Beyond Unreal has posted an interview with Epic’s Steve Polge (with appearances by Phil Cole and Laurent) concerning the first anniversary of the release of Unreal Tournament 2004 for the PC. The 2-page article discusses various topics ranging from the game’s development to MOD scene. A must read for UT2K4 fans.

Here’s a preview of what you can expect from the article:

BeyondUnreal: A huge part of the success of Unreal Tournament 2004 was the addition of vehicles and the Onslaught gametype. Looking back, what about Unreal Tournament 2004 do you think _didn’t_ work? What would you like to have changed?

Steve Polge: With Assault, it’s the problem that in many maps, the game play tends to get bogged down in spam fests around certain chokepoints. We spent a lot of time trying to improve this issue, but it is difficult to prevent this and keep assault from becoming too complicated for casual players.

With Onslaught, the problem is that once one team has a significant advantage, it’s often difficult for the other team to mount a comeback. This is particularly the case on node layouts with only a single node connection to the powercore (which is a good layout for small player counts, but not for larger player counts). We tried to address this by providing multiple node layouts, but unfortunately people tend to play with the default layout.

We’re working on some new game play mechanics to address this issue for the next Unreal Tournament.