Q: Speaking of the team that you've got, do you have any of the old Looking Glass Studios staff on board?

A: Well, no, but we've done our homework. We went through this a couple of years ago when we launched the Deus Ex 3 project, so we're pretty much in constant contact with a couple of people. These people are mainly based in Texas and they have their own lives and their own projects, and for now we've built our team with veterans that have worked on numerous triple-A titles. We have people that have worked on the Rainbow Six series, on Prince of Persia, on the Splinter Cell games - the list is very long and we'll soon release the pedigree of the team, and you'll notice that these guys have a lot of credentials. In terms of Looking Glass and Ion Storm, we're trying to be as close as possible to some of the original developers, but nothing's confirmed.

Q: Gameplay, of course, is also important to making a good game. How's that shaping up?

A: Unfortunately we won't be able to reveal too much of that for now. This will be maybe available in the next wave of communication.

Q: You can't even hint at just a little bit?

A: Unfortunately! (Laughs)

Q: How about the plot, then? The same city?

A: The setting, the character, the story, the features - anything related to the actual content of the game, we cannot discuss for now. What I can say is that people are going to be very happily surprised and impressed. I think that we've put our finger on a number of things. Innovation and originality will be important, and I think it's going to serve this great franchise very well. Even though it's a franchise that we last saw five years ago, we're going to bring a fresh look and a fresh approach. We're always respecting the history and the spirit of the game, but innovation will definitely be quite interesting.

The Big Daddy's illuminated faceplate came in handy as he moved down a darkened corridor into a massive ballroom. This was a particularly striking location, visually, with a gigantic, ornate window looking out into the ocean. Before we could really admire the view, the Big Sister's spooky red "headlight" appeared in the screen's periphery and she ran along the window looking like a boss out of a Metal Gear Solid game.

Cracks formed in the glass and water began spraying into the room under tremendous pressure. The window finally gave entirely and the Big Daddy was hit square in the face by the Atlantic Ocean. Good thing he can breathe underwater. This was a chance for us to see one of several areas set on the seabed outside of Rapture. It looked stunning and was teeming with sea life. We were told there will be no combat during these sections; that they're basically a respite from the horrors of Rapture.

After passing through an airlock the player-Daddy was back inside, where our attention turned to a struggle between a Little Sister and a splicer cast against a wall in silhouette. The dev piloting the demo entered the room and gored the splicer with the Big Daddy's drill (which, as it turns out, overheats so as not to be utterly unstoppable).

We spotted a dead Big Daddy, which the Little Sister seemed to be trying to "wake up" to no avail. She turned and saw the player and seemed happy to see another "Mr. B." This was, as we were told, a "Little Sister adoption" moment; much like the help / harvest choice of the first game, there was a choice to adopt her or harvest her ADAM. The demoer (thankfully) chose the former. (Little Sisters will eventually become unable to harvest any more ADAM, at which point players will be able to harvest them -- evidently the most "evil" action in the game.)

RPS: When returning to the game to develop the sequel, what other directions did you consider taking the story? Were there ever plans to reuse the original cast, perhaps filling in gaps in the timeline? Or plans to go even earlier?

AC: Well, we could have gone a little earlier, but in reality the American Mafia doesn’t go back too much further in history, as you get back toward the start of the century was when these guys were first arriving in the US - maybe there could be a story there, Gangs of New York style? I suppose the problem here would be that we’d start driving round in carts... No, [game author] Dan Vavra's intention was always to move the story forward and explore new eras, the 40s and the 50s. The story in Mafia II is a new chapter, set in the same universe as the original game, returning to the same themes, but its not a direct follow-on. The fate of the original characters was pretty... terminal... lets say, so there wasn't much choice. In fact we don't pick up too far from the end of Mafia which ended in the late 1930s, we pick up Mafia II in early 1945.

RPS: Mafia appeared very early on in the world of open-city games. Are you surprised more developers haven't attempted to create more narrative-driven games in this genre?

