When we think about Mercenaries 2:World in Flames, we usually giggle, pondering all the new stuff we're going to blow up. We might think about the lovely physics, the sprawling environments, or perhaps even the promised multiplayer. What we don't think about, at least not much, is what Matt Colville and the team at Pandemic spent 18 months refining: the game's story.
Don't worry, World in Flames is not going to be some deep and moving work of dramatic fiction. Colville, handling both producer and story editor duties, understands that the story is largely just an excuse for the action, but that doesn't mean it can't still be satisfying. The trick, he says, is for the story and the gameplay to work together symbiotically, without one overpowering the other.
Every story needs a starting point, and for Mercenaries 2, that was picking a location. "We settled on Venezuela pretty early," Colville explains. "It’s a colorful location, that provided a great contrast with the first location. North Korea is a very monochromatic country."
After learning that the U.S. gets more of its oil from Venezuela than it does from the Middle East, it was an easy decision for the team to make the oil a key plot point of the game, but they were wary of making the game too true-to-life.
"We want our game to feel like an 80s action movie. If it hits too close to home, it ceases to be that. The political landscape [in Venezuela] is pretty interesting, but we rejected it because any time we tried to use a story solution that was centered around that, it ended up being too real. We ended up making a politicial statement," says Colville.
Although one might assume that the gameplay is mapped out first, leaving the writers to shoehorn a story around it, in reality the development was far more fluid, with the story taking leads from the gameplay and vice versa. As an example, Colville references the enormous oil platform that we've seen in a number of preview shots of the game. It's a massive set piece, with 30-50 people on it, moving parts, and so forth.
"So when it comes to where are we gonna set this dramatic moment in the game, it seemed like a good idea to put it on the oil rig. Then we have to come up with a reason for the character to be on the oil rig." When the gameplay guys learned that the story was taking the character to the rig, they basically said, well, as long as you're gonna be there, let's see what else we can give you to do, and began designing new gameplay elements. "It's like an ouroboros," says Colville.
Of course, the two halves don't always find a way to meet in the middle. "We wanted a dam to explode and flood a city, but we couldn’t make the story match up with it," laments Colville, going on to explain a cathartic scene between your character and the game's villain that had to be axed because while it worked from a storytelling point of view, it didn't make sense within Mercenaries 2's structure as an actual game.
It's been through about 10 different revisions and taken a year and a half, but the story and characters for Mercenaries 2 are finally ready to see the light of day. The Pandemic team is putting the finishing touches on the game now, working on the few remaining performance issues before the game is released this holiday season. When you play it, keep an eye out for a minor character Blanco--though Colville says he can't pick a favorite character ("I love them all, they're like my children!") he has a soft spot for that particular ex-merc. "I really wish we had more for him to do," he says with a sigh.
