UT3 might miss November

Mark Rein has said that Unreal Tournament 3 might not be released in November after all.

"We do not know exactly when the game will be completed," he told forum-goers in response to questions about a website countdown timer that seemed to be narrowing down the date.

"All we've said is that we're hoping for a November release, but as you know we value getting it right over getting it right now, so there's no guarantee of that," he added, which is a slight change in tone to what he told Eurogamer at Games Convention.

Less than a month ago, when we sat down at the German show, he said the developer was "confident" of hitting November, but "not enough to say which week in November it's going to be".

However he was clearly pleased with its progress, pointing out that the dev-team was eagerly looking forward to getting feedback from the thousands of GC attendees tucking into networked versions of the multiplayer FPS on the show floor.

For our part, we had a look at it a month earlier at E3, and it certainly looked like a game reaching the end of development. It also looked jolly good, as our Unreal Tournament 3 preview attests.

Whether it hits November or not though, the plan is to release on PC and PS3 together, with an Xbox 360 version scheduled for "early 2008".