AC: Well, maybe not so much. One of the challenges of the genre is that on a philosophical level the 'sandbox' is about emergent gameplay. It's actually very difficult to create a dramatic, compelling narrative that melds naturally with the freedom of a sandbox world. Films are directed - you would get a far diluted narrative experience if the viewer was encouraged to pause the film regularly, leave the cinema for a while, maybe go and watch some other films, then unpause to continue. Mafia is about constructing a very consistent experience, one where all the various sandbox elements have been designed to support the narrative. It's totally understandable that most open-world developers have chosen to take the mini-game, mini-quest approach - it emphasises the sandbox playground and that's fun and no bad thing. Mafia II has a super-detailed sandbox, don't get me wrong, but we are using it in a different way, where we have rules that encourage the player to behave realistically, to encourage the player to act 'mafia', so that we can walk from the street and engage with other gangsters in a plausible way that doesn't break the narrative. Not so plausible if we allowed Vito to visit the Don wearing a diaper, sporting a pink pimp hat, wielding a bazooka. If you want the diaper pimp bazooka game, or you want to focus on other non-linear gameplay elements then you naturally have to compromise on the strength of your narrative to some degree.

RPS: Have you felt pressure to develop other aspects of the open world genre - side quests, bonus missions (say, stealing an ambulance and triggering an ambulance minigame), giant helicopter mayhem rocket launcher pedestrian murdering fests?

AC: That sort of carnage can be a lot of fun, it certainly is in many other notable sandbox games, but it has to resonate with the narrative. And Vito running around with crazy weapons, leaving a trail of burning wreckage behind him just doesn't fit the story or the world. As you know we have a police presence in the city, and you can of course run around shooting vehicles and so forth, but in Empire Bay, the punishment fits the crime. If you break the law, you can expect an appropriate response from the police - from a speeding ticket to shoot-on-sight. We don't want to discourage the player from making choices, but we're presenting a believable reality that offers consequences commensurate with your actions. Again this feeds into the reality thing - Mafia guys are part of a secret society. They don't generally wake up in the morning and loon around a city murdering hundreds of people. We aren't going to encourage that - of course the player is free to do this, but you are going to have to face the consequences...

RPS: You've said that when you wanted to start making Mafia II, the technology didn't exist to achieve your goals. So you made the Illusion engine in response. Can you tell us what the Illusion engine does that meets the needs you had?

AC: To give you a topline view, it handles all the things we need it to handle, and it needs to handle a lot. Multiple civilians, vehicles, intelligent pathing routines and detailed, period-authentic architecture, seamless streaming between the city, interiors and cutscenes. What people are finding surprising is just how much detail the Illusion Engine is capable of. Not just incidental detail, with civilians going about their everyday lives around you, but also in terms of graphical fidelity. Empire Bay is a stunningly attractive environment - we definitely expect to set the same visual benchmark with Mafia II that Mafia did when it released, but this time we'll be doing that on console as well as PC. Building the Illusion Engine was a labour of love - but now 2K Czech are armed with the tool they need to deliver Mafia II exactly how they visualise it.

CGI: Tell us a little more about Serious Sam Forever, will this be a standalone title? A total conversion? An expansion pack?

MS: Serious Sam Forever is a total conversion for Serious Sam 2, meaning you will have to own Serious Sam 2 to be able to play Serious Sam Forever. Serious Sam Forever, like Serious Sam 2, is going to run on Windows and Linux.

CGI: What new features can we expect in Serious Sam Forever, anything we have yet to see in previous Serious Sam games?

YS: Dune Buggies! Oh, wait, I shouldn't have said that….

NB: We've done something completely new and have implemented a Generic Game-mode system that allows map makers to create their own unique game modes. Also, there will be multiplayer bot support for Deathmatch-style modes. We currently have working Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and Arcade modes, just to name a few.

With destruction being a big element in Red Faction: Guerilla, it opens up possibility for weaponry in some interesting ways. What was behind the choices for the game's arsenal?

Dan: We really wanted to do this conventional weapon set, which is the EDF weaponry. We felt like we’ve got to have the artillery and the heavy weapon set. It feels really good to keep them conventional; it's almost like you've got to think differently to take them on because they're so powerful. And then, we took a look at the other side and wondered, what would a miner have available? What would they have that we could change and modify into a weapon? That's really what drove that whole concept.

