Brain Hood

Marvel brought Cap, Thor and the rest of the Avengers with them to Comic-Con. Standing ovations and geekgasms ensued.

As Marvel closed out a very successful day in Hall H, they revealed the official Avengers line-up: Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, ScarJo as Black Widow, Chris Evans as Captain America, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, The Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye and Mark Ruffalo as Hulk.

Also joining the team will be Clark Gregg’s Agent Coulson (from the Iron Man films).

All of the actors were on hand – Every. Single. One. – and once they, ahem, assembled, writer-director Joss Whedon joined them onstage.

The Avengers panel followed the Thor presentation, and started with a teaser trailer of sorts that gradually revealed the Avengers logo as Jackson’s Nick Fury said the following passage, one that is familiar to anyone who reads The Avengers comic: “And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Earth’s Mightiest Heroes found themselves united against a common threat. On that day…the Avengers were born.”

Jackson came out on stage and first introduced Gregg and Scarlett Johansson, then he brought out Evans and Hemsworth. And as if the crowd didn’t have enough cause to stand on their feet with applause, Jackson then brought out Tony Stark himself.

RDJ worked the room per usual, asking the crowd if they had seen Inception. When they applauded “yes”, RDJ said that the Chris Nolan movie was one of the most “ambitious” movie he has seen in quite some time.

And then the actor paused, and said that Marvel assembling all of these heroes in one movie, for the first time ever, is the most ambitious thing.

“And if we’re gonna make a movie this ambitious,” Downey continued, “[then] the most important thing is to get the guy to helm it to meet [the fans'] approval”. That man is, of course, Joss Whedon, and the audience clapped in support of that choice until their hands bled.

When it comes to ground-based warfare, there’s no denying that Ubisoft has a fantastic track record over the past decade or so. But extending the snaking tendrils of the Tom Clancy brand into the sky endured something of a false start when H.A.W.X. made its debut early last year.

Although benefitting from Ubisoft’s typically bombastic production values, there was obvious room for improvement. Firstly, you never really felt engaged with the story. It pootled along with dramatic seriousness, but you never really cared who you were fighting or why. If anything, the combat was too authentic for its own good, with most sorties reduced to locking-onto distant pixels and blasting them out of the sky. On top of all that, it was littered with balancing issues, unforgiving checkpointing and a distinct lack of variety.

With a refreshing degree of honesty the sequel’s creative director, Edward Douglas, spends a good deal of the presentation being completely up front about all of these issues, and how they’ve addressed each and every one. Fresh from working on Mass Effect 2, the first task for the ex-BioWare man was to kick the narrative side of the game into shape, and create the kind of scenarios, characters and dialogue that help drag you into the experience

“[In HAWX 1] you had one single point of view in the game – you were basically flying a metal machine,” Douglas notes. “You didn’t get to interact with characters all the time like you can with an RPG or an FPS, so that made it harder to tell a story in a deeper way. You started a mission, you were in the air. You ended a mission, you were still in the air. You didn’t really know who you were in the world. You didn’t know how you fitted in.”

The sequel aims to breathe life into the campaign by “giving the player a sense of grounding in the world,” To do this, Ubisoft has tinkered with a number of key gameplay elements. Rather than spend your whole time duking it out up in the air, the campaign promises to be more interesting and varied, with numerous types of missions, and a compelling narrative woven into the action more effectively.

“We want the player to know how it feels to be a pilot. To take-off and land. To interact with the world and know why he’s there,” he explains. “When you’re in the briefing room or the carrier, or when you’re in the control room, you’re not just floating in the air. Maybe you’re at a computer, controlling an unmanned aerial vehicle, or talking to contacts on the ground.”

As usual, all is not well with the world. Set in the near future, Middle Eastern and Russian insurgencies have put the world on the edge of a crisis after the disappearance of three nuclear devices. Played out from three contrasting perspectives, the story flits between the U.S. H.A.W.X. squadron, a Russian faction, and the British Navy task force.

“As you progress, you start uncovering the connections. There’s a big global conspiracy of how the Middle Eastern insurgencies are getting their resources. It all ends up tying into other Tom Clancy [videogame] stories as well,” Douglas reveals, with Splinter Cell Conviction just one of the games alluded to.

Let’s bring you up to speed: there’s a new game called Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions. In it, you play as four separate versions of Spider-Man. Each one of these universes is threatened by the shattering of the Tablet of Order and Chaos. So far, we know that the universes include Amazing, Noir and 2099 versions of Spider-Man.

