Put down those dual wielded Plasma rifles, it's time to reacquaint yourself with the trusty old flak cannon. Unreal Championship is all set to return to the Xbox. Sporting a completely overhauled graphics engine, enhanced special effects and promising some kick arse melee based combat, UC2 sounds like it should be something special.

We sat down with Michael Capps from Midway to find out just how UC2 is shaping up and how much longer Unreal fans will have to wait!

Hi, Michael, welcome to Xbox World Australia. Can you give our readers an introduction about yourself, your history in the gaming industry and your role in bringing Unreal Championship to the Xbox?

Hi, all. I'm Mike Capps, and I'm the lead designer of Unreal Championship 2. I also have the privilege of being president of the best game company in the world, Epic Games.

My first game was the free U.S. Army shooter based on the Unreal Engine, America's Army. I was designer, producer, and lead programmer on that one, and boy did I learn a lot. I joined Epic and worked for a few months to help ship UT2003, then started a new company (Scion Studios) which we merged into Epic about a year ago.

I'm now responsible for all of our game products, and I'm still working day-to-day on UC2 as lead designer.

Thanks! I'm a huge UT fanboy as well, honestly, so you can imagine how fun this job is.

We have Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag which are the UT standards. We've also got Survival, which was quite popular for UC1.

The new gametypes are Overdose and Nali Slaughter. Nali Slaughter is just what it sounds like – tear through an arena with your melee weapons, beating up the poor peaceful Nali. Overdose is a bit more complicated; it's sort of like a no-team version of Bombing Run. A ball spawns in one area of the map, and you deliver it to one of the two goals. You get a higher score if you go for the longer goal. Of course, everyone's trying to kill you during this process, so it's a bit risky to go for the long goal. While you're holding the ball your radiation levels will climb, and if the max out, you'll Overdose when you deliver the ball. At that point, you become a damage machine (super health, damage amplifier, speed, the whole works) and take out your aggression on those poor fools who were following you.

Yes, everything's available in System Link and Xbox Live. Both allow 2-8 players.

There are seven races, and each one is very different. Each race uses its own types of melee weapons, has its own set of pistols, and they have specific adrenaline abilities. The Nakhti race (the ancient-Egyptian looking folks) use energy-based powers, so they have energy shields, a burst of energy, a flash of energy that blinds opponents, and so forth. The undead Necris use nanoblack, the same stuff that runs through their veins and keeps them alive. They use it to drain life from their opponents, but if they use it on other Necris, they'll actually heal them. The giant Juggernauts are much bigger, and slower, so they're easier to hit, but they have almost three times the health of lighter characters.

We're saying 'over 40 maps'. We've already got more than 40, and our guys are still testing a few more that might sneak their way in. And we're already working on downloadable content maps to give a special thank you to the Xbox Live audience.

We do have some classic UT maps in there, although you sure wouldn't recognize them from all the art changes. Legacy, where you have the final fight in the single player, is a remake of DM-Pyramid level. We have versions of Morbias, Gauntlet, Tempest, and a few others that you might recognize. Sorry, no Deck17. You'll have to play UT2004 for that!

We're really excited about having Raiden as one of our playable characters. We've really enjoyed the experience with this IP crossover. Who knows, maybe we'll have the Gauntlet Valkyrie next time around? “Valkyrie needs adrenaline, badly!”

Working on a fixed platform is a blessing and a curse. It's been very liberating not worrying about compatibility issues, or trying to make your game for the lowest common denominator. We really got the chance to make the Xbox hardware sing.

But we sure wouldn't have minded a bit more memory!

When we talked about how to make the next UC more fun for living room, console-style play, we talked about more of a fighting game feel, where one guy picks an arena, another picks a character, you choose a character based on his choice, etc. That's a big part of why you choose characters and weapons in advance, and those choices really change the way the game plays. Melee just kind of evolved out of that direction. It actually really speeds up the pace, because now you have people trying to get in close for a deadly melee shot. Close-quarters combat is naturally more frenetic than distant combat.

Wow, there's loads. The grenade launcher is new. The stinger, sniper rifle, and ripjack are all revisions of Unreal franchise weapons. In the pistols, the dual enforcers behave much differently now, and we've added Skaarj lasers, the Nakhti Scorpion energy pistols, the robot's rivet guns, and Raiden's lightning bolts.