I mean, you see the walker; a walker is a mining vehicle, it's supposed to do that kind of digging, but it becomes an ultimate weapon. A lot of the weapons you see on the miner side are converted mining tools, so that's where we went with that.

There have been no signs of the Borg since Voyager’s return in 2378. That’s seven years.

Do you actually believe that seven years, or twenty years, or a hundred years, would be anything more than a brief setback for the Borg? The Borg do not consider time as shallowly as humans do. The Borg are not limited by the life spans of individuals. The collective lives on. What one knew, all know. What one remembers, all remember.

Isn't it possible that Admiral Janeway's actions destroyed the Borg?

That would be a lovely fairytale. Admiral Janeway's actions likely destroyed that hub. But the Borg are far wider spread and have contingency plans dating back to before humanity achieved warp speed. We may have delivered a crippling blow, but it was not a killing blow. The Borg still exist. So long as they exist, they will not accept defeat. They persist. They choose a goal and continue until they achieve it. The Borg are infinitely patient. They can afford to be.

I understand that Starfleet may wish they were gone. I do not understand the stubborn refusal to deal with reality. We cannot simply ignore the Borg threat and assume they will not notice us.

The dissolution of the task force was unfortunate and ill conceived. Wishing that the Borg won’t return does not make it so.

How much of that 'destruction' was down to pressure that you put on the team?



P.M.:What I used to say is, "Look, I'm working 120 hours a week - I'm only asking you to do half of what I do!" But you can't do that anymore, because you're asking people to make a choice not between whether they go to the pub tonight or not but whether they go home and see their children.

And so because of me, and the way I used to sort of lead from the front and work harder than anybody else, it used to semi-destroy people's lives. So I've tried to structure Lionhead so that creativity is really important, but it isn't obsessively important any more. That the voice of production and the reason of finance can be heard at an equal level as an idiot like me shouting from the rooftops, which is very much what I used to do.

So looking back at Fable 2, yeah, we crunched at the end, but it was only at the very, very end that we used up people's whole weekends. There's a few exceptions, but a lot of Sundays this studio was empty, which I thought was great.

Everything's important when you're making something big like this - the team, the morale, the quality of their life, how much money you’re spending, the game features you're working on - all of that comes together to make a successful product. It's this holistic thing. I used to think that, if it's not good enough and you're working 60 hours a week, you should be working 70 to make it good. But that's just such a wrong way of working, because you're going to end up making huge mistakes.

When asked if he was disappointed or pleased with Diablo's new art style, Roper, who is now design director and executive producer of Atari-owned Cryptic Studios, and in charge of Champions Online, a superhero MMO due out on PC this spring, said: "You know, I liked the darker grittier. I liked the differences in art style, to be honest. So, I think I would personally from a player standpoint prefer that.

"I think that one of the things that we always tried to get across was that Diablo was Gothic fantasy and I think there was just a need that was put in there from the visuals that I didn't necessarily get. I got it from the architecture and to a degree from the character design but not the feeling of the world. I can't say that I dislike it. I didn't look at it and go, oh my God that's horrible. But I looked at it and went, it's not really... to me as a player it just didn't really ring with Diablo."

PCGH: What are the advantages of DX10.1 in comparison to DX10 as far as render quality and performance is concerned? Will there be technical features that can only be realized with DX10.1?

Artem Kulakov: We integrated DX10.1 features to give extra performance benefits for players that have compatible hardware:

- DX10.1 adds a new instruction called Gather, which can gather 4 texture samples at once, at a much lower cost than issuing 4 separate Sample instructions. Consequently we are able to optimize our shadow map technique, and even shoot for higher quality.
- The Gather instruction will also allow us to optimize our Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) algorithm - again producing a higher image quality.

PCGH: During a presentation we were told that except of possible higher resolutions the visuals of the PC and console version are the same. Is that true? If no, will there be at least visual differences between the Console and PC Version with DX10.1?

Artem Kulakov: The core graphics features of Stormrise are support equally well on all platforms. Extra performance of DX10 hardware allowed us to improve rendering quality. For example, PC version of Stormrise supports soft shadows, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and higher quality post-processing.

