Kane and Lynch Multiplayer Preview

Introducing…

So, halfway through the process of completing my first successful heist there’s a hand on my elbow and someone talking in my ear. I don’t know what’s going on. Panic, bullets everywhere and I turn away frustrated before I can even respawn as a policeman. Sigh. These things happen, I suppose.

Moments later I’m being guided out of the demonstration room and I’m sat by the incredibly luxurious indoor pool at the Haymarket Hotel. Underground, lit golden and red by alternating lights which shine through a water fountain which covers a whole wall and with a private bar off to one side – the matter of the lost multiplayer game is soon forgotten.

I force myself to shake the awe off and look over at the equally impressed game programmer sat across from me. Morten Heiberg is the lead PC programmer for the game, but has also worked on the Xbox and PS3 versions. He was looking a little flushed when I interviewed him, probably because we were both dressed for an English Winter but had ended up sat by an incredibly posh and heated indoor pool. My cardigan wasn't doing me many favours.

For my first question I’m tempted to ask him if he fancies a dip in the pool, but all that Fragile Alliance must have taught me something because I managed to hold back. Instead, I asked him a little more about the characters and how their incredibly complex personalities are worked into the gameplay. “That’s something which becomes most obvious in the co-op campaigns where one player plays as Kane and the other plays a Lynch,” Morten said.

“In co-op Kane and Lynch kind of come into their own. Kane is a very cool, calm man who has experience on a battlefield and is consistently reliable but Lynch isn’t. Because of his schizophrenia he can easily slip into…well, in the office we call it ‘psycho-mode’.” Morten looked a little sheepish when he said this. All I can say is that he’s lucky I was the one interviewing him and not bit-tech’s resident clinical psychologist. I imagine he might have wanted to correct Morten on a few points there.


“When Lynch slips into psycho-mode he can do stuff Kane can’t. He moves faster, can take more damage and shoot faster. On the downside though, he sometimes hallucinates and will see civilians as security guards, so the player may waste time killing them,” said Morten. Intrigued and wanting to know more about the game’s main characters, I pressed for details on both Kane and Lynch.

“Both the characters are well developed and deliberately complex. While Lynch has the problems with his schizophrenia and is obsesses that he might have killed his wife, Kane is a man who has a tendency to run from responsibility and who has abandoned the one thing he cares about. Neither of them are heroes, but nor are they villains. They’re old men who’re involved with things they can’t control.

“The backstory for each character is deliberately vague in a few areas though. Nobody really knows much about Lynch, but we have a theory around the office that he might have been a teacher or something.

“If Kane and Lynch was a movie then it’d be a heist movie, but it’s also a buddy movie, so we don’t want to give the players too much info. It’s very important that they feel always feel uncomfortable with the other characters.”


Character information gathered, I decided to backtrack a little and ask Morten a bit about IO Interactive’s other major franchise; Hitman. Are both franchises set in the same world? What can we expect IO to focus on in the future, with a sequel (and movie) already licensed for Kane and Lynch?

“Hitman and Kane and Lynch aren’t in the same game universe I don’t think, but we do like to reference between them. I worked on Hitman: Blood Money too and there’s a few references in the newspapers there which point to Kane and Lynch escaping from prison.

“Going forward though I think that Kane and Lynch is definitely going to be our new franchise. We’ve put a lot of work into developing it and we want to see it continue. I know we’re definitely working on some downloadable content next, but I can’t say much more than that.”

Ah – this would be the ideal point to ask a more controversial question before a hand dropped on my elbow and told me that the interview time was over. I wanted to know the technical details of the game and if, after all the rumours that the PlayStation 3 is a difficult platform to develop for, there were any problems which came up in development?

“The engine is one we’re familiar with, which helps. It’s an updated version of the Glacier Engine used in Hitman: Blood Money. The Minimum PC requirements are going to be pretty steep – a gig of RAM and an up to date graphics card. There are no DX10 features, but we do support Vista. In terms of porting though, yes the PlayStation 3 was difficult. It’s an interesting machine but it is hard to develop for because, unlike the Xbox 360, you can’t just expect PC code to work on it. I think it’ll do well though because we’re only at the beginning of learning how to use the PS3.”