Okay. Touching back on the controls again. I played around a bit with the dodging and rolling on the ground, but couldn’t find a lot of practical applications for it. I’m wondering if I wasn’t doing it correctly or missed the ideal situation that you’d want to fall backwards and shoot from the ground. How do you hope players use that ability?

Well, first of all, it goes back to what we said about making the gameplay more expansive and giving the player some of that freedom. I mean, when you are in the middle of a fight, there are going to be some very aggressive enemies in this game. When you’re fighting you have that choice: Do you want to just stand up and shoot them or do you want to dodge, then shoot? Return fire? Something like that. There is no set place you have to use it. And the game is pretty long and there will be different points in the game where it will be more useful or efficacious to use these features than in other places. But I think it also comes down to play style. Maybe you’re a very good gamer, so you’re already used to a certain to ways of fighting. This is to give the player that freedom in determining how they want to fight and play the game. They don’t have to use it, but there are places where they should.

Will there be enemies that you can only shoot if you are laying on the ground, or they’ll pass over you if you are laying on the ground, something like that?

We have situations like that with the zombies. There are some that just crawl on the ground, so they’ll grab your leg, knock you down, and crawl all over you. That’s when you shoot them. That’s what you got to see in the presentation when Ustanak, using that claw arm, extends out to grab you. If you fall on your back, you’ll fall underneath his line of attack and you can shoot at him. We wanted to make sure that we weren’t forcing certain gameplay elements on the player, that they had the freedom to choose when they want to use it. And as they play through the game they’ll find that there are different situations where they’ll want to use these new controls in. There’s not an aspect where we’re trying to force you to use them, however.

I’ve played a lot of RE 6’s co-op, and I’ve played a lot of single-player to see if the AI had improved from 5 – I noticed that it has. Can you tell me about the changes that you’ve made to the AI or what you kept in mind from the complaints about AI in 5 moving into 6?

Okay, I was involved in Resident Evil 5, so I understand where everyone is coming from with that critique. One of the key features of Resident Evil, the series as a whole, has been resource management, and that’s a really important aspect of the game. So in RE 5 you have this AI partner who is using your resources. That is something the player wants to control themselves. I understand the fact that resource management is important and that it affects your gameplay and how you want to play the game, and it is stressful to worry that this person is infringing upon your resource management. So we took a step back in RE 6 and how we were going to change that so that people don’t feel stressed like they did in Resident Evil 5.

Another way you appear to be approaching that is that each player has independent loot. If an enemy drops 9mm rounds I can get them and my partner can get the same set.

That’s exactly what will happen.

Why did you decide it was time to add 4-player co-op to the Resident Evil experience?

Just to make clear: We weren’t setting out to create this 4-player co-op experience. That wasn’t the goal from the beginning, but we had all these stories that we want to tell and we wanted a way for them to intersect and give you a different perspective on the stories that are happening for the other characters. And then we thought, "Well, just having the stories themselves, just the stories, is kind of boring." We wanted a more interesting way of getting that to the player. So we thought, "Well, if that was actually playable, it just didn’t happen in the cutscenes, but that it was playable. Then the two groups of players playing together, that would be interesting."

I know that Mercenaries has been confirmed. Are there any plans for competitive multiplayer?

For us, especially Resident Evil 6, the campaign, the main story, that’s where we put the majority of our resources and energy, and that’s where we want to keep the focus on the game. But we understand that gamers out there enjoy a little player-versus-player action. We understand that’s important to them, we do understand that. So, while I can’t go into any specifics, just know that we understand that that’s an important aspect of gaming, so… don’t worry.