Activision has been holding this last world over our heads for months now. It’s annoying, but it’s over. The final universe in Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions is Ultimate.

Reactions to this Ultimate announcement will vary depending on who you are. Folks who just dig Spidey on a mainstream level might have no idea what “Ultimate” means. If that’s you, Ultimate is a series of comic books that have retold Spider-Man’s origin story and taken him back to high school. Folks who are hardcore comic fans might be pissed; Ultimate Spider-Man is a lot like Amazing Spider-Man in terms of his suit and powers. I’m sure more than a few feel that this is a cop-out because Beenox and Activision promised four different Spider-Men in Shattered Dimensions.

I was one of these eyerolling, cranky people, but then, I played the game and shut the hell up.

The Ultimate universe is its own thing in Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions. It might not be as stark a difference as comparing Amazing to 2099, but I assure you, it’s there. For starters, Ultimate is completely cel-shaded and Spider-Man’s got a much sleeker, younger physique. On top of that, Spider-Man’s rocking the black symbiote in this rich and colorful world and not Amazing’s red and blue tights. The outfit that would be Venom is cool on a visual level, but the suit actually means that Ultimate Spider-Man plays a lot differently than the other dimensions.

This is something that Beenox and Activision had been pushing for awhile – that even though every one of the heroes in this game was Spider-Man, they would all feel completely different. Amazing is supposed to be entrenched is his web attacks (web hammers, zipping to kick people in the chest, etc.) and 2099 is all about the aerial maneuvers.

After playing as Noir Spidey and Ultimate Spider-Man, I believe the developers. Noir was this world where I had to stick in the shadows and wait to attack. I’d perch myself on a train car (arrows on stuff show you perchable objects), wait for a chatting guard to take his flashlight off his bud, and snatch the now-darkened foe. It was an inch-by-inch process of making my way deeper into the train yard, taking out patrols, and freeing hostages by ripping the bars off their makeshift cells.

Ultimate Spider-Man was nothing like this. Whereas in the Noir world – if I did everything right – the villain had no idea I was around, Ultimate had black suit Spidey dropped into the middle of a mess of bad guys. This would’ve ended with Noir Spider-Man getting blown away in his world, but here, Ultimate Spider-Man just laid waste to these foes with the suit. Spider-Man swings his arms and whips opponents with the symbiote tendrils, he can cause the suit to shoot spikes out of his chest, and the webhead can create impalers that spring from the pavement.

Videogames are an art form made up of visuals, sound, and a mysterious little something we call gameplay. Limbo is the perfect example of these three crafts working together in harmony to create something astounding. With no text, no dialogue, and no explanation, it manages to communicate circumstance and causality to the player more simply than most games. This 2D puzzle platformer in a film noir style is one of the best games you’ll play this year on any platform.

You control a young boy who wakes up in a forest with no indication of who you are, how you got there, or where you’re going. You set out to explore this bizarre environment but soon find it to be a dangerous place, at which point your motivation becomes clear: you need to get the hell out of there. No cut scenes or loading screens will interrupt the action, making it easy to be swept away in Limbo’s disturbing world. From beginning to end, the game never stops surprising, delighting, and horrifying the player.

There are some pacing issues, though. In the first half of the game you encounter many interesting creatures and what appear to be other children (who are none too happy to see you). Then the second half takes place in a deserted industrial area. The puzzles become more interesting and complicated, but the absence of other life forms weakens our emotional connection with the game. Limbo’s final moment gave me chills — one of my favorite game endings ever. But the lead up to it needed more of a climax. You work your way through the second half of the game conquering increasingly dastardly puzzles, and then the journey ends unexpectedly.

So what do you actually do in Limbo? Well, you die a lot. But don’t worry, the game avoids being frustrating. The developers describe Limbo as a trial-and-death game. As you make your way through the forest, you’ll come across obstacles that will often kill you immediately in shockingly gruesome ways. How many times have you seen a little boy be decapitated by a bear trap? But after your death you’ll restart right before the trap and have to figure out how to get around it. The game is very clever and eventually becomes quite challenging. You’ll be hooked the entire five to six hours it takes to reach the end. While this may sound short, it’s better for a game to leave us wanting more than to overstay its welcome. There is a leaderboard that tracks your completion percentage, but the developer really missed an opportunity to build robust leaderboards that track all kinds of stats like number of deaths and completion time.

