I can't say I'm speaking for anyone but myself, because who knows what people want, but I'm looking for elegance now, not memorizing combo strings.

PO: We want this effortlessness. I want to be this $30 million weapon, and I don't want to go to training school to get there. I want to pick up the controls and be this guy in a short period of time. That's why we took that approach. That deliberately formed the way we built the camera.

The game reminds me in a vague sort of way of Sega's Yakuza game, if you've ever seen it. That had context-sensitive takedowns in a contemporary setting. That game was really underappreciated for some of the stuff it did, so it's worth looking at.

PO: I think we looked at that one. We looked at... what was the first Jet Li game, Rise to Honor?

MS: Yeah.

PO: And tried to do some of the same things. We looked at Power Stone and old-school brawlers and that stuff. But again, it was formed by the property. It didn't always have fight scenes in rooms like this [embassy office], these ordinary places that are loaded up with everyday objects that are then used in a surprising ways.

We wouldn't have these environments. But part of what makes Bourne so authentic is that Bourne isn't fighting a bald guy with a cap inside a hollowed-out volcano. He's fighting for the fate of the world in these enormously mundane locations. It's the juxtaposition between the extraordinary violence of his world and the everyday world that makes it seem authentic.

This game is on the 360 and PS3. Do you have anything to say about the development process on doing multiplatform games?

PO: We needed a lot of support on Unreal to make it run on the PS3. We got caught in the same crunch as everybody else when they finalized Gears, so that definitely slowed down the PS3 support at the time. But, that being said, the guys have done extraordinary work with the PS3, and it's just about ready to pipeline.

Then again, there's controversy relating to that.

PO: Yeah. Well, it's been what, just a few titles that have shipped on PS3 from Unreal so far? It's not... I don't want to badmouth Unreal. It's an awesome toolset.

We wouldn't be where we were if not for Unreal, and their support has been as good as it could be for a company that's had its attention so divided between supporting the developer community and making their own game. But we had to roll a lot of our own stuff on the PS3.