Ritual hopes that other people will describe F.A.K.K. 2 as a game that gamers can easily pick up and have a great time playing. "It's not meant to be something that's life-altering," admits Dochtermann. "It's a game where you just get into it, and you have a blast because you're welding weapons and killing all sorts of weird creatures. We've tried to craft a game that was like a fun, action-adventure film, and that's what I think we ended up with."

While F.A.K.K. 2 definitely has roots in the Tomb Raider over-the-shoulder play style, Ritual blended together a lot of different genres.  For instance, they worked in a first-person shooter type of feel to the way the gamer controls the Julie Strain character -- Selecting, using and controlling the many weapons Julie can use is similar to the way weapons are handled in first-person shooters. For example, in a typical FPS, you control your movement with the keyboard and your viewpoint and weapon aiming with the mouse. Similarly, in F.A.K.K. 2, you control Julie with the keyboard and you control the direction she looks at and the aiming of the weapons in her hands with the mouse. Julie can even engage in dual-handed combat, where each weapon works independently.

What Ritual wants gamers to come away with when they play F.A.K.K. 2 is how the company has established a different style of gaming through this type of player combat. Because the game's combat system controls have roots in first-person shooter weapon functionality, the Ritual guys hope this will draw in hardcore first-person shooter fans to play a third-person game which makes players be defensive as well as offensive.

In fact, Dochtermann says he might have a tough time making another first-person game that doesn't have a strong defensive component to it. "F.A.K.K. 2's two-handed combat system shows just how much fun it is to have something that you can defend yourself with," he says. "The ability to block when a shot is coming in totally changes the way that combat takes place. If I play Quake III now or some game like that, I almost want to be able to deflect machine-gun bullets or something."

Speaking of the Quake III engine, while Ritual was familiar with Quake technology (The Quake 2 engine was used for Sin), the company had never chartered into the waters of a third person game using an engine geared for first-person action.  “We thought that we'd spend a good amount more time working on the camera, and that would be the extent of the modifications we would need," Dochtermann says. "It turned out that was just the tip of the iceberg."

Another major difference between F.A.K.K. 2 and SiN is the way in which the team handled initial design ideas. For SiN, the Ritual team held meetings with the entire staff to try to figure through the problems and issues that arose throughout its development. Of course, not everybody shared the same opinions and solutions: arguments erupted over every silly little thing. With F.A.K.K. 2, individual design aspects were designated to separate teams. The result is that the company was able to get things done a lot faster with F.A.K.K. 2 than they had with SiN. "So that's a big lesson we learned: Not trying to make group decisions on every little aspect," says Atkins.