Tom Stratton - IO Interactive

Interview from Luke - Saturday, 08 May 2010 @ 8:55am

Coming all the way from the IO Interactive office in Copenhagen, Associate Producer Tom Stratton has a quick chat to Luke about the soon to be released Kane & Lynch 2 : Dog Days. No volcano was going to stop Tom from heading to Australia!

Tom: The game takes place about 3 years after the first Kane & Lynch. Lynch finds himself in shanghai where he discovers a love interest. So he's definitely a different man, in a different place in his life. As he begins to have hopes for this potential new life he sees that there is this one last job that he can do, it's difficult for him to let go of his former life so he gets pulled back into it. He knows that he cant do this job without Kane's help, its just too big. They get together and again, with these guys trouble seems to follow them.

Tom: Yes absolutely. The story continues to remain incredibly important for us.

Tom: We definitely felt there were a few mistakes when the first game was built. The 3 biggest critiques were the controls with aiming and shooting, the A.I., and the cover system. Those are all paramount to having a good game, they just weren't where they needed to be to really push it to be “better than good”. So with the game now following Lynch all those mechanics were rebuilt from the ground up.

Tom: We've got a feature called “down not dead”, essentially if a character takes a critical hit they still have a chance and a choice. They can try to take out the target from the current position when knocked down, they can try to find cover – recollect their thoughts and strategy, or get right back up and continue the battle. So it's a fail-stop before you are actually down and out.

Tom: Actually no, if anything we had the opportunity to include what was originally planned to be DLC. So that's something that I think from a development standpoint we are fairly proud of.

Tom: Yes there is, and I believe that it's all going to be multiplayer focused.

Tom: We actually have 2 game directors, 1 that focuses only on single player and 1 dedicated to multiplayer. That's how important we think that multiplayer is to the product.

Tom: Yeah it would be fun to know that there is the opportunity to do it all over again, and you know if players don't mind this game then well.... then we will have to see.

Well that was my brief chat with Tom, i had to remove a few bits due to some recent embargo changes for multiplayer - so unfortunately I cant reveal it all just yet... but here is a taste of the first multiplay mode - "Arcade"

Kane & Lynch 2 : Dog Days is set for release this August on the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.