IGN: Modern Warfare is something that Infinity Ward has ownership over now – does that mean that the team is tied into dong any further instalments in the series?

Robert Bowling: Not really. Right now we don't have a clue what our next game is going to be, and we won't know what it will be until we finish with Modern Warfare 2, which won't be for a while – once this game comes out we're going to take a little break, we're going to play with the community to see what people like and what they want more of so we can focus on the DLC for this game, and once all that's wrapped up and done then we'll start thinking about what's coming next. Right now, if we want to make another one then we might, but we've really no clue what our next game is.

IGN: Call of Duty started as a PC-led franchise but that's changed with Modern Warfare. Do you think Modern Warfare is more in tune with console sensibilities than Call of Duty used to be?

Robert Bowling: We definitely like for the game to be equal on every platform, but the console games became so popular that the majority of our audience are on console. So when we're going out to our community to get feedback, the majority of feedback we're getting is from the console userbase. We'd definitely like it to be a unified user base, and with Modern Warfare 2, more than any previous games, each platform is very similar to each other in how they perform.

Diii.net: Everyone seems pretty happy with the function and form of the Barbarian's Fury resource, but nothing has been revealed about the non-mana resources that the Wizard and Monk will use. Can you give us some insight into what kind of play style their resources are meant to encourage?

Jay Wilson: Well for the Wizard we want to enforce the fact that she's a glass cannon. I don't think it's fun to ever run out of mana. I'm not really interested in an extended resource for her. For the WD we're okay with mana, since he's got some pretty good skills to recover mana that also double as attacks. And he's not defenseless when he's out of mana. He's got pets and ways to attack with them that aren't mana intensive. For him that makes mana fairly interesting.

For the wizard, when she's out of mana she just dies. And that's not fun. So if anything, we want to encourage how she plays. So she's the kind of character that blasts first and asks questions later. Very vulnerable. So we want to implement a system that makes her more blasty, but even more vulnerable. We want to make that a choice for the player. "Do I want to make myself more vulnerable in exchange for being more blasty." And that's a cool gameplay pull there.

For the Monk um... I'm not ready to talk about him yet since he's just too early. We still haven't decided exactly what we want to do with him. We're still playing around with his resource system.

How did you top multiplayer?

Multiplayer is definitely much bigger and deeper than before. There are just so many more elements and variables that make it different. I mean we are all big on customization, being able to let players tweak things. I mean we want everyone to play our game, obviously. We want it to be accessible. But we want every person to be able to have their own play style. There are things in there for people that love to snipe. There are things for people that love to use the assault rifles, that love to be sneaky, that love to use AC-130's and shoot people from the sky.

There is even something in there for people that can't shoot. I am not the guy that shoots; pointing a gun and making bullets come out is not my cup of tea, but you get the riot shield and your job is to help your team. It is a whole new element. It really changes the way you play the game.

Can anybody use that riot shield or is it just that class?

It is a primary weapon. So you can choose to take an M4 or you can choose to take a riot shield. What you are giving up with that is your primary weapon. So when you have the riot shield out, you can't shoot. All you are doing is blocking. You can kill the other guy with melee, but it takes two hits. Like the knife is an instant kill; one hit, he dies. With the riot shield you bash him with the shield and then you bash him again. Then they die. So it is much harder to kill someone, but it is really satisfying.

Q: One of the things that Rob talked about in the presentation [at BlizzCon] was the marketplace, which he presented as something for the mod community. But are you seeing that as perhaps an extra revenue stream and a way to monetise Battle.net for the company too?

Paul Sams: It's certainly possible. What we're doing right now is building the feature set and we're building all the different elements of the experience. We're trying to figure out how marketplace is going to work exactly and how consumers are going to be able to interact with that marketplace. It's certainly possible that there could be a charging mechanism at some point. I don't have any real details about that right now, but it's certainly something we're looking at - we're looking at all sorts of possibilities for each of the areas of Battle.net.

Q: Might it be a place where you could release smaller scale Blizzard products too, like pay-for assets?

Paul Sams: Oh, it's certainly possible. I don't know if it's somewhere we would actually go because we do have this issue with focus. We've got four games in development, we've got our cinematic team, we've got Battle.net - that requires us to keep a lot of balls in the air. We don't want to make any big mistakes as you can imagine. So going and doing a bunch of smaller games pay-for there I think is a cool idea... whether or not we're going to be able to pull that off given the focus we want to keep on our big stuff, I don't know. Time will tell on that.

