We started with the basics. We wanted a mercenary to shoot at us; that came online very quickly, and we started iterating from there.

One of the first additions we made was the ability to "cap" the AI in the knees, forcing them to drop in place. To give you a little taste of the chaos, this feature was actually designed to help facilitate another, player-centric, feature we were prototyping. We ended up cutting the primary feature, but left "capping" because it was cool.

Next we began playing with cover behaviors. We actually have a good foundation in there now. The mercs are pretty smart, but this is one of the features I really want to push and expand on in upcoming episodes.

The helmet system came on a little while after. This is one of my personal favorites. Basically, as we've stated before, if you get a lot of head shots, the AI starts coming in wearing protective helmets. Of course, if you're a good shot, you can blow that off, which is really great player reward. I will say, as of yesterday, we've got a few more surprises up our sleeves for this system as well. I won't spill it here, but you guys will definitely be pleased.

Most of the merc behaviors(the ones described here and many others) are in place now. We're mostly fixing bugs and playing with their reactions. For example, after the shaky-cam footage at CES, we were inundated with feedback that our mercs weren't responsive enough to explosives. This was flagged as a bug, but do to all the great feedback we got, we took a long look at it, making sure we really solved the problem. One of the great strengths of episodic content is our ability to react to community feedback -- this is a great example of that.