The sound design on display here is nothing short of astonishing. Many puzzles require you to listen carefully for sound effects that will clue you in on how to get past them. While there isn’t much of a soundtrack in the traditional sense, the ambient noises really install a sense of dread in the player.

Two games, several DLC packs, dozens upon dozens of hours, countless planets, and however many alien deaths later, there is still one question on the minds of many Mass Effect fans – who is the Illusive Man?

Starting January 2011, Dark Horse plans to address that question in a new four-issue mini-series reuniting the Mass Effect: Redemption team of Mac Walters, John Jackson Miller and Omar Francia. Joining the team will be former Y: The Last Man cover artist Massimo Carnevale. IGN had a chance to grab a few first details from writers Mac Walters and John Jackson Miller.

“The basic idea was that the Illusive Man is, by nature, one of these guys we don’t know much about,” Walters, the writer of the Mass Effect games, told IGN in an interview. “Going forward in the games we were thinking we didn’t want to reveal too much about him [in the present], but we could look into his past and see how he became the Illusive Man and, maybe moreso, where Cerebus came from and how it started. We certainly have a lot of material we’ve developed internally about this that’s not out there publicly and we thought this would be a great forum to share that.”

“Evolution is a story from the early days of the Mass Effect universe, not long after the discovery of the Mass Relays connecting our solar system to the galaxy,” Miller revealed to IGN. “It shows us one of those important moments when humanity realized just how dangerous that galaxy was. Yes, there’s wonderful opportunity out there, but there are also perils; as our story opens, we’re in the middle of the First Contact War with the alien turians. We don’t know much about the enemy, and they don’t know much about us — and, as we’ll find out, there’s a lot more at risk than losing a starship or a colony.”

“One of the questions we asked ourselves when developing the Illusive Man for the game was who was this guy and how did he get here,” Walters said, when asked to detail why Bioware chose to focus in on the Illusive Man. “How does someone come to have this much power and view this world the way he does? And really there’s no way to explore that in the game otherwise he wouldn’t be illusive! So the opportunity to explore him [made sense to us].”

But who is the star of this series? Who is the Illusive Man? We asked Miller for his sense of the character. “I look at the Illusive Man as a searcher, someone plumbing the mysteries of the galaxy — but with a specific mindset to his approach,” Miller told us. “He’s sure there’s a darker side to some of the great things humanity’s discovered, and he’s rushing to find what that is before it’s too late. His adventures force him to be a jack-of-all-trades — part xenobiologist, part intelligence agent, part archaeologist.

“As to how he changes — and is changed — over the course of the series, well, that’s a big part of the story. Let’s just say it’s impossible to come into such close contact with the mysteries of the universe without being changed by them…”

By no means will Mass Effect: Evolution answer all questions and leave no stones unturned. Miller noted that while the story is in the past and definitely a prequel, there are a number of years between Evolution and the game trilogy. But, Miller added, he was sure fans would get a “good sense” of this mysterious puppet master. And who knows, if fans respond as well to this mini-series as they did for Redemption, we could see more on the Illusive Man. “It’s always possible that some of the things we learn in the series may be reflected down the road… there are certainly more story opportunities out there,” said Miller.

It looks like Microsoft’s new Arcade bundle coming this fall will not include a hard drive after all.

A listing spotted on Amazon Germany suggests the new bundle comes with only 4GB of storage; likely in the form of a USB stick or perhaps internal flash memory. The listing also notes its release date is August 20, 2010. No word if this will also include built-in Wi-Fi.

The price is currently set at €149 ($190 US), though Microsoft confirmed to us last month the new Arcade unit will be $199 when all is said and done.

Apparently the slimmer Xbox 360 is flying off store shelves as the company is claiming its seeing “unprecedented demand” for the new console since it hit retail late last month. The NPD will release its U.S. console sales for June this Thursday.

With open world city-games like Grand Theft Auto, I inevitably find myself becoming bored of the storyline missions – and missions in general – and the prospect of driving through narrow alleys, jumping off ramps and generally causing mayhem becomes the focus of my efforts. The exploration is its own reward, and narrowly weaving between traffic or causing an enormous pileup its own challenge.

