Army of Two

The idea is that if you're in mid-Aggro, cover should be used. It's not mandatory - you can still survive, you can still move around, you're going to take some hits and eventually dive back into cover. If your Aggro's maximised, you must be in cover, because everyone's going to be firing at you. If your Aggro's minimal, you can actually hang out, but the problem is that as soon as you start firing your bigger weapon you're going to draw fire, so you'll want to use a smaller weapon that's precise like a pistol or a customised bigger weapon that's got suppressors to tune down the Aggro. That way you don't need so much cover and you can play more open.

You carry three weapons into every map - the primary, the secondary and the special. Your primary weapons are assault rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers. Your secondary weapons are sub-machineguns and pistols - so like your side-arms. Your special weapons all have a scope, so it's a sniper rifle or an RPG, which allows for all your sniper stuff and for big destruction.

The primary set is your big Aggro-builder - lots of ammo, good damage. The secondary has a ton of ammo, high rate of fire, higher precision, less Aggro building, but also less damage. And then the specials are that the scope's the big differentiator. In each category there's a series of weapons, and each weapon has between, say, 5 and 10 upgrades, and actually there's more than 10 for some.

You can upgrade a barrel, and what upgrading a barrel will do is increase the damage and also increase the rate at which it builds Aggro. You can change the cartridges, which change your reload rate. You can change your stocks, which change your accuracy. You can put accessories on the front, like a battle grip that will increase your accuracy. You can put a shotgun undermount that takes out guys who charge you. But every time you tack things on to get better performance you're also going to build the Aggro, so you can also buy suppressors that lower the Aggro.

So, depending on what you buy versus what your partner buys, it's going to make a difference, because if you both buy a heavy machinegun with a big barrel and you're both firing them, the Aggro's going to be in the middle. At that point you can still offset that by telling your partner to take cover while you fire, or saying to use a pistol while you fire, or if you take a heavy machinegun and someone else takes a smaller assault rifle with a suppressor you can actually still fire at the same time and the Aggro will shift towards that player. It's a different play style to play a lot in cover and use the Aggro and manipulate the AI - one player can ghost around the level, complete objectives and accurately pop guys in the head rather than spray and pray.

Yeah, it's huge. It's a persistent inventory, too, so you don't actually lose anything. You can buy more and you can always change parts back to other parts.

The other thing is that these channels I mentioned between playgrounds act as checkpoints, and besides saving and whatnot you can also buy new weapons, upgrade old weapons and change your existing inventory, so if you think you bought the wrong gun for a mission you can adjust. Or if you know you're going to fight a boss, you can change to something bigger.

We have a very strong story, and it's very politically charged, and it's quite grim. We reference real-world events like 9/11 and then we talk about what's going on with America in Afghanistan and Iraq today, so it's the same stuff you'd see on the news but within the last four years of going into the future.

We talk about the problems of the privatised military and what that presents to America. But you can't just feed the player that, so we looked at other genres like buddy-cop films like Bad Boys or Lethal Weapon, where you have these two characters that banter back and forth but there's this underlying grim reality that makes it easier to swallow, where the guys aren't heroes. You play Gears of War and this guy's a hero, he's fighting for his race's survival, he's this last hope of humanity, where for us it's not - they're there for the money, they're there for the action, and there's this anonymity with the masks so you can kind of impose yourself on them a little bit.

As you play through, the banter will occur with the AI naturally, but also with the players between combat, because when you're out of combat there's this stuff via cinematics and story elements, which really tells you what's wrong, and the characters will evolve, and their banter evolves as it gets through the end. At certain points it gets more serious and drops more of the humour.

We bring you in and out of the story, but at certain times when the two are really gung-ho, you just gunned down a hundred guys and you're feeling pumped, that's the point you can high-five or whatever, but when you find out that you've just been betrayed or screwed over, you're not going to be making those same gestures.

Yes and no. It's not like a political agenda.

A little bit of both. We looked into these private military contractors - companies like Blackwater, DynCorp. - and they hire these guys who are ex-Deltas, ex-SEALs, and they have to fight overseas, but they have immunity to prosecution thanks to US law and also the fact that there's deniability. They can be hired by a government through five different companies and then those companies disappear afterwards, the paper trail can't be traced, and then the company can deny they even sent those guys over. It's a weird area that exists and we want people to understand that.

The craziest thing with all that is just how it really works today. We look at the American military and they can't keep special forces guys, and the army's dwindling because everyone's leaving. We kind of want to point that out, but we're not saying that America is wrong in the government and the actions they took in these wars.

Not prior to release. I don't know if there'll be something later, but the thing is given our release date [15th November for PS3 and Xbox 360 in the US and Europe] and where we're at, we'd rather focus on this rather than taking engineers off and having them do a demo.

Well, I can't talk to about any expandability beyond the two-player co-op. I'm not allowed to talk about that right now. But in general, it's been two years pre-production, two years production, so four years ago - so, looking forward then, the big thing was two players, and the other big thing then was Live. We didn't know how good the networking would be. Two players is relatively easy, but with four you need to start having hosts and servers. With two players it's pretty quick, so we found that that's an easy entry point, and going into the future we can continue to innovate more in the co-op space and really I think drive into four, but really there's things I'm just not allowed to talk about at this point.

I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of such numbers of players [laughs].