dynamical lighting and shadows. Integrating this feature together with multi-sampling requires control of the edge-smoothing at a much deeper level than the DX9 interface can provide. So, on the PC, multi-sampling will only be supported under DX10.

PCGH: How do the general hardware requirements look like?
Epic: Since optimization work is still ongoing, these details may change every  day. Generally speaking, the game runs quite smooth with DX9 hardware released by NVidia and Ati since 2006. On high-end cards, including the DX10 models, UT3 runs incredibly smooth already. Additionally, we also support shader 2.0 graphics hardware, with only a few technical limitations.

PCGH: Will SLI and Crossfire provide significant advantages?
Epic: We're testing SLI configurations on a regular basis. Their positive influence can be felt significantly, especially at higher resolutions. So, if one wants to have full details at very high resolutions, a SLI-system would be the ideal way to secure optimal performance. We had no opportunity to test crossfire systems yet, but we are expecting similar results.

PCGH: How exacly are you utilizing the functions of Direct X 10?
Epic: Unreal Tournament 3 will ship with full DX10 support, with multi-sampling being the biggest visible benefit of the new graphics interface. Additionally, with DX10 under Vista we have the possibility to use the video memory more efficently, to be able to display textures with a higher grade of detail as it would be possible with the DX9 path of Vista. Most effects of UT3 are more bound to the fillrate than to basic features like geometry processing. That's why DX10 has a great impact on performance, while we mostly forgo the integration of new features.

PCGH: Will UT3 players be able to benefit from a 64 Bit environment and is there a 64 Bit version anyway?
Epic: To assure compatibility, we tested UT3 with Vista x64 as well. Nonetheless, we're planning to wait and see first, until the OS and its applications will have ripened, before we'll be taking further steps in the 64 Bit direction. With UT2004 we were one of the first developers who ported a title for Windows XP x64. We would've liked to do this with UT3 and Vista x64 as well as shifting all the PCs we're currently developing on to the 64 Bit version of Vista. Unfortunately, full software and driver compatibility isn't there. The basic OS runs stable and it's fun to work with it isolated. But as soon as you want to print something or want to run Maya or 3DSMax together with some third-party plugins you'll get massive problems. But I am sure those can be fixed via service packs and software updates, so PCs with 4 to 8 gigs of ram can establish themselves during the next 12 months.

PCGH: What is the maximun number of threads that can be calculated separately? Will there be a performance-boost if a quad-core system will be used?
Epic: We're able to scale the thread-structure pretty well. There is a primary  thread for the gameplay and a second one for rendering. On systems with more than 2 cores we run additional threads to speed up various calculation-tasks, including physics and data-decompression. So the overall performance benefits greatly from a quad-core processor. Although we haven't looked into the matter yet, I expect an even further performance increase through CPUs with more than 4 cores in future UE-based games.

Dan: I'm still a bit surprised at the lack of innovative new features shown at the event. I suppose that it doesn't necessarily mean that they won't innovate at all, but they did basically say that they're going back to basics. I assume this to mean a slightly improved basic resource management system (which will apparently be just as important as it was in StarCraft) and they'll keep the gameplay fast (they're saying 20 minute games or so I believe) and furious.

I can't say that I'm entirely surprised by the decision, but I am a little disappointed considering the resources that Blizzard has at their disposal. I'm not sure I wanted any gigantic changes here, but there have been some terrific innovations and ideas that have enhanced RTS gameplay in the years since the original StarCraft, and even Warcraft III, was released. Do you think this was done entirely to keep the e-sports crowd happy in Korea so that the same competitors would want to grab and basically promote the product or do you think they really just didn't want to screw with a formula they set out years ago that was successful at the time? Obviously the new units look like a lot of fun and will change the gameplay dynamics fairly drastically from a tactical standpoint, but it doesn't look like there'll be much else new to consider when playing a game. What do you guys think about it? I'm having a hard time being totally upset because it still looked like a lot of fun, but it's pretty baffling to me that they wouldn't take any risks with this when they have the time and basically unlimited resources to make this happen.

IGN AU: At various times in its development, the game has been described as an RPG, a shooter, a sandbox game and everything in between. It's obviously one of those new-fangled genre-mashers. In your words, describe the gameplay mix for us - is it mostly blasting? Much puzzle solving?

