Resistance talks

Ted Price, President and CEO of developer Insomniac Games, talks about new features and the importance of story in Resistance 2.

What can we expect from Resistance 2?

There are a lot of great new things that Resistance 2 offers. First of all we have got the continuation of the Resistance: Fall of Man story which follows Nathan Hale back to the United States. He is facing a massive Chimera invasion of the States and is trying to fight it off in a very tightly integrated story.

Secondly we have got eight player online co-op, which features different character classes, character progression, and experience based rewards. It is a separate campaign from the single player; it has its own story and it is something very different.

We've also got multiplayer modes, one of which is our 60 player mode where we have squads that are fighting against each other using dynamic objectives. This is a mode which does a very good job of keeping the game spread out across the map, so players aren't stepping on each other's toes. One of the things that we found is that when you increase player counts it can get very chaotic, if you don't have organisation the game completely devolves. So with our dynamic objectives, with our rival squads, with our reward system, we are ensuring that players can jump in, have a great time and not feel overwhelmed.

Finally we have brand new community features that we will be integrating into the game and the MyResistance.net website.

Is multiplayer the key focus of Resistance 2?

Actually we are focusing equally on the single player campaign, the multiplayer competitive and the co-op, as well as integrating the new community features. So I don't want anybody to think we're not putting the same amount of attention into single player. In fact we're doing a lot of great new things with the single player campaign including bringing it back to America where there is a lot of visual variety in the settings and a lot of new Chimera that we're introducing as well, plus we're integrating story much more tightly with gameplay. The story will be told from Nathan Hale's perspective, which is very different from Resistance: Fall of Man, so it should have a very different feel.

How will the online co-operative campaign work alongside the context of the single player story?

We're going to have our online co-op mode with its own story, so this story parallels Nathan Hale's story as he is moving through America. There will be a squad of eight other players who are moving through it at the same time.

Now this is a story-lite mode, we don't spend as much time on cinematics as we do in the single player game, but it is story driven nonetheless, and I think that is going to give players a really good sense of progression, as well as fitting into the overall theme of this alternate America that we're setting up for Resistance 2.

Was there an aspect of the original Resistance that you were keen to expand upon in Resistance 2?

I think one of the biggest things we wanted to do with Resistance 2 was answer questions about who Nathan Hale is, what's going on with the Chimera and I think mostly tell an even deeper story. We have brand new characters that actually help tell the story while you're moving through the game, which is a very different approach to Resistance: Fall of Man.