LucasArts' ad campaign for Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction touted the ability to hijack any vehicle, use any weapon, blow up anything, blow it up again, keep blowing it up, blowing the living crap out of it, then blowing the living crap out of it some more. We're presuming that you'll have even more options than a craftily edited ad spot can contain now that Pandemic has new platforms to explore and the financial backing of EA for its sequel, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. We recently fired off some questions to Scott Warner, Lead Designer on Mercenaries 2 regarding everything from its political overtones to what current-gen owners can expect from the PS2 version of the title.



GameSpy: In the first Mercenaries, you picked players based on not only their strengths and weaknesses, but also possibly based on their language skills. North Korea could be considered more of a gathering point for multiple nations and tongues than Venezuela. Are you planning to toss out the linguistic advantages for characters?
We didn't feel that the linguistic differences paid off very well in the original Mercenaries so we haven't done much work on that, I'm afraid. Our decision to choose Venezuela had a lot more to do with, among other things, its great range of geographic and urban locations and its relate-ability to Western audiences. We are really excited about the look and feel of a lush South American environment after the more desolate setting last time.
GameSpy: What's your reaction to last summer's controversy regarding the game's political themes and the Venezuelan government?
It's been pretty interesting! We didn't really receive this level of attention for setting the game in North Korea so we've definitely had to deal with a bit more controversy this time around. Every creative project, whether it be film, books or in our case videogames, that explores plausible scenarios within real-world settings is always going to come under this kind of understandable scrutiny. That said, I think it's important to emphasize that we're not making a political or ideological statement with Mercs 2; our game is strictly a work of fiction.



GameSpy: Among the many abilities that you have in regard to fleshing out the experience on next-gen hardware, which one is the team's favorite?
Oh by far it's our greatly enhanced capacity to deliver on the bread and butter of Mercenaries: destruction. Not only can you destroy things like SKYSCRAPERS and BATTLESHIPS [Ed. Note: That's Warner's emphasis, not ours] in Mercs 2, the myriad of means you have at your disposal to destroy them and the many ways that they get destroyed depending on what you decide to do, is over the top.
GameSpy: Since the game is multi-platform, what steps are you taking to differentiate the PS3 version from the 360 version? Will you be taking advantage of the Blu-ray disc's extra storage space?
We've definitely explored various ways to take advantage of Live, BluRay and the PlayStation Network but we're not quite ready to talk about what we're up to just yet!
GameSpy: We know that the game will feature online co-op. Will there be anything for online competition, such as leaderboards for fastest captures/monuments destroyed, planned?
We definitely have a number of things planned for all things online co-op but we're not ready to talk about them just yet. We're committed to delivering the most robust open world, action co-op game you've ever played!