X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse Interviews

Both GameZone and Gamer Within were able to track down the developers at Raven Software for brief interviews about their upcoming X-Men Legends sequel. A snip from the interview at GameZone:
Q: You have the Brotherhood and X-Men working together was that one of those situations where you said '˜Ok, we are going to do this, now how do we pull it off?'

A: (Yeah, we all wanted to do it. The idea of the X-Men and Brotherhood working together is something we all wanted to do. We toyed with trying to do some of that in X-Men I, so the way we came up with Apocalypse, we thought '˜Ok, who is the biggest, baddest enemy there is, and it is Apocalypse, so that was how we wanted to do it. We knew from the beginning it would be awesome. Just having the Brotherhood and X-Men on the same team totally rocks.

(What we've done is we've made sure conversations change whether or not you are playing an X-Men or the Brotherhood, and the different story points like the mission briefings where Xavier will be giving the mission briefings and (one of the Brotherhood) will start hitting on Jean Grey and Cyclops will be like '˜hey, back off!' so that was totally a blast to do. That's the whole reason we did it was to get that chemistry of those guys working together.)

And a snip from the interview at Gamer Within:
Q: In what ways did you feel like the story in X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse is improved and more sophisticated than in the first X-Men Legends game? And what kinds of story-telling techniques and other things did you learn from the developing the first game?

A: Having both the Brotherhood and X-Men involved as protagonists has definitely allowed Raven and Marvel to take the story to the next level. With the traditional cast of bad guys working with the X-Men, Raven has been able to pull in a number of exciting characters from the Marvel Universe. We are really proud of the character roster in the game and the effects that these characters have had on the development of our story.

We have also done a tremendous amount of work to improve upon how the story is communicated. First, the five acts of the game are tied together with 7 amazing FMV's created by Blur Studios. It was a pleasure working with a team that is so enthusiastic about the X-men, and the results really speak for themselves. Also, the mission briefings have been completely overhauled and really provide some exciting and humorous moments in the story.