A few days ago, Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games expressed his delight with the "additional legroom" that Playstation 3's Blu-ray provides over Xbox 360's traditional DVD drive. This additional legroom will mean more Unreal Tournament 3 content on PS3 than on Xbox 360.
But today, Rein explained that players should see that as "more content on PS3" rather than "less content on Xbox 360". "I continue to be disappointed that folks on the internet treat any positive thing we say about one platform as some sort of critique of another platform. We're a multi-platform company folks please come to grips with that", said Mark Rein.
"Adding a second DVD to a game like UT3 would be a challenge because when playing online you might not know exactly what map you're going to be playing next and we have to be able to accommodate users of the core system. So does that mean the disc on the 360 might have a map or two less? Possibly although it is too early to tell for sure", he added.
Rein also explained that the additional content won't be available for Xbox 360. "The simple facts state that the optical disc on the PS3 holds more data than the optical disc on the 360. If we exceed size of the 360s optical disc then we'll have to find alternative ways to get the content to 360 users such as making it downloadable."
Another Xbox 360 shortcoming is the closed nature of Xbox Live which prohibits the distribution of game mods. Epic didn't come up with a solution for this problem yet, and that's the main reason UT3 won't hit Xbox 360 this year. "When it comes to user created mods on the 360 - we will work with Microsoft to find a way to support them. We just don't have all the answers today and it isn't our chief priority at this very moment because we already have our hands completely full shipping UT3 on PC and PS3 as well as shipping Gears of War on PC", said Rein. "When we get those out of the way, and get a little time to spend with our friends and families, then we'll get back on this issue and figure it out."