Over three years in the making, and with just a single month before its commercial debut on August 31st, we thought we’d heard everything there was to hear about Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. The game’s huge. It has online co-op. You can blow $#!^ up. But while exploring Pandemic Studios’ next-gen playground of destruction at E3 2008, we noticed something new: lots and lots of billboards, with the word “Massive” embedded in placeholder text near the bottom of each.
That’s right — Mercenaries 2 will feature dynamic in-game advertising courtesy of Massive Incorporated. But don’t get your nuclear knickers in a twist quite yet, because Pandemic Studios has a rather creative approach to soothing gamer ire no matter what product Massive decides to advertise on the streets of Venezuela. Says Scott Warner, lead designer on the game:
There’s a faction in the game that actually doesn’t like the fact that the first world is coming in and plastering their cities with advertising, so they’ll actually pay you to blow up billboards. So if you’re like, “goddamn it, the Mercs guys put advertising in the game,” you can just blow it up.
Can you say “achievement unlocked”? Civilians be damned, we’re going to be nuking entire city blocks just to take out every last one of these suckers.
In all seriousness, you have to wonder how Massive feels about players blowing up their ads… in order to properly target a billboard, you typically do have to look at it, which could potentially lead to more advertising revenue than if gamers just tune them out…
Check out our full impressions of Mercenaries 2 right here.
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July 18th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
[...] of particulate, and the hilarious Havok 5.5 physics in play when sending vehicles, buildings, NPCs and even in-game advertisements to a fiery [...]
July 21st, 2008 at 4:28 pm
[...] E3 2008: Mercenaries 2 Lets You Blow Up In-Game Ads For Fun, Profit [...]
July 23rd, 2008 at 12:00 pm
[...] [Via GameCyte] [...]
August 5th, 2008 at 5:01 am
[...] Flames would not only feature in-game advertisements, but would also — true to form — let you blow them to kingdom come. As a dedicated proponent of realistic, contextual in-game advertising, I was personally greatly [...]
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