The past two days I've been talking to you about some of the great new things Lost Planet 2 has to offer. Mostly revolving around the new stages we revealed at TGS. You can read them here, Part 1 & Part 2. But now I'll talk to you about perhaps one of the coolest new features within LP2, customizing your character. 

One of the changes you'll notice in Lost Planet 2 is the decision to no longer follow a main character. Instead, we've built an extremely robust character customization system. Once a you spend time creating your character, you'll be using him everywhere you go in the game. In the campaign both offline mode and in online co-op, and of course all the multiplayer battle modes.  I'll break it down into a few parts to make it simple: weapons, appearance, emotes, abilities, nicknames. 

Click the jump to read about the customization and multiplayer.

Weapons. You may have noticed how this works already by playing the demos out on the PS3 and 360. Weapons are broken down into categories. To give an example, let's take the Short Range category. I like my Shotguns, so on my character, I choose Shotgun as my short range weapon. But maybe you like the new and improved Flamethrower, so you pick that as yours. Now when we're playing a game, we each see the weapon we setup for our character when we pick up the Short Range weapon. If I pick it up, you see me shooting my Shotgun, but if I drop the weapon and you pick it up, you get your Flamethrower and I see you burning the crap out of stuff. 

All the weapons work like this. You'll see this for even the various grenade types. And there's not just one type of weapon each weapon. I can tell you that there are some pretty fantastic secrets to be unlocked as you play the game, one of my favorites (as you can probably guess) is a special Shotgun that acts like no other. Expect to see all sorts of special and unlockable weapons throughout the game, all of them with their own special advantages. And of course, it's all part of the very accessible customization. 

Appearance. So now you've got the guns, but do you look badass? Well, you can make yourself look as awesome or as ridiculous as you'd like. You have four parts on your character to switch out, the head, torso, legs, and back parts. Each of these has loads of various unlockable variations, both male and female. And don't forget that you can tweak the color of each part as well. 

You'll be grabbing new pieces for your character throughout the game, one of which includes snagging those question mark boxes [?] that pop out of slain enemies. (Which I'll mention real briefly that you can use your grappling hook now to grab those boxes. In fact, you can use it to grab globs of T-ENG too, that way you never have to run directly into T-ENG or a [?] box.)

Emotes. Or, as you may remember them from Lost Planet 1, taunts. They're back, and there's loads to choose from. Since we've now gone from 4 to 8 emotes per character (hold down start plus and direction on the d-pad, or any four of the triggers/bumpers to activate a taunt), you'll be able to assign them to your custom character. I'll leave what exactly the emotes are a secret for now, since you'll just have to wait a little later to see some of the awesome and downright hilarious actions you can make your character perform. 

Abilities. This is something new to Lost Planet 2. I won't tell you too much about it though… But to tease you a bit, abilities will help make your character even more unique to you. You can apply these abilities to your character and gain certain advantages. For instance, maybe you can activate a Data Post faster than anyone else. Stay tuned for more on this sweet new addition…

Nicknames. This is a simple new feature of customizing. You basically unlock nicknames by various actions, and can use it as a status icon of sorts. We don't have any finalized, but let's say, for instance, that you love your Shotguns. Maybe not just love, but you're freaking' awesome at using them. As a reward, you may unlock a title like "Master of the Shotgun" that you can apply to your character for all to see. (Master of the Shotgun is my lame place holder name just to give you an idea of what I mean. There'll be far more cool and clever nicknames to choose from.)

You'll be upgrading, unlocking, and customizing parts of your character throughout the game. With so many parts available, your character is going to be unique to you and your play style. It's something to show off to your friends and others you meet and play with online. 

Now a little on mulitplayer. On the TGS show floor we unveiled for the time LP2's multiplayer battle mode. It's taken a lot of community feedback from you, the fans, to help make this a better experience. One big change is the new ability of the Data Posts to let you respawn at them if you control it. You have a set spawn that you can fall back on if no posts are activated, but now you can select which post to come back at to prevent the other team from spawn camping. Actually, this goes for the campaign mode as well. We'll be talking about the multiplayer real soon, and touching on some more of the changes we included based on the feedback of the community. 

Here's a few questions you asked to yesterday's post: 

Kaiser-blade asks: It's been ten years since LP1 right? And that would mean that all the trees would be 10 years or younger. So how come the trees are so tall? Is this because of the alien soil? Do things grow faster on EDN III? Also, was the desert there under the ice before the planet began warming? And if it did where did the water run off to?

Yes, it's been about ten or so years since the events of Lost Planet 1. And as far as the environment changes, you'll have to wait until the game comes out and let the story reveal itself to you. There's something very strange going on in the world of EDN III… 

Rhyth asks: Snow, are the control options finalized or will there be changes? I am referring to the already available option of inverted-y in the demo, so will there be an inverted-x option in the final version? 

Definitely. I'm actually Inverted Y. You'll be pleased to hear that the controls this time around are far more customizable than before. And yes, Inverted X is one of the options.

Deaco asks: When you said there would be different types of shells for the cannon, what specifies the difference between them?

There's a few ways. First, in the way they look. Each shell looks unique, and rather like what you'd expect. The shape of the Cobalt is very standard bullet like, the Devils Roar looks like a huge shotgun pellet, and the Armor Piecing Round looks similar to a sniper's round with a very pointed tip. Secondly, you tell what they are before you pick them up. Grabbing one is not too dissimilar from picking up a VS weapon. Thirdly, you can obviously the difference when they are fired from the cannon. 

Dub asks: In the press "poster" style shot with all the Pirates & weapons there are 21 "sets" of Pirate gear. If we assume Head, Back, Chest & Leg customization that would leave you with a total of 1,929,501 different possible Pirate combinations. Is this accurate? I hope so, I want to rock all different combos and colors!

And now with all the other parts to customize I mentioned above, there's even more. I should also mention that the poster you're referring to doesn't even touch on a third of what's available for customization. It's near limitless, when you start adding it all up. 

If you have more questions, stop by this thread in the Lost Planet 2 forums and feel free to ask.