Crackdown 2

I think the only Agency vehicles that are in the trailer are the sports car and the helicopter. The supercar really is just like the first game - it's the fastest car in the game by a long way, it still scoops vehicles and things up into the air which is good fun. What we're doing slightly differently this time is going to give the player the supercar earlier. Even though it's pretty mental and fast and awesome, it's just a fairly regular, so you'll get it early on in the game as it's fun to have.

And then the more ridiculous Agency vehicles and them ore fun ones come along later. So we've got a few things we're hearing from [Crackdown 1] DLC - the Agency buggy, not shown in the trailer but I think people already know it's coming.

The helicopter's a key tool for the AI as well. The peacekeepers use the helicopter and it is good fun to play around the world. And like I say, the synchronised skydiving you can do in co-op is great fun.

The helicopter's cool for a multitude of reasons, some of which haven't been shown yet. But it is superb fun.

To be honest, the Achievements came in quite late in Crackdown 1 and that is actually specifically so we can find out what players are doing and try and build around it, and that's definitely the same approach we're taking this time.

We do think Achievements are there as an opportunity to seed ideas and creative gameplay. We don't really like the 'grind' Achievements very much, even though Crackdown did have them [laughs], but we just want to make sure they underline and reinforce some kind of gameplay benefit, so it's that thing of doing alternative thinking, make people think differently about the game, and how it's an openworld toybox. The Achievements are coming in late this time, so we're still in the process of figuring out what all the best options are.

We observe what people are doing and build around that. And everyone on the test teams have ideas and we get some really mad videos, mad bugs back, and some of those manifest back into Achievements.

One of the greatest things from the first game was seeing someone driving the SUV to the top of the Agency Tower. There was no Achievement for that, but bloody hell that was an Achievement.

That's the kind of thing we want to reward, you know, so that's how we do it.

The first thing we did when we started development on this was get the PvP code up and running with the new networking. It was very early on and it's key to the game so we did it early, so we had the first game with eight or nine of us playing, and it was just instantly reminiscent of Quake.

It was literally us just taking the Agents as they were, and everyone had a rocket launcher, and everyone's running around shooting each other. And it was like, "S***, this does actually feel a bit like Quake." So it wasn't an intentional thing we chased down. It's the speed of movement and the weapons in the game.

There's a lot of FPS games, there's a lot of online PvP games we play individually, a lot of influence in the stuff we're doing comes from all sorts of those games, so I wouldn't say we were chasing down anything specific. We basically just built things like the jump pads and the power-ups because they do fit with what we're doing. It's a natural kind of progression.

I think the other thing we're doing is the other types of game modes. They stray further away from the obvious towards things you can only really do in the Crackdown environment, like Rocket Tag's a good example [where one player has to keep hold of an orb while others chase him with rocket launchers].

Weeell, there's co-op gameplay in the trailer. I'm sure it's fine.