Mercenaries 2 preview

UK, Februari 24th, 2008 - Mercenaries 2 is a game about 'blowing @!%* up', according to Pandemic's Jonathan Zamkoff. His latest demonstration of the game, at EA's recent Producer day, starts as it means to go on: with an almighty bang. Lots of them. If you've played the original Mercenaries, you'll know the drill: contemporary combat in sandbox environments full of all sorts of vehicles and weapons and over-the-top action. Except this time around it's bigger, badder, louder, and even more action-packed than before.

By way of demonstration, Zamkoff dives straight into that action. Ostensibly tasked with setting up three listening pods, triangulating the location of a kidnapped marketing executive and then rescuing him, Zamkoff decides to send in Mattias Nelso, a Swedish mercenary who dresses in biker chic and who, apparently, revels in the chaos of battle. And chaos is the right word: the mayhem that follows is the sort of concerted symphony of violence, destruction and action that most games, if they get there at all, take a little while longer to reach.

First, Zamkoff climbs into a combat chopper (one of the 130 different types of vehicle in the game, along with bikes, cars, tanks, ships and boats). Then, after briefly warming up with some machine-gun fire, he starts launching rockets at a bridge, bringing it toppling it down, then at a shipyard, reducing it to rubble. Next, he flies over to a massive oil rig. The scale is breathtaking. At last year's E3, this oil rig was a full-blown demo in its own right. Now it's just another of the game world's infinite destructive possibilities as Nelso circles round to it, laying more missile-based waste.

And then, while Zamkoff explains the 'what, not how' philosophy behind the game (telling players what they have to do, but not how they should go about doing it), he lowers a winch and lifts an entire oil tanker into the air, swinging it like a huge pendulum before dropping it on to the floor below and firing yet more missiles into it. Even when he starts following his objectives, the mayhem doesn't end: from shooting down trees to provide a route to the first objective, to creating what Zamkoff calls a 'Mercenaries door', ie. a pile of rubble where once a wall stood, having destroyed it with C4. In fact, the demo concludes with the destruction of entire city blocks via air-strikes with fuel air bombs.



So the major difference between this and the original Mercenaries is one of scale: more weapons, more vehicles, bigger explosions, incredible draw distances and massively huge maps. Every single object in the game is interactive in some way - and mostly that way is by means of destructability. "Obviously the next-gen consoles are allowing us to do a ton more with the physics," says Zamkoff. "The asset density is much higher, there's a bigger world, bigger explosions, really cool articulation on the vehicles - we have moving suspension. So it's a lot more, bigger, cooler stuff with a much better story and co-op multiplayer."

Ah, yes. As if Mercenaries didn't provide enough wanton destruction, one of the new features is that it allows two players to team up to create even more. "Adding a co-operative multiplayer element is a huge difference from the first game," continues Zamkoff. "It's really taken the game to a new level - we're just discovering things that you can do in the co-op that we didn't know you could do. All of a sudden our QA guys are running over, saying, 'Oh my God, look what I just did!'" It's also a bit of a technical challenge keeping those huge environments in memory while two players run around causing mayhem, so you'll only be able to move so far from your partner.

"We were trying to do untethered multiplayer but it just couldn't be done," says Zamkoff. "We're toying with tethered ranges right now. Right now we're at about 500 metres, which is very, very long, and if you're playing together, you don't want to be getting lost in the map. We also don't want to do things like spawning more guys in multiplayer, or giving them more hit points. The way we're tuning the balance of difficulty is by making the enemy's aim a little worse in single-player. We don't want it to feel like a different experience when you drop in. That's really the big part of the multiplayer for us: it's seamless. You can jump in, you can drop out and the player doesn't feel like it's any different to the single-player game."

But even more than this seamlessly integrated multiplayer mode, the thing that sets World in Flames apart from its predecessor is its greater focus on story and character development. "The biggest thing that we felt like we could have done better in the original Mercenaries, that we could have developed more, is character and story development," reckons Zamkoff. "We had this really cool idea and a lot of combat and action, but we felt like the characters didn't resonate with our fans as much as we would have liked them to - and certainly the bad guys didn't feel like evil antagonists. So the number one thing that we did this time is to do an amazing job with the writing this time round."

Mercenaries 2 feels all the more epic thanks to those spectacular draw distances.

Moving from the then topical issue of nukes in North Korea to the now topical oil crisis, Mercenaries 2 takes place in Venezuala (because it's more colourful than the Middle East, apparently, and it provides an excuse to bring in a load of Latin percussion and Reggae for the soundtrack). The story - a classic revenge structure - plays out over three acts. In the first, your character is hired by Ramone Solano, a popular South American politician, to rescue one of his kidnapped generals. Once you've done that, he refuses to pay your contract, leaving you nothing but a bullet in the ass for your troubles - thus setting up the rivalry, and quest for revenge that forms the basis of the second act before reaching climax at your showdown with your megalomaniac evil mastermind nemesis.

As Zamkoff says, it's "a sort of big Bruckheimer meets Tarantino summer action movie that's really a combination of witty one-liners and banter and oh-my-god-it's-a-crazy-Swede, with RPGs and putting C4 on things." It's got loads of explosions, loads of weapons, loads of vehicles, and loads of environment to explore. "I just feel like we've got so much to offer," concludes Zamkoff. "The toys, the air-strikes, the factions, the crazy Rastafarian pirates. We're selling an experience." And a pretty intense one at that.