Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

There was nothing to settle. It was a lot of rhetoric. It's an entertainment property - we don't go back and forth with these guys, we just kind of are the game that we are. They've been very quiet on the radar of late - I'm assuming they have bigger things, like kicking out foreign journalists and nationalising the oil supply to worry about. To me it's a lot of gamesmanship. We don't court the controversy.

If you look at the main character in our game, and look at the country we've made, it's really not photo-realistic Venezuela. It's much the same idea as making a movie set in some fictitious city. So we just don't really concern ourselves with it too much. We don't want to do anything horrific. We don't want to nuke a city. We're not going to do anything of that level. We don't encourage the death of civilians, there is no likenesses of any major landmark buildings. It's a setting, it's an oil supply, it's a headline feel, but we're not trying to court controversy.

We feel for our friends who worked on Resistance: Fall of Man and that whole to-do that's going on [Sony and Insomniac recently came under fire for Resistance's depiction of Manchester Cathedral]. We're being very careful - I worked on several Spider-Man games and had to do a lot of licensing work with the city of New York, and one of my big things was 'let's just avoid it'. We don't need the headache of trying to license buildings because there's just so much that gets wrapped up in that.

Yeah, we don't have the same level of advocacy, we don't have the lobbyists on our side the same way that the movie folks do. We're just not as mature an industry. Movies and Hollywood have been around since the '20s, and there's a lustre and a fame that's attached to them. I think we're getting taken seriously financially - we're a very big economic entertainment medium - but there's a sense still in people who don't understand games...it's the idea of xenophobia, that people who don't understand things can be very judgemental and afraid of them.

I think it will be another five-to-ten years before the people moving into executive positions will be the kids who were playing with Genesis and Dreamcast.

It's just not new for people to latch onto pop culture and blame it for society's ills. People are going to have sex, do drugs and commit crime no matter what the form of popular entertainment is at the time, and people tend to make those parallels, but we are who we are, and I really don't attribute games to the decay of society [laughs].

On a positive side we felt that the minute-to-minute mechanics were very solid - we didn't want to mess with the 'secret sauce' so much. We basically have first-person shooter controls in a third-person game - we didn't want to change that.

What we did want to do - as I talked about a bit - was we felt we could have done a lot more with developing the characters and storyline with the humour and punchiness of dialogue. And that really has taken a big turn for us. It didn't really show in the demo because it was a lot of blowing stuff up and showing the cool stuff, but there's some really great writing this time around, some really funny cinematics. It's going to manifest itself through the contract briefings when you go to take a job, with these pretty cool interactive sequences where you're going back and forth with the head of a petroleum company or the guerrilla boss, and each character's got their own form of humour. There's some really cool FMV in it, there's a lot of chatter in the world. We really want to sell the character themselves and the three-act story with protagonist, antagonist, and a classic revenge fantasy.

With the writing style we try to draw from the Tarantino - the really punchy dialogue - and we like Bruckheimer's huge explosions and bridges blowing up.

I think it's the idea of the civilian versus the military. Where GTA excels is selling the fantasy of being a thug, being a gangster, but you can't take an Abrams tank, you can't take an attack chopper - the level of destruction that we do is really unprecedented in openworld games. You have a lot of destruction in games, but they tend to be level-loaded, very scripted games. There's no game out there that's doing the scope and the scale and the physics we're doing. The stuff that GTA's doing is fantastic, but we're trying to take the hill between military and civilian and cover the lifestyle - somewhere between Halo and GTA is really the fiction that we're going for.

We were impressed. I felt personally - I was surprised at the complete lack of a story in that game - but we were so far in development by the time that came out that the lessons were just, it's cool, we liked their multiplayer, we thought it was a pretty interesting game, and we liked getting the Halo 3 beta out of it [laughs].

We probably would be looking at underwater gameplay - submarines, scuba tanks and underwater action.

Yeah, very difficult to make entertaining. Camera controls and so on and so forth. But I think it would be really cool in Mercs to do some more submersible stuff - take an underwater vehicle and plant some C4 at the base of an oilrig. We could maybe expand the co-op multiplayer into four, eight, sixteen player. Larger multiplayer. Maybe add some competitive multiplayer modes. There's always new features that you can add, but you also want to avoid, every time you make the game, going back to the well and starting over, because I really feel like the minute-to-minute of Mercs is cool, so for Mercs 3 we want to take the big stuff - it's been a heck of a time getting onto the next-gen consoles, we finally have a really cool looking engine - and expand upon it but in a sane fashion that we're not starting back from day one.

If I have anything to do with it, there will be [laughs].