PCGH: As far as the PC Version of Stormrise is concerned, will the DX 10 visualization differ substantially from the graphics that are rendered with DX 9 hardware or will DX10, in case of Stormrise DX10.1, just speed up the rendering process?

Artem Kulakov: Stormrise is a DX10-only title. DX10.1 integration provided some additional benefits, see the answer to question 3.

Q: PC gaming is still pretty popular for certain genres, so how do you feel that the Games For Windows campaign has progressed - is there more development planned there?

Chris Lewis: We're happy there, and we're very mindful that there's a strong and vibrant PC gaming community out there. Not all console games lend themselves to the PC - when it is appropriate we bring games to both platforms, when it's not we don't, and that will continue to be the case.

Ultimately we're a Windows and PC company at heart, and that's not going to change, and the development on both platforms will remain central and important. The business ebbs and flows, and there will be times when we do more on one platform than the other, but they do co-exist very nicely, and as a company we're in a pretty unique position that we have a strong legacy on PC.

We now have a similarly robust position on console, but we're excited about all screen sizes, whether they be phones, consoles via the television, or PC. We're uniquely placed to offer a very rich experience on all of those screen types to consumers, and we'll continue to invest across all platforms.

We remain focused on it, you'll see more from us there in the future, and long may that continue.

Q: Are you aware of any changes in the next Windows platform that are specifically aimed at the gaming community?

Chris Lewis: Windows 7 will be great for games, undoubtedly. It's all good news - it's even more robust, it's quicker relatively, and the early testing cycles are proving very promising overall. I think it'll be nothing but good news for PC gamers, but we'll have more to say on that later on this year.

Q: Why does BF1943 have a 24 players?

A: 64 players is awesome but will all good there is some hurting also. The 24 player limit is not about us being lazy, but the experience of a massive battlefield is necessary not bound to the amount of players! We have also optimized the layout and size of the maps to compensate for the 24 player limit. And as many of you remember most clan wars where player with 8vs8 or 12vs12 and what we have seen many of the 64-player servers are mostly half-full or having lack of performance. Beside these design decisions there are technical limitations. There are very restricted bandwidth limits on the consoles and we are networking a lot more than 24 players:

- 24 players are networked
- Almost as many physics driven vehicles with movable and destroyable parts
- All destruction, if a wall is being destroyed on one client we need to update it on all the others, otherwise we could end up with players hiding behind non-existent walls.

If we removed all destruction and all our vehicles we could have more players. But no other game gives you the wide gaming experience we have!

1UP: There was mention of how the campaigns eventually grew too large to be encapsulated in a single title. Now that each race's campaign has more room, can you elaborate on things you could do in a 30 mission Terran campaign that you couldn't do in a 10 mission one?

DB: The primary thing we can do is structure the campaign in a non-linear fashion. Being able to focus on one race for 26 to 30 missions gives us the breathing room to give players meaningful choices as to which parts of the galaxy they want to explore first, and the ability to create side plots. It also gives us the leeway to introduce more characters, more locations, and allow us some room to explore those characters and settings in more depth. Trying to cram all of that into 10 missions at a time didn't seem feasible, and would have negatively impacted our design goals as well as our story presentation.

1UP: Okay, so that's "why" the campaign is longer. Now, StarCraft's classic "10 missions per race" structure is one that most modern RTS campaigns tend to stick to. With each campaign now being significantly longer, how will you guys make sure that each campaign doesn't start to feel stale after 12 or so missions?

DB: The key is ensuring that we offer lots of creative and interesting missions. We're not looking to throw 30 skirmish missions at players and call it a day. Each mission we create for the game is getting a lot of care and attention, and we're treating all of them like their own little mini-game. Our technology guys are giving us the tools to do some really cool things with scripting, and we hope players will enjoy the little twists and surprises that we're building into our missions.

IGN: Can you talk about what you're working on right now, like a patch?

Kevin Hoare: We've never stopped working on the game, we're working on it every day. We haven't had the typical break after it's gone gold. We're continually working on improvements, we're working on a patch right now.

