Midway and Epic today announced the minimum and recommended system requirements for the PC version of Unreal Tournament 3 along with a pair of choice screenshots. UT3 looks like it will need a hefty computer to run this bad boy, the recommended RAM is 1 Gb, whoa! After looking at the screenshots it makes sense why you will need to run a rig of epic proportions.

Minimum System Requirements
· Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista
· 2.0+ GHZ Single Core Processor
· 512 Mbytes of System RAM
· NVIDIA 6200+ or ATI Radeon 9600+ Video Card
· 8 GB of Free Hard Drive Space
Hit the jump for more…

Looks look most big games need a collector’s edition now a days and Unreal Tournament is no different, the limited collector’s edition will be available in limited quantity at select retailers for a suggested retail price in the U.S. of $59.95, available November 2007. It will also be available across the UK, Europe, South Africa, Russia, Australia and most other territories.

From the press release:

Midway today announced an exclusive PC collector’s edition for the highly anticipated first-person shooter, Unreal Tournament 3. This limited edition is encased in a special tin hard cover. Included is an Art Book featuring the flawless art style found in the vehicles, characters, weapons and environments that are signature trademarks of the Unreal Tournament 3 universe. In addition, the limited collector’s edition includes bonus DVD extras, featuring:
Hit the jump for more…

It was recently confirmed by CVG that Unreal Tournament 3 on the PS3 will run at 60 frames per second.

The console version itself is looking in great shape; the version we saw today was running at a solid 60fps and looked near-identical with the PC counterpart, which was also running side by side. Mouse and keyboard support is also confirmed, although Epic wouldn’t say anything when we quized them about crossplatform play.

Sounds like a plan to me. Good to see that Epic has the Unreal Engine 3 running well on the PS3. This will prove beneficial for future games that use the engine.

Epic and GameSpy (owned by IGN) today announced a deal where GameSpy’s multiplayer technology will be incorporated into Unreal Engine 3. The deal affects PS3 to PC cross-platform play. Other features being included in the engine are communication tools, competition apps, matchmaking, stat tools, community features, leaderboards, and unannounced new features that may turn up down the line.

The kicker is that GameSpy says this could work for brining cross platform play in a single game to the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. How cool would that be?

GameSpy has the technology to actually connect gamers across virtually any platform for multiplayer play, even Xbox 360 to PS3 to PC. “We’re huge believers in cross-platform play,” said [Todd] Northcutt [GameSpy Technologies Director]. But he said it’s ultimately up to Microsoft and other game companies to realize the dream of total cross-platform gameplay.

I have a tingling feeling that Microsoft will want no part of this. They have their own Games for Windows Live stuff for cross platform play. Hang this one up there with your dream of the next Duke Nukem game dropping this decade.

Ruh Roh Raggy… time for the fanboys to come out and play. Mark Rein, the head of Epic, shared some info about DVD size with CVG.

Speaking at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, Rein said: “We’ll compress some things. But you know, we may have fewer maps on the 360 version… Blu-Ray has definitely given us a lot of legroom.”

The Epic VP added, “If you think down the road, well maybe the next UT beyond this one, on Blu-Ray disc, we might fill the whole damn disc with all the cool stuff the mod makers make.”

Eek. That can’t be good. Between possibly no or little mods and fewer maps, the Xbox 360 version of UT3 looks to be very gimped.

It looks like during a recent demo of Unreal Tournament III at the Edinburgh Interactive festival a very peculiar item was uncovered, known only as the Gamercard. The folks at Epic quickly covered it up by stating “Oops!”.

One can speculate pretty quickly and with certainty that this is an attempt by SONY to take a step towards the tried and true GamerTags that MS currently uses over their Xbox LIVE networks. I think it is a great idea and can’t wait to see it in action. We can only hope that Nintendo thinks of something similar and does away with those awful Friend Codes.

From Game Digest:
Hit the jump for more…

That’s right folks. Prepare to frag the ever loving shit out of your friends on the PS3 with the precision of a mouse and keyboard. Or use the SIXAXIS if that’s what you prefer. But hey, having the choice is the best part.

Mark Rein confirmed on the official Epic forums that UT3 would see out of the box keyboard and mouse support on the PS3.

I checked with Steve Polge and he said that YES we are supporting keyboard and mouse in Unreal Tournament 3 on PS3. He is confident we are doing it in a way that will be balanced without feeling “gimped” for either side. We’ll also allow people to choose whether or not they want to allow mixed controller vs. keyboard/mouse games or not.

Good idea giving people the choice for setting up the games. Takes away one reason for users to bitch about stuff. Now if only Microsoft would allow keyboard and mouse support on the Xbox 360…

In case you were excited about the possibility of playing the 5 new chapters, 3 new mulitplayer maps, and the new multiplayer game type from Gears of War for the PC on your Xbox 360, it’s time to get sad.

Mark Rein, head of Epic, told CVG in an interview that it’s very unlikely we’ll see the new content on the Xbox 360.

“It’s very unlikely because the two code bases aren’t compatible”, Rein explained to CVG when we caught up with him earlier this week.

“To do that, we would have to patch the 360 version and the size of the patch would probably dwarf all five updates we’ve done so far. It’s just too much work. I can’t see it happening.”

“It’s not impossible,” he added, “it’s just unlikely.”

So if you want to play all this new content, it’s probably best to go spend another $50-60 on the game for the PC.

Mark Rein is never one to keep his mouth shut. Sometimes he has no filter between his brain and his mouth, which is great for his line of work. Gamers want to hear the truth, not some sugar-coated PR spin.

In an interview with CVG, Rein said it wasn’t a smart move for Microsoft and Bungie to show a tiny bit of the Halo 3 single player campaign that this year’s E3.

“I think that [showing the single-player campaign] hurt Halo 3 at E3″, Rein told us when we caught up with him for a chat this week. “Halo 3 didn’t win any game of the show awards that I could see. Well, because they didn’t have to show Halo. There was no need”.

“I’m sure if they’d actually had a big Halo 3 presence, if Microsoft had set up eight machines or 12 or 16 machines so you could sit and play it, it would have won all kinds of awards. But they don’t need to because, like me, everyone’s already placed their order… So I think that worked against them at E3,” the Epic boss added.

I somewhat agree with him. I honestly expected more from Halo 3 and was disappointed that all we got was a simple little trailer, given the amount of time between E3 and the release. A single player demo or even a more refined multiplayer demo at E3 would have been better. But hey, everyone is going to buy it anyway. Microsoft knows they’re going to sell millions of copies of this game, so why push it and show anything more than is absolutely needed?

Although Gears of War is in fact requiring the use of Games for Windows Live, it’s Epic cousin, Unreal Tournament, is shunning the service.

As confirmed by Mark Rein, UT3 will not be connecting to Live on the PC.

UT3 does not use Games for Windows LIVE. We have not decided about cross platform play between PC and PS3. We’re not 100% sure that users want that feature but if we get time we’ll play around with it and see how it works. In the mean time we plan to be able to serve the PS3 from PC servers so that should help us gets lots of great servers going.

I don’t see how Windows Live would benefit an Unreal Tournament game. All it would do is pigeon hole it into using approved servers and such. It would really stifle the modding community and privately run servers.