Scott Warner on Mercenaries 2

Lead designer shows us a World in Flames

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Mercenaries 2: World in Flames is so very nearly with us we can almost taste the high-octane action Pandemic are plotting. Still, with the game being pushed back repeatedly and some stiff competition awaiting this release with fangs bared, we thought a brief chat with lead designer Scott Warner was the order of the day.

Pandemic and EA have been telling us about Mercenaries 2 for quite some time now. At what stage is the game's development, presently?

We're 99.9% done at this point and almost ready to ship the game off to retailers worldwide, with an August 31st date in North America and September 5th in the UK and EU. We just have a few more bugs to squash over here and we'll finally be ready to share the game with everyone!

Mercs 2 has been pushed back a couple of times, what challenges caused this, and how is the game stronger as a result?

Release dates are always a bit of an educated guess and it's been rare that I've worked on a project where the ambition of the game fell straight into place with the expected ship date. Not only is creating an open world, sandbox action game a difficult goal in and of itself, but then to allow the player to destroy every single of bit of it is exponentially more challenging.

Add a co-op system that allows players to come and go as they please with no interruption to the server's game and you have a game that really required complete commitment from everyone on the team in order to get the engine performing well and handling our crazy ambitions.

Destruction. Its one of our favourite words. Tell us how interactive the world of Mercs 2 is.

With the exception of the terrain and water, everything in Mercenaries 2 is destructible. Everything!

What is the game's premise?

Mercenaries 2 are a personal revenge story where you level an entire country to get back at a man who screwed you over. You'll work with all manner of self-interested parties, from shady corporations to huge military powers, in order to acquire the money, resources and information necessary to hunt down that son of a bitch down.

Venezuela isn't too happy with the plot. Should Chavez and co be concerned by Pandemic's new videogame?

Using real world locations is always bound to upset someone out there but the important thing to remember is that we are creating a work of interactive fiction and not drawing analogies to real world people or governments. Venezuela was mostly chosen because it is a varied and beautiful locale that allowed us to create environments that were extremely different than the ones we delivered for North Korea in the original Mercenaries.

Visuals are obviously important, but are physics and AI just as key to delivering an immersive game experience now?

I'd say physics and AI are just as important as visuals in delivering a Mercenaries-style game play experience. Given that we have to allow the player to destroy anything and everything in the game, there are a lot of dynamic objects being thrown around in any combat situation. In order for the destruction model to match player's expectations, you're going to need to rely heavily on a robust physics system.

Likewise, if you're going to have a lot of dynamic objects getting thrown around in combat encounters, the AI will have to be able to intelligently use those objects to engage with combatants - if they can't, it doesn't really matter how good your game looks if your enemies combatants can't figure out how to get around the battlefield to shoot at you.

How do you balance realism and fun in a game with pretensions of real-world grittiness?

It's a balance we think about regularly but ultimately I like to describe our approach as "real enough". That is, we present a quasi-real world scenario for the player to think about but we never let that realism get in the way of the player enjoying an over-the-top interactive action experience. Yes, you probably couldn't careen your truck off a cliff in real life and live to talk about it, but if it was plausible enough for Schwarzenegger to do in 'Commando', it's plausible enough for us.

Have you learned anything from Mercs 2 that will aid your other games, presently in development?

We've learned a lot from Mercenaries 2 that will definitely help us develop better games here at Pandemic. It's been a monster of a project and I'm certain that the challenges that the team has had to deal with in making a next-gen, open world action game will aid them in developing just about anything in the future.

Any DLC plans post-release? Or will be left itching for Mercs 3?

It's definitely something we've thought about, but right now we are just laser-focused on getting Mercenaries 2: World in Flames out and into the hands of the fans.

Thanks for your time, Scott.

By Luke Guttridge