What about the three playable characters in the game - how will they be different from one another?

JZ: They’re very similar. We didn’t want to unbalance the game for a fictional standpoint. It’s a lot about what their humour is and how it plays out with Chris being serious, Mattias being a smartass and Jen using her female charms. It’s a lot more story-based than you'd imagine.

We’re toying around with the idea of playing in character and rewarding that. Like Mattias getting an award for big explosions, Jen getting an award for headshots and Chris getting an award for no civilian deaths.

Although we haven’t implemented the feature yet, it’s something that if we don’t feel we can get right, we don’t want to tack on just for the sake of it. We’ve got so many features in the game that the idea of doing something half-assed just to have another bullet point on a box isn’t really worth it.

We’ve heard there may be a fourth character - is that true?

JZ: No! We were initially toying around with the interesting idea of creating a fourth character to play with, but we felt that instead of spreading ourselves too thinly, we wanted to take the three characters we had and make them really developed and fully fleshed out. It’s something we felt we could’ve executed better in Mercenaries - especially the depth of the main bad guy.

As well as the Co-op mode, are you going to have traditional multiplayer modes in the game too?

JZ: If possible we’ll add those on, but again we don’t feel that deathmatch really gets to the heart of the game as much as Co-op multiplayer. At the moment, it’s just co-op online and that’s as much from a design standpoint as it is from a tech standpoint. We really feel like that’s what sells the fantasy and because Mercs is such an open-ended game we want you working with your friends, to come up with a thousand new things we didn’t even think of at the beginning of the cycle.

Jan 28, 2008