Q&A: Mercenaries

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[b]Q&A: Mercenaries[/b]

[b]What aspect of the finished game would you say you where most pleased with?
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Toby Mast (Lead Tester, LucasArts): The game design as a whole. Being able to play in an environment where you can do anything you want, where it\'s up to you to choose how you get from Point A to Point B and know that you\'ll have a great time doing it. The endless variety of mission types, collectibles, unlockables, and things you can destroy. It\'s so satisfying as a game developer to be able to say: \"You can go off and play the game any way that you want, and you\'re going to have a great time doing it.\"

Chris Susen (Product Manager, LucasArts): And I would add to that: it\'s the diversity; the range of weapons, vehicles, air strikes, and missions. Diversity is a key theme, and we think we really hit it out of the park.

[b]Why did you not include a multiplayer or online co-op mode?
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Chris: When we were developing the game, we really wanted to focus on making it the best single player experience possible. If we were to do a sequel, we\'d definitely explore doing multiplayer, but I think that putting multiplayer into the first iteration of the game would have been at the expense of something like the helicopters, the Havoc physics, or some other major key feature. I think that when you\'re launching a new IP (Intellectual Property) you want it to be as feature-robust as possible.

Toby: I\'d like to add that one angle to it is that the game puts you in the role of a lone mercenary who\'s going to be working with all of these different factions in this environment, and to have another person involved in that didn\'t highlight the fantasy - it really didn\'t fit into the scenario. We obviously considered it, but when it came down to it, it really didn\'t help the game any. You want to be the king of that world, and multiplayer really didn\'t support that idea.
[b]
Is there anything you would have liked to have included in the game but couldn\'t due to technical limits?
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Toby: No. (laughs)

Chris: I really can\'t think of anything. Every time a tester would say, \"Wouldn\'t it be cool if...?\", or someone in marketing said, \"You know, we could sell more copies of the game if...\", we put it in the game. I think the developers (Pandemic) and the LucasArts team went all out in getting everything we could possibly squeeze in into the game.

[b]Do you think you will be releasing Mercenaries in South Korea, and do you think it will go down well with the neighbours?
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Chris: We\'ve been working very closely with our partner in Japan and Korea, and we have had some concerns from some Korean media come to us regarding the substance of the game. But we\'ve reassured them that what we\'re doing is creating a fantasy, that it\'s all about gameplay. It\'s not about creating a geo-political statement where you\'re taking down North Koreans - it\'s about blowing the s#!+ out of stuff, it\'s about having fun, it\'s about driving around, taking contracts and being a mercenary. You could take the gameplay out of North Korea and put it in somewhere else with a different story supporting it, and it would be just as compelling.
[b]
Why are the trees not destructible like the rest of the environment?

[/b]
Chris: Mercenaries is a very environmentally-friendly game; we\'ve worked very closely with Greenpeace.... (laughs) No, it just became a nightmare as a particle issue.

Toby: For the game to be able to perform at the exceptional speed and framerate that it does, having individual particles for absolutely every object on-screen while supporting gameplay elements and environmental elements was unrealistic, so the one thing we didn\'t make destructible were the trees.

The trees are blocks we use for the terrain. It\'s like the mountains; you can\'t detonate mountainsides, even though realistically you could with some of the airstrikes. We kept the restraint to that. It would have been fun to drive over trees in tanks, but in the end it was a technical choice.

[b]The influence from GTA is obvious, but were there any other games, films, or books that influenced the game?[/b]

Toby: Jeez... I mean, there had to be. I know SOCOM and Metal Gear Solid were influential in terms of control, but generally it\'s just great games that are out there that we, as gamers who are developers, are fans of. Book-wise, the guys at Pandemic researched so much that they must have been influenced by a million things when they were creating the story.

Chris: If you take a look at it, there\'s next to no research material on North Korea. Look for pictures of North Korea anywhere online and you\'ll be hard-pressed to find them. We were really diligently doing as much research as possible on what North Korea looks like, what the buildings look like, what the environments look like, because nobody really knows. If you ask somebody what they think North Korea looks like, they have absolutely no idea.

Chris: You wouldn\'t until you\'ve started making a game on it, and then you\'re trying to create realistic terrain and realistic cities. What does the countryside look like? I don\'t know - and that\'s why you have to do a lot of research. But there\'s next to nothing out there because they haven\'t released anything for a long time.

Toby: I was really impressed by the amount of research Pandemic actually had from the very beginning of the project. The team had stuff on North Korea\'s terrain, the location of the cities, the language, and the weapons, along with all of the research they had done on the supporting factions as well. They had an amazingly in-depth amount of library to refer to.

[b]If you earned $1 every time you heard someone mention GTA while talking about Mercenaries, how rich do you think you\'d be by now?
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Chris: I\'d be a millionaire, I\'d certainly be a millionaire. I think that people see the open-ended sandbox style of Mercenaries and say, \"Oh, well it\'s GTA\". We differentiate ourselves with the total warzone aspect - the carpet bombs, airstrikes, tanks, and all of that - but on top of that you get to progress through the story any way you want.

I think the sandbox feeling is great in GTA, but you have to do missions in quite a linear fashion, and the way you do them is also quite limited. In Mercenaries there are a bazillion ways to do every single mission. For example, when Toby was showing off the game he airlifted a jeep and threw it at a building; in another mission, he could have hit a vital person with that jeep and killed them to complete the objective. Every mission has an infinite number of ways that you can complete it and that\'s what truly sets it apart.

Toby: I think I\'d be a millionaire as well. My answer to that GTA question is always the same thing: people credit GTA as creating a new type of game genre that\'s successful and fun to play, and it did that. You see a lot of games that are very similar to it - some very, very similar - that fail. Where they failed was that they didn\'t then take that design and go to the next level with it. We knew that the idea of a genre that gave the player the impression that they could play the game any way they wanted was fantastic, but with Mercenaries you truly can do anything you want - and that\'s fun.


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