When asked in this interview with Gamasutra if the fist pound would return in Army of Two: The 40th Day, Creative Director Alex Hutchinson gave a definitive answer.

"Yes!" Hutchinson exclaimed, to which Executive Producer Reid Schneider added "A resounding yes!"

Hutchinson went on to describe the fist pound as "an optional mechanic that gets as much press and conversation as that is magical."

The fist pound has become associated with the game, mainly for its optional use in creating some very dark humor. Some gamers and members of the press felt that this caused some tone inconsistencies with the game, and that the first Army of Two may have been too irreverent with sensitive issues. While they aren’t looking to cut humor from the game entirely, they have developed an interesting litmus.

"We want the tone on the new one to pass the Steven Seagal test," Hutchinson said. "If you can hear it as a line in Die Hard coming from Bruce Willis, great. And if you can hear it in Under Siege coming from Steven Seagal, cut it. That’s our general in-house rule."

The sequel will also feature more buddy humor - something that was touched upon in the first game but not fully explored.

"And I think that Army of Two has an awesome core fantasy. It’s in the title. It’s on the box," Hutchinson said. "These two guys together versus the world. It’s not eight players, it’s not sixteen -- I may not have that many friends myself to play video games with, but I have one gamer buddy who I can play with, and that core fantasy resonates hugely."

Oddly enough, the style of humor in the original Army of Two led to disproportionate sales in North America, while other countries didn’t see quite the same performance.

"I think that’s partly to do with how in North America, you know, lots of people went to fraternities, and all that," Hutchinson said.

Hutchinson also described EA’s attempts to make the game more universally appealing.

"That fits in North America, but didn’t fit as well in Europe. So if we can keep that North American audience and get the same size of audience in Europe, then it’s a big franchise," Hutchinson said. "We want to make sure that we’re accessible to that audience as well as the North American audience."

So - what exactly will these two buddies be facing in The 40th Day? The folks at Electronic Arts Montreal are staying tight-lipped about that for the moment.

"It’s kind of the mystery, the core mystery of the game. We ask the player more questions than we give them answers. Games often feed information with deus ex machina, when you don’t actually care. So we want to put the information about why this disaster is happening and what it actually means as an optional feature within a game, not as something that we feed you," Hutchinson said.

The developers made the story elements optional because they acknowledge that some gamers aren’t interested in such things.

"In an action space, there’s a percentage of players who just want to shoot everything. They don’t want to be, "Blah blah blah," 10 minute cutscene. But we do want to service those players who want to find that stuff," Hutchinson said. "The 40th Day Initiative is the name of the event that is occurring in Shanghai. But what it means, who’s doing it, and what they’re trying to achieve with it, we’re not explaining. We’re trying to leave it for the player."