Unreal Tournament 3

Another way of focusing the fight in vehicle games is giving every player a hoverboard. Reminiscent of Jak II's answer to the problem of a big city and a slow player-character, the hoverboard helps you jet around quickly but leaves you hugely vulnerable. Only available on vehicle maps, you can be knocked off it with even the slightest blow, which immediately locks you into a rag-doll tumble, but, as Morris points out, "sometimes you'll want to throw caution to the wind".

On PlayStation 3, you'll also be able to use the Sixaxis pad's tilt control to manoeuvre the hoverboard. It's actually one of a few control tweaks aimed at the PS3, where you'll also be able to control the Redeemer's all-powerful secondary-fire mode with Sixaxis, directing the round through the sky and into your opponent's face by tilting. Given the game's close association with platform holder Sony - it's a PS3 and PC "exclusive" for 2007, as if you didn't know - Epic is paying a lot of attention to getting the PS3 version's dual-stick controls right too. "One of the big concerns is that controller is very different to the keyboard and mouse, so we want to make sure we have the best experience possible," Morris begins by explaining, "and one of the ways we've done that is to have the Gears of War team working day and night to get these controls up to what we would want."

Something else that Epic's done is to look closely at the single-player. "One of the things we found out is that with Unreal Tournament 2004 probably less than half the players ever went online," Morris says. "So that was really surprising to us, and we want to make sure the single-player this time around is a fantastic experience. What we've done is create a full-fledged single-player - it's got cut-scenes, storylines - we're calling it divergent storyline because you actually get to decision areas where you say hey, do I want to stick to this corporation or move onto that one, betray them, whatever, and so when you play through it a second time you're going to have different ways of playing the game." You'll also unlock things as you play through the bot-based single-player game that can be used to customise your character, online as well as off.

That customisation can be layered on top of a character model that begins basic and chunky, like one of Gears', and then picks up unique attributes. Morris' favourite add-on is the hammerhead shark helmet. The ornaments drastically change your appearance, with the obvious benefit that if you're shot by somebody online you can probably identify them a lot more easily when you decide to respond in kind on the next spawn. Morris quickly nixes any hidden potential for that to backfire, too, pointing out that the appearance changes but the bounding-box - the area that registers damage when shot - is consistent across even the most diverse models. He expects that Unreal fans on the Internet will have great fun developing custom character models.

That of course keys in to something else that's been said about UT3 this past month, which is that the game will support the use of mods across both PS3 and PC. Mark Rein said last week that UT3 won't support "Games for Windows - LIVE" (they have strong views about it), so there's no cross-play between PC and Xbox 360, but cross-play between PC and PS3 hasn't been ruled out, and PS3 players will be able to join PC-hosted servers, if not PC games. Asked for specifics on the mod interchange, Morris can't immediately help. "We're looking at different ways of doing that," he says. "Electronic transmission, websites maybe - but that's still being worked out."

However that does work out, one area of the PC-PS3 relationship they are happy to focus on is graphical. Epic has PC and PS3 builds sat a foot from one another at E3, and they're keen to draw the action to the exact same sections to emphasise the similarity. Building on Gears' terrific levels of detail, the Unreal Engine 3 purrs happily under the bonnet of its home-game, with levels full of crumbling bridges, smashed trains, branches gently swaying in the breeze, and a palette of deep purples, browns and greys bored together with the same textural seamlessness we were quick to praise in Halo 3. A lack of human or much artificial opposition in our presentation build means that we can't comment on how well UT3 handles the inevitable spectacle of large-scale battles between 24 players packed onto hoverboards and in vehicles, nor what if any damage all the bot computations will do to performance, but for now that's not really their point: UT3's E3 demo seems to be to emphasise the framework, with the bigger picture to be inked in the run-up to its release later this year. Look out for more on Epic's ambitious FPS in the months to come. It's definitely worth keeping an eye on.