"When Microsoft bought FASA Interactive and incorporated it into Microsoft... the two reasons they bought us was, one, they wanted the catalogue of intellectual properties and, two, they felt that we had developed a really good development culture. And the reality is that, pretty much from the day we moved to Redmond, that development culture was destroyed," Weisman told GamesIndustry.biz.

"I don't think the studio ever really had a chance. It was destroyed right in the beginning."

And Microsoft came close to repeating its mistakes with Bungie, added Weisman, who was working for the corporation as creative director at the time the Chicago-based studio was acquired.

"When we were acquiring Bungie, they wanted me to sit down with the owners of Bungie and tell them how well the transition went," he explained. "And it was like - 'what planet are you guys on?' This transition did not go well. And actually I became the lead vocal pain in the ass to get things done very different for Bungie.

"I tried to convince them to leave Bungie in Chicago, but not winning that I did succeed in getting them to put them in a walled off room, which didn't follow any of the other Microsoft stuff. We were much better able to defend Bungie's culture than we were FASA's culture."

Matt Hooper: And a lot of your readers play with mouse and keyboard, and I read a lot of comments about--it's funny, because they think we abandoned that. Tim and I have been making games for that for thirty-plus years combined. It's not like we forgot about that, we've got that covered. That's the easy part.

The reason we mentioned the controllers is because that's the thing that's a little new for id, making sure it's right on all the consoles. The game will play awesome on mouse and keyboard.

Tim Willits: Yes, people definitely overreacted to that. To think that we would not make an awesome first-person experience and control interface is kind of silly.

Matt Hooper: Yeah.

Tim Willits: For us, we need to be practical in how we approach this. We knew that we would get the first-person down, we're not stressed about that. We've never done the vehicle stuff, so we did that first and we made sure that was awesome. We've done a lot of console work, but the internal team has never done a multi-platform simultaneous release before. So we need to make sure that we nail down the controller, because we haven't done that before. We need to focus on getting that done.

The stuff that we've done before, I'm not worried about. And people shouldn't worry about that either.

G4: Why is Battlefield 1943 launching later on the PC? In retrospect, was this the right decision?

Dyke: We haven't released a Frostbite [DICE's game engine] built game on PC, so going into this project we lacked a starting foundation we had on Console. There are also many different and unique only challenges to the PC that has lead to us pushing the release even further to Q1 CY 2010 [early next year]. This was a hard pill to swallow, but it was absolutely needed to ensure the features and functionality that PC Players have come to expect from Battlefield on PC are not missing. Things like support for DirectX 9 and 10, higher player count (up to 32-player matches), wide peripheral support i.e. Joysticks for flying, VoIP, and ranked server provider hosting. So it was and still is the absolutely right decision, for quality sake, to not release until it is ready.

Shack: There was a pretty strong reaction to the news that there will be no LAN support in StarCraft II. Were you expecting that?

Chris Sigaty: Yeah, I think any time that people hear news like that, they're going to be upset, or some people will be certainly. The really hard thing about is the primary reason we made it--and it's a tough decision--are some of the things we intend to do with Battle.net. And really a sense of being connected all the time, and whether you are a competitive player or a casual player--we're adding things in there that try and enhance that experience by being connected. So that's really the primary driver behind it, but we can't show that driver, so I think people are reacting to that in the way they will, and they don't have any information.

Shack: Like, perhaps, seeing a rainbow in a screenshot, and then..

Chris Sigaty: Precisely. So I think ultimately, it's going to be a great experience. We're really concerned--of course, it's our bread and butter, is a good, connected, fun multiplayer game. Playing with low latency, and having an experience where you're not complaining about the connection. I know people are saying, "But I do it this way now." There's things that we're going to try to do that if you are close to one another, you get the best connection possible. So we're going to try to alleviate all of people's concerns, but until people play it and see it, I think they'll just react to what they see on paper. I mean, we've gone through a lot of this so far on the project. Even things as much as us saying we're going to add unlimited selection to the game was met with all sorts of various crazy reactions, even on our own team. It's funny, thinking about the unlimited selection argument--that's still ongoing, although I think it's going to turn out to be just fine. But unlimited selection, originally that was a huge deal, and on our team as well. And one of the guys on our team recently went back and was playing original StarCraft some more, and he said, "Wow, I don't know why I ever pitched a fit, because I can barely go back and think of the older interface in that way." [laughs]

Shack: EA just announced Command and Conquer 4, which will require all players to be constantly connected online, even in singleplayer. Have you considered something similar for StarCraft II?