APB, developed by Realtime Worlds (Crackdown) is an open world urban MMO, where each of the two action areas are isolated segments of a city, and each is capable of housing up to 80 players at any one time. It’s a third person shooter based on the age-old game of cops and robbers, where you’re either a reckless criminal or an enforcer trying to put a stop to them. It’s one of the few MMOs released that is almost entirely player-versus-player centric, in that it relies on players on both sides of the law to be active for any real conflict to ever occur.

APB has many strong points. The customization options available to players are some of the most flexible we’ve ever encountered – from facial structure to age, makeup, weight, height, muscularity, freckles, wrinkles, and even tattoos (which, with some very careful shaping, you can create from scratch), the character customization suite alone is extremely impressive. Then there’s a car customization suite with almost as many options, including the style and tone of paint, decals and car attachments. Then you can create your own little tune that will play for any opponent you kill, design your own logo, and even your own clothing. Each individual customization suite is complex and can be difficult to use, but in a talented hand can produce some stunning results. In a less talented hand, it can produce a backwards person in pink underwear. All that flexibility is totally cosmetic, though. A tall, muscular character will move at the same pace as a short chubby one.

The first time you create a character, you will be asked if you want to go through the tutorial. The tutorial consists of a video that quickly summarizes what you’ll be doing and totally skips past rather important gameplay aspects like equipping upgrades, and only briefly mentions that you have to equip new weapons to use them, but never really tells you how. Then it puts you into a tutorial map, which is the same as a normal map, but won’t force you into PvP for the first few missions. This too skips a lot, and only teaches you the absolute basics of movement on foot and in a car. Grenades are mentioned in neither tutorial, but end up being an integral part of combat. APB would certainly benefit from a more structured, linear and in-depth tutorial than the one currently built into the game.

Once you’re into the game proper, if you’re playing on your lonesome (which both the game, and I, highly advise against), then missions will be streamed to you every thirty-or-so seconds. In a group, they’re streamed to the group leader, and it is up to them to determine whether or not they want to accept a given mission. Missions generally start with a player being told to go to a certain location and pick something up. After that, they’re told to drop it off somewhere, or pick up another thing. When you haven’t been assigned any opposition (more on this shortly) then the mission length seems to be somewhat randomly determined. Sometimes you’ll do six steps (rarely more), and one time, for the first step, I went to a location to “investigate” and my mission was suddenly over. If you are unopposed, the game is boring beyond belief

If everything is working right, however, you should usually be assigned opposition within the first few steps of a mission. Suddenly, you’ll hear sirens and “APB” will appear onscreen, with flashing red and blue lights behind it. This is where things pick up. Now there is an opposing team headed towards your destination, and they are told to prevent you from doing whatever it is you’ve been told to do, or to do it before you. Suddenly, your team of four is facing another team of four, and the match is usually pretty tight, thanks to APB’s excellent matchmaking system. You can’t, by the way, just shoot anyone. Unless someone is in your team or matched up to directly oppose to you, bullets will simply pass right through.

Matchmaking works like this: every time you complete a mission, the game looks at how effective you were during it – how many people you killed, how many times you were killed, how many objectives you completed etc… and will try to figure out how much of a threat you are compared to other players. It’ll assign a threat level to you that serves to figure out who to match against you. In a mission where it’s you and one other player, and you’re both very high threat, the game may assign three or four players to fight against you. Likewise, if you’re both very low threat, it may only assign one medium-threat (or higher) player against you. Otherwise, it’ll do its absolute best to match you threat-for-threat. If it’s still not an even match, the lacking team can call for backup, which sends a message to all eligible idle players in the area with an option to join the fray. The end result is ideally a contest between equals, where it’s a challenge for both sides, and no one feels like a sore loser by the end. To Realtime World’s credit, it often works out that way.

A listing relating to an all-new edition of Gearbox’s sublime shoot & loot ‘em-up Borderlands has been spotted on US retailer GameStop’s site, stoking hopes that a definitive package will be hitting shelves soon.

GameStop’s site made mention of a strategy guide for Borderlands GOTY (spotted by CVG), suggesting that a Game of the Year edition is likely on the cards.

No other details were announced, though by now we all know the drill with Game of the Year editions; all of the previous DLC will likely be bundled into one box, and with Gearbox’s post-release support for Borderlands proving highly respectable with the likes of The Secret Armory of General Knoxx and The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned among others it should be quite a package.

Borderlands was one of our highlights of 2009, a delightful redneck blend of shooter and RPG that’s near-unique and an awful lot of fun.

