"I know how to do balanced deathmatch for the world over and sell millions of fucking copies and everybody's happy. I know how to make deathmatch fun for when you're in England playing against the U.S. or Australia versus the U.S., [when] you actually have a decent fucking ping on it [and] everything's great.

"But what I don't know how to do," TimeShift director and producer Kyle Peschel shouted above the noise of Sony's Gamers Day event, "is make it fun in your house. Your house is a very weird ecosystem compared to the world as a whole."

"At my house, every Friday night--actually, every second Friday--I have guys from work over, I kick my wife out, and I sit down and I go, 'Alright, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to bring the other HDTV into the living room, I got a couple of couches set up, we're going to play some multiplayer games and have a great time.'

"What happens--I've got this friend named Aaron, [he's] kind of a camping bitch. And guys don't want to come over to my house that often because Aaron's there and they're like, 'Dude, he just fucking camps with the sniper rifle all night long.' And then I gotta explain why we get into a fistfight because he's a camping bitch and my wife's asking did I get the camping equipment out and I'm like, 'You just don't understand games, ah fuck it, show me where the Resolve is and I'll clean the mess up myself.'"

What it boils down to, Peschel explained, is the chance to adapt the conditions of a game to any circumstance, to keep it fun and enjoyable. "I want you to [have] the ability to make your own multiplayer modes. I can take deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag--all these modes, we've got like seven or eight of them, I don't even know right now, there's so many we keep bringing online every day--you'll have all those, it'll be balanced, everything.

But what of the title's namesake--the player's ability to slow, stop, and even reverse time--which Peschel discussed at length in our past look at TimeShift? Many developers, Peschel included, have struggled for years trying to bring time manipulation into the realm of multiplayer. They all come up against the same brick wall--time control is only fun for that one player who's has that ability. Everyone else is either stopped completely or stuck in slow-motion with no way to fight back, which is not just frustrating, it's annoying. "Let's say we're playing sixteen player deathmatch and I stop time," Peschel hypothesized. "You're all fucked for like, six seconds, and that's not enjoyable."

"Your suit exports the time control power to these handheld grenades. When you throw them, they hit the ground and explode into temporal space, at about four meters across or so, I don't know, twelve feet, and it's suspended for an isolated amount of time. It stops [time] for maybe four seconds, then it implodes and it's done. Anything in there is trapped, anything on the outside can't enter it.

"So if you tried to shoot me with a rocket launcher, I throw [a grenade] down in front of us, that rocket is stuck in the middle and is just gonna sit there, waiting for the bubble to implode, and then boom, it hits me."

The circular bubble creates an interesting scenario for those separated by it, which Peschel likens to a childhood memory. "My brother [is] trying to kick my ass and I try to get to the dining room table. Once I'm on the table and he's over there, he goes to the left, I go to the left, he goes to the right, I go to the right, just trying to keep something in between us. Because you can't shoot through [a time bubble] if it's a stop, or you can if it's a slow or in reverse you shoot yourself in the face and that's never fun, you're trying to get on to the other side of it. Then you can put these up dynamically, you can use 'em offensively, you can use 'em defensively.

"It's about trying to bring more than anything else," Peschel concluded. "We need to figure out how to elevate the FPS, take it to something new."