Chris Sigaty: Well, there's a couple things. You will need to connect once for sure, to basically authenticate the game. And then you can choose to play "offline," we're calling it. But playing offline is more limited. There's a bunch of achievements and that sort of stuff, and that stuff does not happen when you're offline. So it's really to your advantage to be connected.

Shack: But you're not requiring it.

Chris Sigaty: Not for singleplayer. And I think that's also true--singleplayer and challenges. Which you probably saw the button for it, but didn't know anything about it--challenges is another area you can go to. Challenges are something we're trying. We always hear people say, "You look at singleplayer as the training ground for multiplayer, right?" And we don't really.
And in fact here we're kind of training you all wrong, because you can have any unit depending on what missions you went through, and there are units that aren't in multiplayer at all, like Firebats, Medics, all sorts of stuff. We kind of created challenges out of this, and our concept behind challenges is to train you at some of the things that are important to a good competitive player, to be at least aware of. They're little minigames that teach you about things like economy, how to maximize getting resources, unit countering, control grouping, micro, spell usage, all sorts of things like that. Those two things are available when you're offline.

"I'm looking for games that are playable by a wide audience, fairly fast, a good amount of luck, a good amount of strategy, and something that feels more like a paper game but was still made with a computer," Garfield tells Gamasutra, describing Mind Twist and his move towards digital gaming.

"I'm trying to make the game more broadly accessible than a trading card game," says Garfield. "TCGs are often very intimidating because constructing decks is a difficult task. The competition in the area is such that players know that they're potentially getting into something that is very complicated and very expensive."

Garfield says the game will feature versus battles that take approximately 10 minutes to complete. Instead of individual cards, players will buy pre-constructed armies that offer some customization, akin to buying pre-constructed Magic decks. He describes the game as "very expandable".

Garfield also says that this approach should "minimize" the advantage rich players could gain in Magic, because you can't select specific units and create whole armies; in Magic, any specific card, no matter how rare, could be used in any player-created deck. The strategy is preserved between those with a big and small budget, he says, because "I don't have the weight of my 50 purchases behind me; I just have that one deck, and my [personal] experience."

However, Garfield sees the potential for deep strategy all the same. "I want people to, when they play, not feel like they have to invest as much time and energy as they do with Magic, but still have the same game play depth that Magic might have, and the expandability." He describes Mind Twist as having "less of an arms race, less of a learning curve" than his popular creation.

The game, of course will offer a free army to get the player started, but if he becomes enamored with it, he can purchase more -- including any army he sees an opponent using. "If you like the game -- that's our job -- then you will be interested in getting more of these [armies] and increasing the breadth of strategies you can bring to bear," says Garfield. Of course, purchasing optional armies implies a microtransaction model, but Garfield is quick to point out a nuance: "'Microtransaction' is accurate, but it's not as 'micro' as many games. We haven't pinned down exactly what [cost] it's going to be, but what I'd like to see is something more chunky than microtransactions, because you're buying the analogue of a [Magic] deck."

Q: Do you think a good, meaningful story is possible in an ever-changing world that all users can change?

Ray Muzyka: I think a great story is possible, because if you think about it, the narrative is actually possible in multiple directions. There's a social narrative between players, there's the external narrative outside of the game with social networking. And then there's the internal narrative of the choices you make, and then there's the internal narrative of the story arch being created and kind of evolving over time, both on the player's user-generated content and the way they make choices and their impact on the world, but also the developers actually create a story arch that has some kind of purpose or overarching goal to it. So you can look at it almost like an onion with multiple layers of narrative, and that's one of the reasons why I think interactive fiction is so exciting, because it has those multiple layers that aren't really possible or as achievable in a more passive, linear medium. They can have good stories as well, but I think there are different kinds of narratives that are deeply exciting, in some ways more exciting, in non-linear fiction.

Q: There's obviously, as we've discussed, a growing trend of trying to grow the gaming audience. A lot of it has to do with hardware, for now, but do you think narrative in games, just by their nature, can grow the gaming audience?

Greg Zeschuk: They definitely do. Story is the most common, fundamental thing that we all share. It's there from the beginning of human time, sitting around the campfire telling stories is an entertainment form. Movies are an extension of that, and games are now becoming an extension of that. I think it's exciting to see where we are right now, because the technology is getting to the point where barriers are being broken down, and we are able to explore stories in different ways. For us, it's gotten to the point where it's real. You're looking at these characters that are believable, and you can actually engage with them. It's exciting because I think we're past infancy, we're in the toddler stage now. In the past ten years we've gone from really tiny pixely characters to Commander Shepard. Ten more years, who knows. It's crazy.