IGN: Can you say what the patch will address and what sort of timetable there might be?

Kevin Hoare: We've done some improvements to the video editor and the rendering engine for the replay editor. We've added, again from feedback from the forums, we initially didn't support direct-input controller devices and people seemed to want that, so we added support for direct-input devices. I think there was an issue with bowling…

Arthur Chiang: We read that some people with sensitive mice were having trouble with the bowling mini-game so we looked into that more and we've got a fix for that. There's a bunch of little UI tweaks because we've come a long way in our video editing prowess and we've been slowly increasing the user functionality to make things easier for what we want to do with it.

Jeronimo Barrera: Let's not beat around the bush here. There's a lot of noise like this game doesn't run at all or there's missing textures and everything else. From what we've gathered a lot of those problems are either out of date drivers or we don't support that type of card or you're underspecced or whatever, it's always a combination of one of those things, it's not necessarily that we don't know what we're doing because obviously we put in hundreds and hundreds of hours of test into this. From what we did and from going through certification with Microsoft and our external QA process we didn't run into the amount of problems that the boards seemed to be saying there are. I know that Nvidia and ATI are constantly...I think they're releasing new drivers pretty soon.

We are working on making a patch available in the next few days. Since Grand Theft Auto IV is a Games For Windows - Live game the patch must be certified by Microsoft before release. The patch is already at Microsoft and we expect a speedy approval. The patch contains a variety of fixes including:

- A fix to the crash after legal screen that some German customers were reporting.
- Numerous improvements to the video editor: Smarter naming of videos, improved rendering quality, better fx during replays
- Fix to bowling while using certain sensitive mice
- Fix for ATI 1900 shadows
- Overall savings to memory
- Graphic improvements to particle systems and mirrors
- Multiplayer character settings are preserved
- Support for DirectInput controllers. Note: The current hack way of supporting these controllers may not work with the improved functionality. So we recommend you remove the hack before upgrading to the patch.

Issues with power management software have also been fixed (slow speed, double speed issues). Even after the patch comes out setting power management software to maximum performance is recommended. We've seen cases where power management software does not detect the game is running and puts the CPU in green mode. Besides the patch we've also improved the way the Social Club handles data this should have greatly reduced or eliminated the Mma10 error. If you are still receiving this error after logging in and out of Social Club we would like to know as much info as you can about it.

Have you modified the game's basic mechanisms: moving speed, weapons damage, health system, reinforcements system, STR view, etc.

Charlie: A lot of these numbers use NS1 as a starting point. The marines still spawn from infantry portals the same way but aliens currently spawn from "egg clusters" - eggs are produced at a certain rate and then aliens hatch out of them. They can choose which egg they hatch from and when. Our health system is similar although it's similar to Call of Duty IV in that there is no number on your display, but you definitely know how hurt you are from other feedback.

What are the new features for each team?

Charlie: The biggest ones are the addition of a Commander role for the alien side and dynamic environments (including infestation). There are lots of other smaller new features (new resource system, new abilities for both sides, automatic squads, etc.) but these are the biggest. We're still learning how the Alien Commander should work but we think our dynamic environments will make every game play differently.

IGN: The online features in the original DiRT felt a little compromised - is there going to be significant changes to the multiplayer for the sequel?

Gavin Raeburn: It's all new. You'll see competitive online racing in all race types, plus a progressive reward system and community features which we'll talk more about in coming months.

IGN: With so many disciplines of off-road motorsport included, how do you manage to produce a cohesive package?

Gavin Raeburn: We have to strike a balance. We don't want to restrict what the player can do by saying "car X can only drive on track Y", but on the other hand we don't want to break the believability of the game's career progression with mismatched opponents. In DiRT 2 we'll be going further, looking at game mechanics that transcend race disciplines and vehicles to provide that cohesion. We'll reveal more details in this area soon.

IGN: And being the huge F1 fans that we are, we've got to ask – how is work going with the F1 game, and when can we expect to see anything of it?

Gavin Raeburn: The F1 project is progressing well, although it will be a while before we start showing it. In the meantime, the F1 team have a blog on our community website with which you can stay up to date with developments.