Far Cry 2

"In some maps you'll have grass around your base, so you can set fire to it and the other team won't be able to grab your diamond for a while," says Gaetan Richard, the game's multiplayer producer. "But then your team who spawn around the base will have problems, and anyone coming back with the enemy diamond won't be able to return it." We chatted with Richard about burning stuff a fair bit during Ubisoft's multiplayer event. Richard liked to talk about burning stuff.

We did wonder, though, why there wasn't any kind of co-op? "We thought about that," he says, "but as we were building the engine from scratch with dynamic loading and destructibility and all that, it was complex enough already. Having AI online would have been crazy. That's why you don't see any animals online, either. The animals use the same pathfinding nodes as the AI, so we have the same problem there. You can see a few birds when you're playing online but that's it."

Alright, but the four multiplayer modes that are on offer seem kind of bare-bones. "I've been on the project for a little over a year now, and when I arrived they were experimenting with online modes that were a little more related to the single-player story," says Richard. "But there was no more time, and they really needed something that was solid and felt good with the map editor. So I said, 'Now there's no more room for trial and error', and we went back to basic game modes.

"Another thing we have to keep in mind is that we have the map editor, which is a good third of the game. We thought that if we had game modes that were too complex, the user wouldn't be able to make good maps for it." We reckon he means they were experimenting though, so what got cut? "Well, I think there's one I can talk about. In single-player you work for factions, and after some missions you can betray them and go and work for another faction. This mode was like that. You didn't swap sides, but you could betray your side and do things for the other team for your own benefit. But playing online it's already tough to build a team spirit. If you add betrayal, the team spirit goes away and it all stops working."

While the event we attended didn't feature a demonstration of the map editor, Ubisoft clearly considers it a pretty big deal, which is hardly surprising if you've watched the frankly amazing Leipzig video of how it works. As well as making the tools as intuitive as possible, Ubisoft is shipping Far Cry 2 with YouTube-like search features and the option to rate any map you try, which will hopefully allow the best projects to float to the surface and not just ones featuring 120-foot wangs built from corrugated iron. Richard also assured us that in the months following the game's release we'd see recreations of maps from every game from Halo to Counter-Strike.

It's a pretty bold claim, but he pronounces it was an infectious energy and confidence. Nothing left to do now but wait for the chance to try the full game.