I’ve never had such a tumultuous relationship with a game as I have with Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. Like many, I’ve cancelled my account multiple times, only to later admit defeat and reactivate months afterward. I’ve stared at the launcher shortcut on my desktop with a mix of resentment and cautious longing, carefully considering whether it’s best to wipe the files off my hard drive entirely or to leave it on so the inevitable reactivation wouldn’t require a time consuming reinstall. Regardless of how many other MMOs I check out, from Lord of the Rings Online to Age of Conan to EVE Online, I always find myself getting drawn back into Blizzard’s fantasy world, usually around the time of a new expansion pack. It’s just so hard to walk away from that many hours of commitment and never look back.

And so I suppose it’s not entirely surprising that I’m starting to get sucked into the third expansion to World of Warcraft, called Cataclysm, even after having spent a significant amount of time away from the game. The beta test just opened up last week and after jumping in I’ve had the opportunity to prowl around the high level questing area of Mount Hyjal, take my first steps in the boots of a Goblin Hunter, and spend a number of hours slashing through the new Worgen starting zone.

Since my level 80 Paladin was still hanging around Dalaran, the main city located on the continent of Northrend added in the previous expansion, my first order of business was to get him to join the fight on Mount Hyjal, a questing zone on Kalimdor meant for players level 78 – 82. I hopped onto the first boat I saw and would up in the Wetlands on the Eastern Continent (Hyjal is in the middle of Kalimdor near Ashenvale), but this at least gave me the opportunity to check out some of the changes that had been made.

As you may or may not know, Blizzard is giving Azeroth a facelift in Cataclysm, permanently changing zones around and adding in new content, regardless of whether or not you buy the expansion when it is released. Menethil Harbor, for example, is almost entirely submerged, with only some of the houses and the keep breaking through the water level. As I was about to jump into the water to take a look around, I then remembered flying mounts were now cleared for use everywhere, so I hopped onto a griffon and surveyed the scene from above. The added convenience of being able to use flying mounts was welcome as I surveyed the land. But before diving into the new high level content, I decided to log out and hop on over to the Worgen starting zone, where I started life anew as a Warlock.

Having tried both the Worgen and Goblin starting areas, I can say the Worgen zone definitely has a stronger hook to keep you interested. Mostly, that’s because you don’t actually start off as a Worgen, but as a human trying to fend off a Worgen assault. Between groups of frantic human you try to defend and salvage what you can, and it’s not too long through the initial quest chain until a small icon shows up on your status bar saying you’ve been bitten. Mousing over the indicator shows a little bit of text innocently suggesting that maybe it’ll go away, but if you know anything about horror fiction at all then you know this can only end badly.

The transformation doesn’t happen immediately. Instead you continue to run around questing with this bite mark. As introduced in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, there’s more phased questing here, which seamlessly alters the world around you as you complete tasks. This lets the lines of battle shift around as you kill and collect, making it feel as though you’re actually moving around within a changing world and that your actions have consequences instead of simply trotting from one quest giver to the next across a static battlefield. Mixed in with the standard types of slaying and gathering tasks are a few vehicle quests, such as hopping on horseback and rescuing an NPC from a tree surrounded by crazed enemies as well as a cannon quest where you need to defend against their advance by manning a turret and firing explosives.

Soon after that quest the initial storyline comes to a close as your character makes the transition from human to Worgen. There’s a transformation cinematic that’s supposed to play here, but as of my playthrough a few days ago it still wasn’t in place. After the sequence is complete you’re transported to a new town and dropped into a stockade, since the town is rightfully wary of your new beast form. To get out you can speak to a nearby quest giver and down a potion that keeps your wild tendencies under control. Thankfully it works, and you emerge from the stockade as part of the most menacing race within the Alliance.

The Worgen area, called Gilneas, lies just south of Silverpine Forest, and doesn’t look too different from what we we’ve seen before. As you should expect if you’ve been around Silverpine and taken down Arugal in Shadowfang Keep more times than you care to remember, it’s an area of bleak rocky landscape and twisted forests. Plenty of places of interest and nestled in between the rustic townships overrun with spiders including the reddish woods of The Blackwald and jagged rocks extended out into the misty expanse of the sea. There’s a lot more I have yet to see too, and the way the quests progress move you swiftly from area to area to keep the action from getting bogged down.

