The boys are back in town…
X360 speaks to Battlefield: Bad Company 2’s producer Gordon Van Dyke to find out how it’s shaping up…
A lot of great multiplayer games have come out since the original Bad Company *Cough MW2 Cough*, what improvements have you made?
We’re really focusing on trying to have a really strong multiplayer compared to what we had in Bad Company 1. So at release we’re going to have four game modes; Rush, Conquest, Squad Match which’s is a working title but it makes sense and finally Squad Rush and a Hardcore option that can be applied to all the game modes.
Each squad is VS all the other squads and there’s going to be a total of four in one game a total of 16 players, 4vs4vs4vs4. This is really intense and we’re kind of excited to see how people play out this game mode and I really think that the competitive players will really take to it. It’ll be really fun for four guys who are friends, it’s easy for them to jump in as a team and they’ll be pitted against 12 other guys. It’s going to be the first squad that gets 50 kill ticket’s that wins the round. We wanted to have a center point, this is a Battlefield game so we throw in something to spice things up and it’s an IFV (an anti-infantry vehicle), it’s basically a light tank where a whole squad can fit in. Where going to put one of those on the map and everyone is going to have to fight over it to use it, because it could give you the strategic edge to win. But then you have one vehicle and 12 enemies… so it’s going to be quite a battle that takes place.
What about the maps, they’ve always been a lot more open than traditional FPS?
We’re going to customise versions of existing maps to utilise a smaller space than the normal Rush or Conquest game modes. For example if there’s a town section to a map, only that area will be accessible and that’s where they’re going to have the battle. It’s going to be Ranked as well.
Then there’s Squad Rush, which is four vs four, eight players total and that’s set on a smaller Rush game mode. One crate per base and there will only be two bases that attackers need to take and the defenders obviously have to defend. This will be set on a custom version of the map to handle that and there are no vehicles, ever. This is that one map and game mode you’ll be able to play with no vehicles in the way and we think this is the one the competitive crowd will really take to. It’s going to be much easier for four people to team up and create their own mini-clan and this will also be Ranked. I’m really eager to see how people respond to this. But I’m wondering if we should allow Party mode to work, I don’t want to see in Squad mode four teams working against the others. Only one team can win at the end.
What’s this Hardcore mode all about then?
For Hardcore mode, it’ll apply to all four game modes, and it’ll be no Kill-Cam, friendly fire is on so you can kill your own team mate accidentally or intentionally, much more realistic damage from weapons, basically everything will feel much more realistic and it’s focused on those intense moments, it’s going to be do or die and you’ve really got to be on your toes. There’ll also be a huge reduction in the HUD elements, so no cross-hair, so if you want to aim and hopefully you’re not screen dotting, it’ll be really important to use the iron sights, guys aren’t going to be shooting from the hip, you just can’t in reality. It’s to make it feel like a much more realistic version of Battlefield, we know there’s a group out there, and they may not be biggest but there are guys who want to experience that type of gameplay, especially from a game like Battlefield where you can have vehicles. Of course when you do get in a vehicle all those cross hairs and visual data is built into the game and it’s modelled from reality, just like the guns so when you bring it up to your eye that’s what you see, it’s the same in the vehicles. We’re not going to take away things that would make sense in the real world, I guess would be the better way to describe it. There’s nothing that would break that immersion in reality, no enemy icons, no mini-map and this will also be a Ranked game mode.
How much has the Frostbite engine been improved?
2.0 is the name we’ve given to the engine, people love numbers. I think, I would say we’re just scratching the surface of what we’re going to be able to do with the Frostbite engine and destruction and this is the second big title to come out on it. If people follow us closely we have a lot of our TNT guys and they go to a lot of developers conferences and they did a presentation about Frostbite 2.0, we’re really focused on the engine and making sure it’s a good as it can be. We want to make sure that our destruction never becomes something like a marketing feature, as apposed to a game feature and I think sometimes that can happen and we work really closely with our marketing team to let them know that elements of our game should always match gameplay experience.
That’s why you don’t see everything destroyed or everything blowing up because that doesn’t necessarily make it cool for the gameplay. So, the way we’ve done it is so that when people think of Battlefield they think about the gameplay, the infantry, the vehicles, the destruction. Destruction should always be a part of the equation, not the end goal and that’s what we’ve really focused on. We could have made everything just blow up, but is that fun, does it make the gameplay experience better? Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t and that’s why you’ll see key things just not being destroyed but most of the time we hope you don’t notice because we’ve really tried to be smart with it. We want it to feel natural and intuitive that if I shoot something that it should blow up. But if you shoot something like a big piece of metal with a grenade launcher it typically wouldn’t be destroyed, like if you tried to blow up a big dumpster.