Redh3lix asks: As an "old school" Battlefield 2 / 2142 player, from my experience I would say those games were (and still are) very special in what they accomplished. Can we expect the same balance and depth in Battlefield 1943? Will it be deep enough for me? It all seems a bit cartoony and tongue-in-cheek.

Patrick Liu: It all depends on what references you have. Remember that the main inspiration is BF1942. I'd say we've made it easier to get into the game, but it definitely requires a ton of skill to compete, and how about 50 ranks for depth? I'd say we have made it very balanced with the experience from previous games and many iterations of balancing.

Atticus12 asks: Can you explain the character advancement to us? What do different ranks offer?

Patrick Liu: Ranking and awards are mainly for bragging rights, so we don't have any unlocks per se. we wanted to make it a really fair experience. someone that's played it for 10 hrs shouldn't have any real advantage, the only thing that matters is skill! But then we have that small challenge of 43 million kills to unlock a whole new map and game mode...

kungphu asks: Is there going to be a multiplayer beta? Or some kind of demo to test before launch?

Gordon Van Dyke: No beta, but we have a trial version that lets you confirm what you already thought - that this game is the best USD 15 I will ever spend!

pcgames.de: Can we expect authentic locations in Call of Pripyat or are they all just fictional? If so, which?

Yavorsky: Oh, yes. Firstly, all of the locations in the game are going to be totally new. One major introduction is a whole part of Pripyat town (its eastern area) remodeled in the game in its real scope and authenticity. We've taken a number of new trips specifically to photo Pripyat and the surrounding areas for the game. As a result, we will introduce the Pripyat river boat station, the Jupiter industrial complex, the Kopachi village, the railway station Yanov - all of those and more recreated from the real-life references.

My personal impression is that Call of Pripyat will be the most photo-realistic, and also atmospheric, game in the series. This said, the locations in the game are going to be the biggest in size out of all the three games.

pcgames.de: Do you already have an exact release-date for Call of Pripyat? And of course what about the official system-requirements? They seem to be a little low. On which machines are you currently running Call of Pripyat?

Yavorsky: No exact ship date so far, but we expect to get the game out this Autumn already. The game should be pretty playable on a machine like:

- Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 / AMD 64 X2 5600+
- 2 GB RAM
- 512 MB DirectX 9.0c compatible card / nVIDIA® GeForce 9800 GTX / ATI Radeon HD 4850

As you know, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has a tweakable menu with a lot of parameters to affect the performance. So you can adjust it as you like to achieve the comfortable play. Anyway, if you want to play it in max quality and resolution, go for as powerful machine as you can - there's never enough in this case.

GB: Do you think we'll ever see a third PC-only, non-MMO Neverwinter Nights? Why or why not? Would Obsidian be interested in tackling another sequel?

Feargus: We'd be jazzed about tackling a sequel. We learned so much from making NWN2 and would love to make another one. As for there actually being another one, personally, I would be surprised. If there was, there would be a lot of brand confusion between what Cryptic is doing and what we are doing. What we'd love to do instead is tackle something like Baldur's Gate 3 or create our own new fantasy world - or have we already been doing that? :)

GB: As someone who has been directly involved with the Fallout franchise over the years, what is your honest opinion of Bethesda's version of Fallout 3? Given the game's design and the success it has enjoyed, do you think it will affect the way your team approaches Fallout: New Vegas?

Feargus: My honest opinion is that they chose the right direction. I could nitpick some of the game systems and how they did certain things, but they would really be nitpicks - and you would probably get a very similar list out of Todd Howard. I can say that I've really enjoyed playing Fallout 3 and the thing they absolutely NAILED was the feeling of actually being in the Wasteland. Ultimately, that is what Fallout is all about; it's about being in that world and running around in it and that's what Bethesda did with Fallout 3.

GB: Aside from the Aliens RPG, Alpha Protocol, and Fallout: New Vegas, do you have any other unannounced titles in development? If so, how long have you been actively developing the title(s)?

Feargus: We have been working on another title for the last four months that we can't talk about yet. It's going really well though and the team is really excited. It's using our own internal engine so we are really able to do things our way based upon everything we've learned about making RPGs in the past ten to fifteen years. Don't take that as a silent slam on Unreal - it's not. Our engine, like Unreal, is a tool and different jobs can be done better with tools that are made for them. There are things that our engine may never do as well as Unreal, but likewise there are things that our engine will do that will be better than Unreal.

So, is it safe to say that you have like four different projects in development right now? So, you have Left 4 Dead 2, you have Team Fortress 2, I'm going to go out on a limb and say Portal 2 and then...Episode 3?