Jon Chey: Actually, this is pretty simple: BioShock is a shooter. It's true that it is doing things that no other shooter has done before, and that gets people confused about what genre it is. It's funny how genres work. They certainly help people figure out what games are and help them decide whether or not to pick something up and try it out. But at the same time, they often act like straightjackets. Developers get lazy and just follow conventions. I mean, why does every shooter have to go in a straight line from where you enter the level to where you leave?

GTA asked questions about what it means to be a driving game ("why do you have to go round and round a closed track?") and that turned the genre on its head. We're trying to do the same thing for the shooter genre by adding non-linear exploration, choice of tools, deeper interactions with AIs and so on. But at the end of the day, you've got to be able to aim and pull the trigger. This is a shooter.

IGN AU: What does BioShock do that the System Shock games didn't?

Jon Chey: Oh God. Well, start by go taking a look at a BioShock screenshot. And put a Shock screenshot next to it. I love Shock 2 but it's kind of hard to claim it was pushing the visual boundaries of game development. I think that is a claim we can make with BioShock.

And then there's physics and environmental simulation. BioShock lets you set people on fire. And then if they bump into something flammable that catches on fire too. Or you can light pools of oil and watch the fire spreading down the hallway. And AIs that are on fire can jump into a pool of water and extinguish themselves.

And what about AI? Big Daddies pick up Little Sisters and carry them around on their backs to keep them safe. Splicers run to health stations to heal themselves when they get damaged. I don't remember that stuff happening in Shock 2.

But perhaps more than anything else, these just aren't the same games. System Shock 2 was an FPS/RPG hybrid and it felt that way when you played it. BioShock is a deep shooter. It just feels different. We have designers and programmers just focusing on movement and aiming, getting the feel right. It's the same thing that every great shooter has to do but we didn't have time for in Shock 2. It's probably not clear from screenshots or movies but it's pretty obvious when you pick up your mouse or controller and start playing.

FiringSquad:The game is already one of the best looking Xbox 360 titles out there. How hard is it to bring the graphical features over to the PC?

Frank Filice: The development team in Japan is not only going to meet the level of high definition graphics already established, but they plan on exceeding them on multiple levels. Some of the screenshots you have show the changes in detail that are being worked into the game, not to mention the increase in screen resolution for even greater level of detail.

FiringSquad:What can you tell us about Lost Planet's controls in terms of support for keyboard/mouse as well as gamepads?

Frank Filice: PC gamers have the choice to play the game with mouse and keyboard or with a gamepad. It's really up to the player's preferences and hardware.

FiringSquad:What can you tell us about the content for the PC demo of the game?

Frank Filice: The PC demo will be the same content as was in the single-player demo that we released on Xbox LIVE back in May of last year. There will be two levels from the single player campaign, allowing players to check out a variety of weapons, grenades, enemies, mechanized Vital Suits and areas of the game. The demo will hit about a month before the game is released.

GS: Will vehicles return in this episode? Half-Life 2 featured the dune buggy and the air boat, but Episode One took place entirely on foot. Will either of those vehicles return, or is there something new to look forward to?

EJ: There will be a new vehicle in Episode Two. The buggy from Half-Life 2 was built by a group of rebels that was clearly skilled at welding together a tube frame but was a bit lacking in the horsepower department. In this episode you'll be driving a car built by someone with a lot of knowledge of older American hot rods.

GS: Computing power has increased substantially since Half-Life 2. PCs now have dual-core CPUs, and the Xbox 360 and PS3 are powerful multicore systems. Will Episode Two support multicore CPUs for better physics or AI?

EJ: We've built a system for dealing with multiple cores and threading called hybrid threading. As opposed to using coarse- or fine-grained threading, we take the approach of building a system into the engine that makes the right decisions about how to deal with multiple cores on the CPU.

In Episode Two this will translate in a number of ways, benefiting not only systems that were traditionally CPU based, such as artificial intelligence and physics, but also systems that are on the graphics side. We went with this approach because it scales well over time. Desktop processors are going to have more cores over time for us to take advantage of, so we took the route that requires more work up-front so we can keep pace with our customers' hardware as we move from dual core to quad core and beyond.

IGN AU: Crysis is probably the other really big DX10 example. We've heard a few reports about the performance of that under DX10 and we have an expectation of how this game will look, based on all the screens that have come out. Can you comment on the performance of that? Will we get to see all of this eye candy running on today's hardware?

