I love how oblivious us forumgoers are to the content on the main Gamersyde site. :)

I didn't. :D

IGN AU: The big fly-through of the city streets?

Maxime Béland: Exactly. My dream – and I hope we can pull it off – is to have the whole game with no cuts. One f***ing seamless experience with no stops! You saw it – what's cool is that it hides the loading scenes; we play full-HD movies in full screen and you don't really notice that we're loading in the background.

We will do it – it's just that sometimes, when you use the mirror to look under the door for example, we do a cut. But no! Right now, we weren't able to do it for E3, but the idea is that next time Sam uses his mirror, he's going to pull out his mirror, the camera's going to shift down to the mirror and you're there the whole time. Same thing with the sticky camera.

Yeah, the sticky camera is back – I know a lot of fans loved it, so now you're going to throw it and the camera's going to go into the sticky cam. What I love about the sticky cam is, yes it's an old gadget that we're bringing back, but it works so well with the Mark and Execute. Now you and throw it, mark enemies with it and then also mark the sticky cam and blow it up, so enemies don't find it!

IGN AU: Man! Genius – so thought through. I love it.

Maxime Béland: Well, I won't say it was too thought through, but by building emergent systems, you sometimes get some nice surprises! [laughs]

IGN AU: Vantage Point is a really good example – but what other inspiration points did you have going into this iteration?

Maxime Béland: The three 'JB's – James Bond, Jason Bourne and Jack Bauer. And for me, a personal one is 'Man on Fire'. It's a guy who has nothing to lose; it's interesting for us, now that Sam has lost his daughter. I love what they did with the subtitles – when he was asking a guy questions in Spanish, the subtitles – call them 'alive subtitles' – the would move and get bigger. That was the original idea we had for the projected objectives. Also, what they did was overlap two shots at the same time – there's a guy in the car, but in the window, there's what he's talking about.

It fits with making games, because we want to make games where people are always inside the game. I love the games that have a shitload of cinematics, but it's not necessary. I started as a game designer, I love interactivity and I want the player to be in control as much as possible. Now, with the storytelling technology we have – the projected objectives, the projected movies – they're super-interesting and sexy.

And it's an actual light, you know, that's projecting them. When you're in front, it moves across your body. It's super cool.


IGN AU: Have you come across any weird quirks when developing these new systems? AI that's a little too dynamic, maybe?

Maxime Béland: Well, the Mark and Execute system is something that we changed a lot and tweaked a lot. We wanted to give players that feeling of taking out multiple guys super-fast, but we did so many iterations of it before getting it right. I don't know if you noticed, but you need to do a stealth hand-to-hand kill before gaining the right to execute. But what it does now is, when you play, you always have in the back of your mind "okay, okay – do I have my execute? No? How do I get it? Okay, okay – hand-to-hand kills." So when you're playing, you always keep this in the back of your mind. Mark-mark-mark, come out.

The idea is to always keep the player moving forward and in the loop – having the fewest possible disconnects, you know?

IGN AU: The pace seems a lot faster this time around too.

Maxime Béland: You know, it's not so much that it's faster, it's more that you're always in control. You can take your time, stick to the pipes and watch patrols and stuff. But you're always in control and taking care of it.

IGN AU: Thanks so much for your time – we can't wait for this one.

Maxime Béland: My pleasure. Thank you.

Absolutely, but at least that's marginally better than having those march titles join the cluster-effing in the runup to christmas.

I hope publishers will eventually arrive at the conclusion that gamers pretttttty much buy games whenever.