All the melee weapons are brand new - dual swords, axes, staffs, kama, fists, even Skaarj blades.

For Unreal Tournament, having that sort of selection available really makes sense, because you have enough buttons for it. In the first UC, juggling a dozen weapons with just two buttons made for a real interface challenge. So that was part of our reasoning.

The other reason was so that each match would really feel different. If your know your opponent has a bio rifle and a flak cannon, that really changes your tactical approach, combat distances, etc. When your opponent could pull out any of ten weapons at a moment's notice, you don't have the same ability for tactical assessment. It's great replay when you can say, “Let's try that same map with the same characters, but this time I'll use the rocket launcher.” When you add, “Let's try one of 40 maps, with one of 14 characters that play totally different, and choose different weapons, and toss in one of a few dozen mutators to the rules” you've got a heck of a lot of replay, and that's crucial on the console where we don't have a mod community like we do for the PC.

So easy that they practically activate themselves! Okay, not really, but we went through literally a dozen different interfaces before we came up with the current system, and I'm really happy with it. In the default config, you tap the X button to pop up a menu. There are three options, tied to left trigger, A, and right trigger. We show the icons for the abilities, their names, and the trigger you press to activate. Pressing X a second time will go to the second set of three options, with the same interface. Pressing a third time will close the menu. It's handy for exploring a new character's abilities, but most people learn the keys pretty quickly and do it without looking.

We put similar abilities in the same positions. Everyone has a quad-jump combo (X,A) and a speed combo (X,A,A). Each race has a vision mode (X,X,R). Each race has a way to get health (X,X,L), whether it's a mechanical upgrade, or a health boost, or vampiric attacks. Each race has a unique combo (X,L) that's usually defensive in nature, like a energy barrier that repulses projectiles, or teleporting out of trouble. Finally, each character has a unique combo (X,R) like the ability to create a holographic projection, or create an ice storm that freezes nearby characters, and so forth.

It sounds more complex than it is. Once you've played the game a few times, even if you don't know your current character well, you have a general idea of the purpose of each adrenaline button combination. Of course, mastering a character is key…

Definitely comes into play more. We have a full cinematic storyline that introduces the Anubis to the player. You don't just start fragging, you learn why Anubis must join the Ascension Rites tournament, you train to get into the tournament, and even get ambushed outside the tournament arenas. No respawns there!

In addition to the main campaign, we do have a ladder-style progression available for each of the 14 playable characters. There's also a challenge mode to put you in tough situations, like being down 2-0 in a capture the flag match and having to catch up and win with only a few minutes left. Against a team of really fast characters. And you're a slow, heavy character. And they have the flag. And, did I mention the match is 1-on-4? You get the idea…

Both, actually. Melee is always done in 3rd person, so switching to your swords will put you in 3rd, but the game remembers your preference and will put you back in 1st if that's what you were doing before. You can also switch between them very quickly by tapping the black button. I'll switch to 1st person for a bit more accuracy, then back to 3rd when I need more peripheral vision or when I'm doing a complex chimney jump.

You can even set your preference per weapon, so as you switch from the shock rifle to the rocket launcher it'll check your profile and do the switch for you.

Making games for the Xbox is really fun as a designer, because you know that all of your players have sufficient hardware, and you can make something that looks great for everyone, not just people with high-end graphics cards. We have a distortion effect that applies to arbitrary geometry in the world, which makes for great explosions, especially for the shock combo. We use a radial blur when you have speed-enhancing combos on, and that gives a great sense of acceleration. Our sniper rifle zoom has loads of effects, including a color ramp and depth of field with auto-focus.

Stats is a big part of the competitive Unreal games, and so we've done some fun stuff there. We're using ratings (based on your performance) to help create better, more balanced matches when folks use Quick Match. The single player is totally Live aware, and in fact we have rankings in all the single player campaign and competition ladders, so you can compete for best times there as well.

We're a few days shy of feature complete, and then it's a few last weeks of polishing until we ship. People will be playing the Xbox Live-enabled demo quite soon I hope, and the game should be on shelves in March or April.