Keita Iida: We have nothing but pure confidence - especially with 8800-series cards - that with Crysis, you're going to have a tremendous experience. Again, since they're developing with 8800 as a reference, their target is going to be 30, if not 60, frames per second at relatively high resolutions. With DX10, given that it's a clean break from DX9, there are a lot of new art assets that need to be created; there are a lot of special effects that need to be written. Usually what they do is, when they take the DX9 engine and port it to DX10, they need the underlying renderer to support the DX10 features, and then they add the features on top of it - whether it's art or game-building.

What happens is, first, you need to get the game up and running; get the features implemented. Right now, Crytek, with Crysis, is in the process of adding new features and will soon be at the optimisation stage. That said, we would love to show you the game running on 8800 hardware, but we're bound by NDAs, and that's a decision bound by EA and Crytek; but we have every confidence that, by the time it's ready to be demonstrated to the public on DX10 with the 8800 or whatever advanced hardware is available at the time, it's going to run perfectly fine.

IGN AU: Can you comment on what happened with NVIDIA's Vista drivers? You guys have had access to Vista for years to build drivers and at the launch of Vista there were no drivers. The ones that are out now are still basically crippled. Why did this happen?

Keita Iida: On a high level, we had to prioritise. In our case, we have DX9, DX10, multiple APIs, Vista and XP - the driver models are completely different, and the DX9 and 10 drivers are completely different. Then you have single- and multi-card SLI - there are many variables to consider. Given that we were so far ahead with DX10 hardware, we've had to make sure that the drivers, although not necessarily available to a wide degree, or not stable, were good enough from a development standpoint.

If you compare our situation to our competitor's, we have double the variables to consider when we write the drivers; they have much more time to optimise and make sure their drivers work well on their DX10 hardware when it comes out. We've had to balance our priorities between making sure we have proper DX10 feature-supported drivers to facilitate development of DX10 content, but also make sure that the end user will have a good experience on Vista. To some degree, I think that we may have underestimated how many resources were necessary to have a stable Vista driver off the bat. I can assure you and your readers that our first priority right now is not performance, not anything else; it's stability and all the features supported on Vista.

IGN: What influenced the changes you made to some of the classes?

Robin Walker: Let's start by talking about why do classes at all, because everything follows from that. A class should be an experience in a bottle. An engineer should be an experience, a soldier should be an experience, and those things should be different, so there's no point of having two classes where the experience of playing them is the same, or at least is negligible in terms of the difference. When we think of different experiences we're thinking about things like player decision making, when you're in some situation as a class, the ones you make as that class should be different than if you were a different class, and certainly the factors you care about should change and so on. So to us classes are about bottling up various experiences. The reason various classes changed are mostly because we were unhappy with the experience itself like in the case of the scout, where we were fundamentally unhappy with it [in the original Team Fortress Classic (TFC)], we thought it was substandard. It basically involved you not having fun in combat and having to run away from things all the time.

IGN: How far along in development are the maps right now [for the PC]? What's left to do?

Charlie Brown: The flow of the maps are pretty much the way they will be when we ship, mostly it's an art pass and there's a couple places where we're still messing with some of it... with everything we've been playtesting for three months and we're continuing to playtest and based on that feedback we kind of make changes. But at this point we feel they'd be pretty incremental especially on the stuff you'll be playing [referring to an upcoming play session with IGN]. The other thing is we've brought forward three of the classic maps at various levels. 2Fort is the one that's most faithful, it's the de_dust of the CS world, it's just the one that everyone expects so the actual layout and flow of that map is still really faithful to the original. Dust Bowl pretty much flows kind of the same, there's some different pathing and we use a new control point mechanism, which is prevalent throughout a bunch of our maps, instead of the flag mechanism, but as far as the flow it's still pretty similar. Well is pretty much Well in name alone, it's gone through a lot of change, you recognize a few of the rooms and combat spaces but in general it's pretty different. There's trains moving through the middle and again this rocket theme. There's also a new map that addresses some of the problems that have been in our space for a while, and it's one of our takes on solving that problem.