Newell: [laughs] Uh, I'm not going to talk about things that we...we're talking about Left 4 Dead 2 and Episode 3. As far as I know, that's all that we're talking about publicly.

Doug Lombardi: We're not talking about Episode 3 publicly. (smiles)

Newell: Oh well, I guess I'm not talking about Episode 3 publicly either. (laughs) So...what's your question? Yes, we have a lot of stuff that's going on. We have Steam. Steam's a lot of work. We have these movie things that we

This seems like the first thing BioWare has made in several years that has that really traditional BioWare feeling in terms of its setting and subject matter. With those intervening years, how does it feel to be getting back to that? And are there new things that you have to keep in mind when making that game in 2009?

DG: There's the obvious 2D to 3D difference. The 2D levels we were able to make back in the 2D days were like paintings. Part of me wishes we could go back to that. I don't know how much of a market there would be, but I would think there would be something. I always found that very beautiful and evocative. However, we're quickly reaching that place with the 3D games as well. We have access to facial animations, expressions, body animations. We no longer have to tell a story through words only. That can be done well -- [Black Isle's] Planescape: Torment is an example of a game that was told primarily through words, but maybe it wasn't entirely accessible to everyone because not everybody can deal with this wall of text, which is very sad. I wish there were more willingness to do that. But now we no longer need to do that. There was a transition period where we had 3D art, but not the ability to be emotionally evocative with it. With Mass Effect, we were feeling our way out a little bit with the ability to use facial expressions.

I'm trying to deal with this as a writer. I worked on Baldur's Gate II as my first game, becoming used to telling stories through words primarily. Normally, you'd have to write something like, "I am very angry." Now, you can have him look mad. I may not need him to speak at all. We've started to get to this point where when it comes to storytelling, it's not a solo endeavor for a writer anymore. We're starting to do this thing where we sit down with, say, a tech designer and an animator. There are people in each of these fields who are story-oriented. There are always going to be some who just want to be told what to do, and that's fine, but there are some who are very creative.

Andrew Farrell is one of the artists we have at BioWare; he's very creative and very story-oriented. I love that we're at a place where I can sit down with a guy like Andrew and bounce ideas off him. He looks at it from a slightly different perspective. He says, "How can I help you tell this story through art?" Then I'll have a cinematic designer. He'll say, "These are the libraries of animations and facial expressions I have. How can I help tell this part of the tale through gestures and interaction?"

It's neat when we bounce up against each other, and I'm thinking, "Really, can we do that? Is that possible?" and they say, "That's totally possible." That's a neat place to be. It's like I was saying earlier about Baldur's Gate II, where our 2D engine had reached its epitome, and we knew what we could do with it, so we had room to be creatively experimental.

I think we're reaching that point with 3D games as well. There are a number of RPG hardcore enthusiasts who I think have been a little embittered from the step away from the traditional style of games. We're still trying to remain accessible to a larger audience, but some of them will just never appreciate it. You can't help that. But I think they can be pleased to see that we're getting to a point now once again where we have the ability to focus more on storytelling and experimentation. I think we'll see more and more of that as time goes on, and I think it has some really excellent potential. But not every company is going to do it. Fortunately, like I said, BioWare values the writing process a little more. So, if we continue to do that, I think we can see better and better things. At least for a while, I guess -- until the next piece of big technology comes along.

IGN AU: We imagine texture-work and modelling for this kind of look requires quite different skills and aesthetics than for a more traditional looking game. How has the art department adjusted? Were they thrilled to have something so different to sink their teeth into?

Brian Martel: This was a challenge for a lot of the artists at first, but mostly it was really just us getting our sea legs, if you will. It was challenging for some because it was such a departure from what they felt they had been working towards for years: Hyper Realism. Ultimately though everyone got into it and found it to be some of the most fun they have ever had working on a game. It is a very liberating and freeing art style. Artists that have traditional skills and folks that have done a lot of texture painting and texture photo manipulation have the time of their lives with this style.

For the most part it is such a unique style and they have never worked like this before so it is a blast for all of the artists. As the style came together I think they all felt ownership of it because everyone helped to do something that helped to define the look. Each artist was able to influence and inspire the other ones.

IGN AU: The new visual style is clearly a point of differentiation, but how does it fit in with the game's attitude and gameplay?

Brian Martel: Believe it or not I think it accentuates and reinforces the attitude and game play immensely! It's been a symbiotic relationship between the new look and the game; each one feeding into and off of the other. The style of the game play begat the new look which freed the game to have more attitude and more fun and ultimately each made the other better for it.