The latest installment of the "Ask a Dev" article series is now available! Through the Senior Designer Bruce Harlick's comments on the Mission Architect, we knew the mission designers have access to a much larger set of tools then are included with the Mission Architect. It's all about tradeoffs. With that in mind, they'll push the envelop as far as we can here and use the resources we have, and the new resources we can get, to create kicking new Story Arcs and missions that go beyond what you can do in Mission Architect.

Bruce also would like to see branching stories in the game, where the player choices dictated what came next in the story. He said It's a thorny problem. For one thing, it greatly magnifies the number of missions needed for any story arc. Any time you have a branch, you're doubling (at the minimum) the amount of content you need to create and you end up creating content that only a fraction of the player base is going to see. There are also technical issues; for example, branching stories work well in single-player games, but can lead to trouble in a multi-player game.