Did you look to games from other genres for ideas? Company of Heroes, for example.

Gilmore: Well, what you have to bear in mind is that destructibility [like that of CoH] is a far different thing in an RTS. For one thing the fidelity of an FPS has to be a level of magnitude higher. You can walk right up to a wall and examine the individual bricks and mortar - in an RTS you don’t have that level of freedom. You tend to forgive a lot more in an RTS. That said, we absolutely don’t restrict ourselves to our genre or even to WWII; we’re constantly looking at all kinds of games. So FEAR was an inspiration for a lot of people on Airborne, as were Halo and Half-Life 2.

Have you ever considered that the sheer number of MoH games released might be cheapening the series?

Gilmore: Sometimes, yeah. At some point we’ll have to rest the franchise and I don’t want to make a game I don’t love. So if I personally ever reach the point where I don’t have a good idea, a key innovation or such, then there goes my interest. It’s really not about how many products are released; it’s about making sure you deliver a great one every time.

The company’s been deeply supportive of that in the case of Airborne, because it’s a shift, right? It’s not like the games our competitors make which are just cranked out year after year. We want to make a contribution. Ultimately that’s the legacy of Allied Assault and it’s something we need to get back to.