In case you were a bit curious as to why Epic decided to bring Unreal Tournament III to the PC and PlayStation 3 before its debut on the Xbox 360, Epic Vice President Marc Rein has shed some much-needed light on just why it’s being delayed on the 360. That light? Mods.
According to Rein, because the PS3 and PC are relatively open networks, bringing in user mods on each hasn’t posed much of a problem. The 360, however, seems to be closed for business. From CVG:
The open nature of PlayStation Network has meant it’s not been a problem bringing UT III mods to PS3, but Xbox Live’s essentially closed network is causing a stumbling block. However, Epic VP Mark Rein has said the dev hopes “to find a way to bring mods over to the Xbox 360″.
“That’s part of the reason we announced we were shipping the game on PC and PS3 this Fall, but we don’t have a date for the Xbox 360 version - it’ll be some time after the new year. Part of that is because we haven’t been able to figure out just how we’re going to do the mods. And Microsoft’s got a very busy Christmas schedule… We just couldn’t get enough attention from them to solve that problem”, Rein said.
So what will happen if they can’t get mods to actually work as intended on the 360?
“Worst case scenario is, we port them and we put them through certification and we put them up as downloadable content,” Rein added. “That’s the worse case scenario. Hopefully between now and whenever it is we ship on Xbox 360, we figure out a user-managed way to do it.”
