Crackdown 2

It is totally the same guy. I know that came up on the other thing you printed, but it's definitely him.

I'll tell you what it is, I think they'd just not mixed his voice in the build that we'd shown before, so he sounded a little bit thinner, but it is the same guy.

He's got some awesome ones in PvP. He's got one in PvP which is... "You put the 'gent' in 'Agent'."

That's a difficult question because that would probably give away a fundamental part of the game we want players to discover, but the Agency is still on a mission to restore peace and order and all that kind of thing.

To be perfectly honest, that plot point at the end of the first game is not something we wanted to develop on, because it was going towards the game in a different direction. We weren't really ready to deal with that - it was a bit of a sod that we kind of had that line to deal with, and we are dealing with it, I just can't say how at the minute.

But you know, 10 years have passed and there's a pretty good story for what's happened in that time, so it does all sort of tie up.

And I think Billy [Thomson, designer] has already spilled that we want to do Crackdown 3, so you've got to string the pieces together and figure out what's going on there, which will be nice.

Well, there was always a line for Crackdown even from the first game. That plot line you're talking about was meant to take the game in a certain direction, and we're still heading through the arc that was originally kind of conceived, we're just doing it slightly differently.

Probably an easy one to talk about is just general hand-to-hand combat, because that's something that we felt in the first game was pretty limited. Throughout your whole character progression you only have the same hand-to-hand move, and that was really weak, and what we're trying to do now is make sure abilities and upgrades are skill-based, so you unlock stuff as you're going through your progression, and hand-to-hand's a very obvious one there: you get more moves as you go through the levels.

That's the kind of approach we wanted to take because it fixed a lot of problems and also because it's more rewarding for the player to get stuff unlocked. Another good example is driving skill - it was really frustrating in Crackdown 1 to level up your driving, because you try and run people over and they all dived out of the way, they were just too clever. The Freaks [in Crackdown 2] work well for levelling up your driving skill, because they're just cannon fodder.

Yeah, that one's a good one. At the end of the first game you've got all the vehicles in one hit right at the end, so we're going to spread all the good vehicles out [in Crackdown 2]. We've kind of taken that approach with everything - make sure there's something for the player as they go up every skill level, so there's loads of bits and bobs you get access to as you go up through the skill level, and everyone I know seems to have levelled up everything but driving in the first game...