LucasArts' new Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction for Xbox and PlayStation 2 promises to be one of the most open-ended destruction derbies ever made. The third-person-perspective action-shooter features three playable mercenary characters, each with different skills allowing for multiple styles of gameplay as they undertake missions in an explosive North Korea. Developed by Pandemic Studios, Mercenaries even features RPG-like aspects as your character attempts to stay on the good side of all the different factions involved in the conflict. Josh Resnick (president of Pandemic Studios) and Mark Domowicz (game designer and programmer) gave us an inside look at this groundbreaking title.

What’s Mercenaries all about?

Josh: The easiest description of Mercenaries is “Grand Theft Auto in a war zone.” But we take it much further than Grand Theft Auto did. You are in North Korea, and it’s on the eve of an historic reunification of North and South. But a General Song basically stages a coup d'etat, takes over the country, and all chaos breaks loose. And that’s where the mercenaries come in. The allies have landed and are trying to restore order – South Koreans are in there, the Chinese, Russians, all these different factions. The allies have issued a new "deck of 52," very similar to what the U.S. Army did in Iraq, and it’s your job to chase through this deck of 52, help restore order, and make a lot of money along the way. The great thing about Mercenaries is if you see it, you can use it, you can destroy it, you can hijack it, you can blow it up – you can do absolutely anything. It is truly a freeform, open-ended environment that gamers have never seen before.

How did you come up with the story's concepts?

Mark: Basically, we took our inspiration from a lot of real-world events – we find that fact is often more interesting than fiction at times. The two main concepts are North Korea having a nuclear arsenal – we wanted to play a “what if?” scenario on that – and the other main concept is that of a private military company. A private military company is a group of people (usually ex-military) that governments will hire to do contracts that are time-sensitive and need to be discreet. In Mercenaries, you play an agent of Executive Operations, which is a fictional private military company.

Josh: Going with the Mercenaries concept gave us the freedom we needed to push the limits on what is freeform gameplay. Because you’re a mercenary, you can work with all these different factions, you can use all these different types of weapons, and you can accomplish missions in a lot of different ways. We wanted to give the player the freedom to do things their way, so one of the highlights of Mercenaries is you might have a particular mission – say, to snipe some mafia higher-ups – and you can use your sniper weapon, you can call in an air-strike, you can plant C-4 on the hood of your Jeep and run it into the group of guys and bail out at the last minute, or you can use RPGs. There are multiple ways that you can tackle each mission in the world, and having the mercenary be that character gave us the freedom to do that.

What kind of research did you undertake to learn about mercenaries?

Josh: Well, Mark is secretly a mercenary, and I didn’t want to bring that up in this discussion, but…

Mark: Somebody once paid me 50 cents to beat someone else up.

Josh: We actually did do a lot of research, and what shocked us was how real these private military corporations are – I mean, these guys have real operations around the world. You can actually go on the Web and find sites. These guys are South Africans, Israelis, Americans, and they’re actually going out and offering their services to governments. We were surprised at how overt it was; we learned a lot of really interesting information about how they operate. As you can imagine, though, we were only able to dig so deep because they’re not really very open about how these things take place. We definitely had to use our imagination a bit in terms of putting this all together, but we were quite surprised at how real these private military corporations are.

What are some of the particular gameplay features?

Josh: One of the things I’d want to call out is our "action hijacks," which is really unique for this kind of game. So if a helicopter is swooping low overhead, you can press a button and the camera is going to pull back and you’ll be able to grab the skids of the helicopter, grab the pilot and throw him out, get into the helicopter, and now you’re firing Hellfire missiles onto a base. If you see it, you can hijack it.

Mark: There are three different characters in the game, and they cater to different players’ desires. The first is an American, Chris Jacobs; he’s ex-Delta Force and he’s the kind of character you want if you’re the run and gun type. Then there’s Jennifer Mui; if you want to snipe or sneak in, she can walk right up to an officer and have him not even notice before she takes him down. So if you were going to try to capture all the cards as opposed to kill them, you might want to work with her. And then the third is Mattias Nilsson. He’s light-footed, he’s fast, he’s the kind of character you would play if you wanted to get in, get out. If you value being able to dodge very easily, that’s the character you’d want to play.

Josh: We also have the ability to be sneaky. Say the Chinese want to set me up against the South Koreans, so I accept this Chinese mission and I take this assignment against the South Koreans but I don’t want to piss them off. So what I would do is hijack a South Korean vehicle and then disguise myself as a South Korean, sneak into the base and then do something to them where they don’t see it. Then my faction rating on the South Koreans won’t go down and I’ll still be able to take missions from them and still get access to certain South Korean vehicles and stuff like that when I’m buying it on the black market.

You have four different factions in the game – the Chinese, the South Koreans, the mafia, and the allies – and each one of them gives you contracts that usually involves going against the other one. So in Mercenaries, not only are you looking at accomplishing your missions and killing or capturing the deck of 52, but you also have to be very careful to manage the balance between these different factions. For example, if I piss off the Russians too much, all of a sudden I’m not going to have access to their black market, which is called the "Merchant of Menace." So through the black market, I can take all this money I’m making on these missions and order in a helicopter or supply crate. But if I piss them off, I can’t do that any more – so I’d have to go back to them and bribe them or take another mission to try and get back into their good graces.

Are there any major differences between the different platform editions?

Mark: The Xbox version has normal-mapping on it so the graphics are a little prettier, the frame-rate is a little bit higher, and the load times are better. But that said, the PS2 version looks fantastic. I’d be demoing the PS2 version, and people would often say, “That’s great – when can I see the PS2 version?” So they both look really, really nice.

Josh: I’d be very comfortable saying that this game – more than any other game out there -- really integrates and embraces Havok physics. It is spectacular when you’re blowing things up in this game. It is extremely satisfying. You find yourself blowing things up in so many different ways that you never get tired of doing it over and over again.

Mark: We have an engine that was done completely from scratch – amazing particle systems. The explosions are great, the smoke is great. We have great environment effects – we have leaves and snow falling.

Josh: And there is no loading from one area to another. You’ll actually go from a zone where it’s raining or it’s sunny and then move into an area that’s snowing, and it’s seamless. It’s totally transparent to the player.

Can we expect to find any Easter eggs?

Josh: There are some neat surprises, some secret characters and features. We’re working with LucasArts, so you can imagine what kind of characters that we can have fun with...