Lost Planet multiplayer at GC

Those of you wondering what the multiplayer part of Lost Planet is going to be like won't have to wait much longer to find out - Capcom's planning to show it off at Game Convention in Leipzig next month.

In an announcement this afternoon, Capcom Eurosoft said that its stand would play host to four-versus-four team battles - with players struggling against the game's icy conditions almost as much as each other.

The full game will include "numerous multiplayer maps and modes", says Capcom. Speaking to Eurogamer at E3, Keiji Inafune said the team was aiming to support up to 32 players in the final game.

"The team keeps saying 16's more realistic, but I keep telling them to do 32," Inafune told us. "A lot of it'll be determined in the next few months, but we know we'll do the standard set of modes, and we'd like things like different factions of snow pirates fighting each other, with a kill-all mode, a territorial mode - and that'll obviously be slightly different to other similar games because colder, windier territories are going to be tougher to keep hold of because of the way they use up fuel."

"And of course you'll be fighting over the robots. We'll have people leaping into robots, and the guys outside reacting by ripping the weapons off the side of it and using them against it. There's a lot of potential and obviously we're going to try and exploit it all."

That's all on top of a big single-player game too, which will see players taking on snow pirates as well as nasty big bugs - and all the while trying to preserve heat to stave off death in the icy wilderness of the, well, lost planet they find themselves on.

The full game's due out on Xbox 360 exclusively in early 2007 - and there's a demo of it up on Xbox Live Marketplace too, which Capcom says has enjoyed more than 400,000 downloads since E3. Coo, eh?

For more on the game, check out our E3 impressions and interview with Inafune.