Epic has also done a lot of new things in terms of overhauling the UI by adding client-side demo recording, mid-game voting for not just maps, but game types and mutators. The team has also flushed out all the different areas of the game based on what they heard the community asking for as well as other areas they thought could add some new innovation and value to the game.

"We feel like we have such a vibrant community that not only continues playing this game but creates their own modifications for the game long after the game ships, that we want to reward these gamers with new content," said Polge. "We want to give people a reason to continue playing the game and continue making their own changes to the game."
Outside of the big things, PC gamers will notice a lot of subtle improvements like the weapons pick-up system. In games like Death Match and CTF, players traditionally had two different ways of picking up weapons. There is the weapons stay, which means weapons are always on you. Anybody can pick them up at any time, but you can only pick them up once. And that is typically what people often use in team games and casual matches. Then the other system is that you can pick up a weapon once, then it is gone for everyone until it re-spawns, whether through a time burst or another mechanism.

"What we have done with this expansion is created a hybrid of the two," explained Polge. "With weapons, you basically have a personal respond timer. If you pick up a rocket launcher, it disappears until your respond timer runs out and then it appears again for you. That does a couple of things. It's clear for the novice player that if the weapon is there, I can pick it up. It means that if you run out of ammo, you know you have a place where you can go back to get it. Before, with weapons stay, you could see that rocket launcher, but you couldn't get any more ammo off of it. For advanced players, it allowed us to make the ability to throw weapons and toss them to teammates easy."

Epic also now provides weapons lockers for game types like Vehicles CTF and Warfare, where players always get their weapons from the weapons locker when they re-spawn. The mid-game map voting is something Polge said the hardcore players were all clamoring for. Epic already had map voting, they just extended it to provide a lot more features and a lot more options for how it works.
"There are also a number of features that we have brought over for mod authors," said Polge. "One that I can think of off the top of my head is we've added the ability to do bone scaling, so you can basically stretch peoples' arms and stuff. While it's not very useful for us in this game, it's a cool effect and it's something we thought mod authors can take advantage of in the main engine."

UT3 is about to become a whole different experience next month, adding value to the PC and PS3 game and giving the community plenty of new tools to work their mod magic with.