Resistance 2 came out for its first public viewing at Sony's PlayStation Day in London, and we took the opportunity to try it out. While only a limited multiplayer demo, what we played left us with plenty to be excited about. Considering a good six months' worth of development time remains to polish and perfect things before this fall's release, the game already looks impressive, easily equaling the standard of the original. That amounts to no small feat for a game supporting 60 players running around vast levels with a variety of crazy weapons, but developer Insomniac Games has its sights set higher. President and CEO Ted Price says that there's plenty of new technology yet to add to the game. As far as he's concerned, these are still the early days of development.

Extensive community features figure to be a big part of the online component. Plans center on making myresistance.net a hub for online players, built around the sort of social features that drive popular sites like Facebook. Price declined to go into detail, but expect Resistance 2 to become the flagship online title for PS3, and not solely for its 60-player battles.

Price did offer a little deeper insight on the design direction behind the large-scale battles planned for competitive online. Because the chaos of full, 30-on-30 battles would detract from much of the potential fun, combat comes down to what he calls "battles within battles." Each side in the conflict consists of smaller squads, but more than that, these squads get individual tasks assigned to them. The result pits squads against each other, all vying to achieve a number of different goals around the battlefield simultaneously.