Game On: What did you learn from traveling to Hong Kong that you applied to this game?

Jeff O'Connell: The biggest thing that we learned when we went to Hong Kong is that all your cliché notions of Hong Kong that you might have got from movies like Big Trouble in Little China, which is a great movie in its own right, are not to be believed. Hong Kong is an amazing city. It's a complex city. It is more Chinese than people might think and I mention that because obviously it's in China, but the British influence there isn't as strong as you think. Most people speak Chinese; the cab drivers don't even speak English. It's the little things like being on the streets in the game. You'll hear more Cantonese. The radio stations in the game don't play Western pop, but Asian music. We've really tried to make things like that in the game and make it feel authentic. It also helped with understanding that the relationship between the cops and the Triads goes back almost 200 years. We've used the stories we've heard and the people we've talked to to try and build a really authentic story.

How does the John Woo Hong Kong-style bullet time work in your game?

The way that our system works is as you go out of cover you can vault out of cover or you can descend off an object. By holding the left trigger as you do that you'll engage into that slow motion mode where you have more time to target. The more successful taking down guys in that mode, that time will extend. So you can go through entire sections of gunplay in that slow motion mode, and we've tuned all of the effects and reactions to look good as you're in slow motion.

Can you give us some examples of open world options what people aren't on missions in the game?