We speak to EA's creative director Alex Hutchinson about the sequel to the controversial Army Of Two

The first Army Of Two was a new IP at a new studio – is it easier having a starting point and working on the sequel?
Having come from working on engines before, the starting with the engine is night and day. When you can actually already talk about the design and the gameplay instead of ‘let’s make some stuff up’ and when the engine actually gets here it won’t do any of the things that we wanted! So I think it’s been a lot easier in the sense that it wasn’t as terrifying a question of whether anything could ship. The first version of anything on new tech is, can we get a game made? With this the question has been, can we get a great game made? I think everyone was really confident from day one that we could make a good game, but the audience already has perceptions that it’s ‘okay’, but how do you take that and surprise people and say, ‘No, this can be awesome.’ If you think about some of the biggest brands and games I love – your Burnouts, your Resident Evils, your Tekkens – the first ones were a 71 [%]. They weren’t great, but now Resident Evil 4 is one of the best games I’ve ever played and Burnout Paradise is phenomenal and Tekken 3 blew me away back in the day and is still amazing. Because of the budgets you don’t always get the chance to climb that ladder and people forget that the other versions of those games were in the seventies and it’s only once they got going that now they’re powerhouse franchises because they have all that knowledge and learning.

Did the original Army Of Two get different responses from different parts of the world?
Hugely. It was interesting for me as I came in as an external party, which was good because I had personal relationships with lots of the team members but I hadn’t worked on the last game, so I was able to give my gut response to different parts and look at the feedback hopefully reasonably objectively. When you work on a game it’s hard sometimes to distance yourself from the sheer volume of hard work that it was, so you take everything very personally. It was good for me to be able to come in and be objective.

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