IGN: How are you guys implementing physics? Is it purely visual or will it play a bigger role in gameplay?

Jeff Morris: The nice thing about the Unreal Engine 3 is that it allows you to do all of these types of things in the environment but at the same time you don't want the levels to become progressively less interesting as the game goes on because everything is getting leveled. We do have that kind of environmental interaction and there are certainly going to be some Deathmatch levels that emphasize some physical hazards and things like that.

But you gotta love physics because it really makes the weapons feel more powerful. If you've got a system where things start kicking around the environment or chunks of walls blow off, the weapon is going to feel more powerful regardless of the number of points of damage that it does so it's something we take really seriously.

Mark Rein: One of the good examples of physics being used in gameplay is blowing up the power cores. Those aren't just canned animations anymore. Pieces of this thing are flying off all over the place. It makes the game feel more real and a more immersive environment.

We're also hoping to have some levels that really stretch the boundaries of physics. We have a good relationship with Aegea and what we feel is very good physics performance on PS3 and the possibility of putting the PhysX card to either match that or surpass that on PC. So we definitely are going to build some funky levels around are built around cool physics stuff. We haven't decided exactly what those are going to be quite yet so it'd be a bit premature to really comment on those yet.

IGN: What are the different online capabilities of the PS3 vs. the PC? Often times you see lower player counts on consoles compared to PC games.

Mark Rein: To be honest, we don't really know right now. Sony has hinted that the system is going to be completely open. Player counts, for instance, are usually a function of the server capacity and not the client capacity. Unless your graphics are so complex for each character that you can't render 30 of them together that's not your limitation. It's usually outgoing server bandwidth as well as server power. So the amount of memory and single threaded CPU power are very critical. Presumeably if the system is completely open, we can host games off of the biggest baddest PC servers we can build. That indicates that we should have the same capabilities unless we have to go through some router or some special Sony thing so we just don't have enough details right now to be certain.

More to the point, we have to consider how much fun a game is going to be if there's forty guys in a game and you have a controller in your hand instead of a mouse and keyboard. It's just the gameplay considerations we have to think about. Some games are at their best with four players and some are at their best with forty players. It's hard to say where we'd end up but it probably won't end up being a hundred person game because it's just too fast.