Mercer versus Heller Conflict Central to Prototype 2 Experience

Prototype 2 might be a few months away but the developers working on the open world action game are already excited about how players will handle the central quest of the game, finding and confronting Alex Mercer, the hero of the first Prototype installment.

Matt Armstrong, who is a design director working on Prototype 2 at Radical Entertainment, has told Destructoid that, “We were just throwing out ideas about where we could take the sequel after the events of the first Prototype when one of the guys said ‘You know what? We should just kill Mercer’.”

The developer says that the concept generated a burst o excitement among the development team and lead to the implementation of a number of ideas that would not have otherwise existed.

The decision to focus on a new main character also meant that the Radical team had a lot of freedom when it comes to how he evolves as the game progresses and also changed significantly as the development team worked with him.

Armstrong added, “One of the things that I’ve been most happy about in the game has been Heller’s dry sense of humor. Humor in games is a very difficult thing to pull off successfully, but our writers have done a really impressive job of simply allowing it to flow out of certain situations and interactions without forcing it. This has gone a long way to making Heller a really engaging and relatable character.”

Prototype 2 is set to be a tighter experience, with the Radical team taking to hearth the criticism that players delivered for the first game, especially that linked to repetitive side missions.

Heller will have a new set of mutation powers, most of them linked to tendrils rather than the straight up transformations of the first game.

The game is set to arrive on the PC, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 in late April.