Phasing continues to be a part of the experience while questing, including a notable part where you must descend into the cellar of a building to turn in a quest. You just wiped out ship captains by catapulting yourself from the shore to their vessels and returned victorious, only to have the ground shake and shudder while informing the quest giver of your success. When you come back up to ground level you find that the waterline of the sea has dramatically shifted inland, which also reinforces the notion that there’s more going on in this version of Azeroth than is immediately apparent.

As for specific skills, the Worgen race gets a built-in one percent boost to critical strike chance, a speed bonus to skinning along with a 15 point bonus, a 15 percent decrease to the length of time diseases and curses affect you, and an activated ability called Darkflight. By triggering this you’ll be able to bump up your run speed by 70 percent for 10 seconds which can be used again after the three minute cooldown expires. I think the Draenei’s Gift of the Naruu heal over time racial is still my favorite, but the sprint is definitely useful early on to escape from dangerous situations.

That’s only a sliver of everything that’s changed in the expansion. From class mechanic shifts like the Warlock’s shards and the Hunters’ new focus resource to talent tree tweaking and new skills beyond level 80, we’ll be covering more as the beta continues into the coming weeks.

The Vision building on the outskirts of Dundee’s city centre is a striking one, all coloured glass and girders: inside, it looks more like a level from Perfect Dark than an office block. Rather than being filled with gun-toting soldiers, though, it’s the home of Ruffian Games, developers of Crackdown 2 and one of the newest additions to Dundee’s flourishing game development industry.

Ruffian formed in late 2008 as a group of like-minded developers who wanted to create “real video games”. Roughly half of the original Crackdown’s development team jumped ship to Ruffian to work on the sequel, and the lead designer was the same on both games. Besides this, Ruffian has few ties to Real Time Worlds aside from the healthy community relationship that all Dundee developers seem to share.

Crackdown 2 has only been in development for a relatively short amount of time, despite the original game being over three years old now. Prior to this, Ruffian was a self-confessed odd job company, taking on contracting jobs for other developers to help it finish off its games. Crackdown 2 is its first high-profile title.

“The last 8 months have been solid crunch,” says James Cope, producer on the game. “It was hell,” he jokes, “but the end result was really good. We’re really pleased with what we’ve done. We set ourselves some pretty aggressive, ambitious targets, and we’ve been very lucky. With some great guys and some hard work we’ve come up with something we’re all very proud of.”

Ruffian is very honest about what the short development cycle has meant, namely that there are some elements of Crackdown 2 that the team couldn’t explore as much as they’d like to.

“We had to come up with some core concepts on where we wanted to take the franchise,” says Cope. “And we ran with that. One of the many regrets from the development is we’ve not really had time for iteration, so some mistakes have been made—we’ve had to just bite that and swallow. That’s been a hard thing, but it’s taught us a lot and we think we’ve got a really good game out of it. I think the combination of luck, hard work and really talented people has come together really well.”

“We had to start by coming up with a design that we knew was feasible in the time,” adds Billy Thomson, Creative Director. “That meant that there were certain things we had to avoid, because in that time period there are certain things that you just can’t do. It meant we had to come up with a design that was tight, not too risky, and not coming up with features that would take months to develop. We didn’t really have time to do things three or four times and pick the best one; we really had to try and nail things on the first attempt. Which is near enough impossible, to be honest.”

The very first goal the team set for themselves was a brand new feature for the series, which Thomson believes is the best thing about the sequel. They knew that they wanted to include player-versus-player gameplay in the game, but Crackdown’s network code was optimised for two players at most. Therefore, the team had to throw out several years’ work to get 16-player PVP up and running—something considered impossible by the original development team.

“Incredibly,” says Thomson, “we had 16-player PVP up and running by the first milestone in the project. That set a precedent; if we set insane goals, the team that we’ve got can deliver on them. For just about every milestone, we set stupid goals but the team kept delivering on them. So it’s their own fault, really!”

Ruffian hired a lot of new team members to work on Crackdown 2. Many of these new hires were junior developers from local educational institutions. They were keen to impress thanks to feeling rather star-struck working alongside experienced developers.

“We put a lot of faith in talented people,” says Cope. “We think we’re pretty good at spotting talent. We work a lot with organisations such as local universities and we’ve done very well out of that historically. It’s really nice to be able to bring people like that into a really big game as their first professional project. It’s a really satisfying experience and they love it.”