All of which is to say, as Douglas Adams once said: Don’t panic. Quake 4 looked a lot better to me in person at Raven’s office than it did at this brief demo, where it was just impossible to see the kind of thought and detail going into the game. You may remain skeptical now if you like, but I’m still on board.

Steve Polge: All the movement abilities from UT2004 are still there. So you’ve got double-jump, you still have dodge-jump: The biggest thing we’ve done is fine tuning and tweaking the existing movement to get it exactly how we want. We’ll be in the hallway after a play session arguing about whether the jump higher should be 4 units heigher or whatever. But the biggest change is really that we’ve increased the feel of gravity. And that makes the world feel a little more solid and less floaty. What it ends up doing is, while you still have all those movements, they’re not quite as dramatic. You’re not feeling like you’re floating through the air. What we’re trying to do in our play sessions is perfect the combat. We also do a lot of play sessions of UT and UT2004 and kind of compare where we’re going and if we’re happy with the changes we’re making. You still have all those things a good player can take advantage of. By reducing the amplitude of the dodgeing movements, the fighting is more controlled in a way that allows the it to be more „in your face,“ closer and more personal, and that’s really one of the things we’re going for.

BeyondUnreal: Will that have a secondary shield function on it like we saw in UT2004?

Steve Polge: It won’t have a shield function, but it will have some kind of secondary function that, ah, and we’re still trying to figure that out, whether it’s a deflection kind of thing like we had in the original UT, or we’ve had some other ideas that haven’t been finalized. We won’t have any melee weapons like UC2, really we look at those as kind of different branches of the Unreal family. With UC2 we wanted more of a console friendly, fighter/shooter combo, but this game is more traditional deathmatch with of course, the addition of vehicles.

Steve Polge: We’re going back to the impact hammer. (Steve smiles deviously, again)