I don't think Microsoft did anything to help the PC as a gaming platform with Vista, and that's a tremendous frustration because I take it very personally. If I would've been there, I would have made much more aggressive efforts to make sure Vista stayed out of the way of games. What you see with Microsoft is, without people at Microsoft who realize that the operating system does not add value to gaming, it gets in the way, they think they can add more value by adding in more [doo-doo] that only gets in the way of making a good game. Unfortunately, Vista does that. Microsoft added more [err, poo] that impedes game development. It's certainly possible to make great games in Vista, it's just more of a pain in the ass than it needs to be. I think Vista is a missed opportunity for Microsoft to have done a better job in supporting PC gaming.

GI: Why did you change up the fundamental Team Fortress gameplay of capture the flag with a majority of the maps?

Walker: One of the main reasons why we've gone to control points with much of the maps is control points are about defending and attacking points, and TF's gameplay, all of the classes fit into some part of a defensive or offensive role. It solved a core problem with Well and CTF where if the flags are at each end of the map the only bit that's really important are those areas. So if you're a defender, Engineers don't build sentry guns in the middle of Well or three quarters into Well, they build them at the end because people will walk around your sentry gun and steal the flag. So we were looking at half of this map that was hardly being used and if you're an offensive class you want to avoid combat in the middle of the map to be at full strength when you reach the enemy base. Our game should be about getting into combat and having fun, so we don't want to create a situation where people are trying not to get into combat, or they're trying to avoid combat.

So, with the capture points, if you're an Engineer, in the flag maps you build sentry guns at the flags, you never move them, that's where they are. You might move them if they get blown up. With control points there's only the front control point that's in danger, enemies can't take control points behind you, so Engineers end up, you'll build around the control points, and as you capture control points you move your sentry guns up. Take another one, move the sentry guns up. Move your teleporters and so on. For the defensive classes going to control points meant they saw a lot more of the map. Defending the middle for example as an engineer is significantly different than defending the end, so Well as a defensive class has a lot more variety in its play with control points instead of flags. So that's some of the theory in why we went with that.

Brown: I still think having the control point scheme, and having the flags at the bottom is a real easy way to tell the player where the front line is too. So as far as when you spawn and when you get into combat and where you can expect to interact with other people will be pretty obvious from the get-go.

Walker: Yes, if you join a CTF map, if both your flags are home you have no real understanding what the state of the game is. Maybe you should be defending because all of the enemy is outside your base, they've pushed your team all the way back, or maybe it's vice versa. Whereas if you jump into Well, you can see, well we own four of the capture points and they own one, we know we've pushed all the way back to their final capture point already. It's a great way of exposing game state to you in this very clear way. It tells you as a player who's jumping in, here's where to go. Oh, I'm an engineer, I'm going to defend the furthest point we own. I'm on offense - I want to attack the first enemy point.

GI: So, we could still see something like Murderball, Push, Team Sniper, etc.

Walker: Yeah, I think with all those we're going to play test and evaluate them all. Our focus, perhaps this is a reflection of our learning process, early on with TF2 and TFC I don't think we knew what was good and what wasn't so good. We had a shotgun approach. Let's just do a bunch of stuff. Some of those worked out and some of them didn't. So our goal here is to lead with our best foot first, and start experimenting a little later.

GI: What about people who are going multicore? Are you supporting that as well?

Brown: Yeah. We've already moved a couple of systems over, and definitely the performance in general increases, but what we can do with the particle systems and stuff like that will also increase. So the systems that we've already got in place are the particle systems that are multi-cored, and you saw what we can do with that on those machines is much greater. Animation-wise, not that we're doing a lot different at the moment, that system has been offloaded, so just as a general performance thing, it performs.

Walker: That's actually the most expensive thing we're doing in our character set. These characters are more expensive bone wise and animation wise than we've ever done before. Just getting the characters, the characters have so much stylization and personality in their models that we wanted to come through in their character animations as well. It took a lot of work, and as a result, performance wise they're more expensive than we've ever done before, character wise. It's definitely more expensive than DoD [ed: Day of Defeat] and so on.

Brown: It comes out a lot in the high end.

Walker: Yeah, if you've got a multicore machine, it helps a lot. As I say, the quadcore systems that we have here, their frame rates are just insane. It's like 300 FPS at 2500 by 1900 or something like that. Those cores are just chewing up the animation systems and particles. All of our core technology systems, the engine itself is shared between TF2, Portal and Episode 2 and so on, so all the work that's being done there is being shared across all of those products.