Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

I suppose it could, yeah. But we're moving the bar in other ways. Ultimately what's important about a game is the state it puts the player in. The whole reason people play games is because they want to get into a certain mental state, a certain zone. When you really focus on that, then a lot of the bullet-point features and stuff falls away. They might reach that expectation in certain ways, but Mercs 2 will reach it in others, like the destruction we're doing, or the sheer amount of physics, and also preserving that openworld in the co-op. From what I've seen of GTA IV it looks amazing as usual, but I'm hoping we'll do a little bit of that ourselves.

If I had to boil it down to one word it would be "freedom". Mercs 2 is certainly amongst a few games that are so focused on player freedom and so devoted to not restricting or managing the player experience in any real way. It's really just this freeform and emergent experience; emergent in the sense that Mercs 2 has game rules and they are consistently applied, so anything you can do in one place you can do in another place and it works the same way. And that puts a lot of creativity into the hands of the player about how they want to play the game. Mercs 2 is a game that lets you set yourself a goal and then almost conduct experiments with how things are going to play out. Our goal has always been to say, "yes you can do that, yes you can do that, yes you can do that". I think that's the zone the players get into, that you really get sucked into the world because it is so consistent and free.

Something that we think is really cool and keeps the game unique is that you are equally at home in the civilian and military world. A mercenary would feel nothing about driving a Ferrari into a tank battle, because you're not a soldier but you are at home in military environments. In terms of the toys we've got all of the military stuff covered, but some of the most interesting "destructive trinkets" as you put it are our sports cars being fitted out with rocket launchers and various types of weaponry. These are things you can take into these giant battles, so you can turn up in a modified Lamborghini with a guided missile launcher on the roof and see how you do with that.

We also have a tank bike that players are going to have to work hard to unlock, and it is basically a motorcycle crossed with a tank and it has the ability to climb up on stuff and crush it but also preserve the speed and mobility of a bike.

It's complete. You can literally take a city and reduce it to smoking rubble. It'll take several minutes of concentrated destructive effort. That was really a touchstone for us from day one; if we're going to do this, we're going to do it properly. If there was one thing we weren't going to compromise on, it was that aspect of the game. It's incredibly satisfying.

We've done some interesting things mechanically with the destruction. We have something called "crushing technology", which doesn't sound very interesting but was tough to get right. We use Havok physics to do all the pieces coming off the building - we have these huge chunks of masonry falling down - and they all have a very carefully implemented crushing damage. So if you can arrange for bridges or towers to fall on things then it will really squash things. That kind of idea has been featured in games before, but not like we're doing it. Ours is anywhere, anything.

The destruction is pretty complete and pretty amazing to take down three of four skyscrapers at once and be among the chaos that ensues.

Yeah, absolutely. You have access to the helicopters or a grappling hook that lets you hijack them. You can definitely get up high and there are a few missions that involve that kind of gameplay, but it's also a very useful technique for sniping or dropping in behind enemy lines. The freedom of the game is not limited to the ground level.