We’ve just tried to make it smart and not distract a persons focus and I think that’s the most important thing, even in games in general. When you’re making something people should always just progress and not notice things that are wrong. Even though sometimes we’re faking it and it’s a videogame, sometimes it’s hard to understand why things makes sense to the player, they just do.
Like in movies when you see lightening and thunder happens right after, but in reality it doesn’t happen like that. Sometimes when your watching a movie your brain just doesn’t register it, and it’s weird things like that and that same kind of technique is applicable in videogames. It’s really about us as developers making sure we don’t break the players experience and immersion. I think Naughty Dog with Uncharted 2 is a perfect example of this. I’d be playing and it would get to past midnight and I’d think ‘Man, I’ve got to get to bed’. But I didn’t want to stop playing because they never tell you that you reach a check point, you don’t know that you’ve progressed, the cutscenes flow together and so you never feel like you want to stop and you just want to complete it like you’re watching a movie.
How will the destruction effect the environments?
The terrain will look different and you will see that a battle took place. That’s actually one of the more interesting things, when you go to a certain flag, especially on Conquest, you’ll go there and you’ll look at it and recognise that there’s been a lot of fighting around it. Craters in the ground and it actually makes you more anxious when you try and take the position, but if you go to another and it’s clear, you’re like “Phew, nothing bad happened here, I’m a little more safe”. Even though that might not be true, it’s funny how the destruction makes an emotional impact on you, it’s really evident for me in Battlefield 1943, some of those flags can get obliterated and in the tropics there’s tons of flimsy buildings, so it didn’t make sense for us to not let you completely knock them down. It’s really fun and it just keeps getting better and where we’ve gone it’s only going to get better.
Maybe it’s about hardware or better optimisation we’re hopefully seeing much more dynamic physics and less baked stuff. But the baked stuff works, it doesn’t hurt the experience but what it does do is free up a lot of memory for us to expand in other areas and make an even bigger experience. Having dynamic physics takes a lot of horsepower to run it’s always a trade off in game design and the tricky part and that’s a lot to do with producers.
What about the competition from Modern Warfare 2?
If you play Modern Warfare 2, this is a very different experience. To say that you prefer this one or that as opinion is ok, but to say one’s better than the other, I don’t think it’s a fair judgement to make. Both games provide a completely different experience, MW2 is pure, intense infantry combat and they do it really, really well. Bad Company is about bigger warfare, it’s about huge environments and vehicles so your adversary isn’t always a person, its maybe a person in a tank. It’s almost makes it games within games as a lot of people are sometimes intimidated and it’s one of the reasons we spent so much time focusing on the controls for the vehicles. Some games only ever let you play in a vehicle, so you’re only in a car or you’re only in a jet. Whereas here, you can pilot a helicopter you a can be a gunner, a passenger and all these other vehicles… it’s games within games. Even the UAV adds a new experience, patrolling the area in a more vulnerable situation. It’s reminiscent of the Commander mode was in Battlefield 2 but now it’s in a way that you have to be more careful, you’re exposed, you can’t see what’s happening around you. It’s all about helping your squad and getting a birds eye view of what’s going on as you can get really high.
I think this is actually our best flavoured Battlefield game, some of them were focused more heavily in one section. If you look at the history of Battlefield, 1942 was the first time that anyone implemented vehicles in that way. You had battleships, planes, jeeps and tanks, bombers. We’ve never reached that scale of vehicles again! But if you looked at all the maps, they were totally designed around the vehicles. In Battlefield 2 we kind of then focused much more on the infantry so we implemented the Commander mode and the squad mode and we highlighted a different area. Then 2142 mixed things up in a good way but people weren’t as in to it. Then Bad Company 1, which is where we did everything in-house (I am only mentioning in-house Battlefield’s) and we focused primarily on the single player experience and we’d never really done that before and that got us really excited. But now we’ve kind of done everything and we know the right elements to mix and match, you’re going to see us going much further in future Battlefields.
What about the singleplayer?
For the single player I feel it’s more about refining and learning to tell the story better, for me it’s always about making you feel like you’re playing multiplayer in the sense that we have huge open maps. Our levels can be 8 kilometres large, so they’re huge and it’s making you feel like you’re really in a squad so sometimes you’re not always the pilot but the gunner. But it makes sense because of the squad and this way we’re able to deliver the story in an intuitive way so that people feel like what’s happening makes sense.
We’ve been adding a lot more animations and it’s actually the animations that sell the AI. The AI has always been really clever, you just never saw it and that’s a key thing for games, it’s now much more about animation than graphics. The visuals were always so important but we’ve reached this level where it’s huge already and a lot of games look good. Now it’s the games that are standing out that have a large amount of animations and the way the characters respond. Say if an enemy AI sees you, does he just stand there and shoot or does he run into cover. Does he take a position that’s better suited to attack you so we’ve done some work and refined that experience so the people you’re fighting feel more alive and much more like it’s a person.
Are you looking forward to seeing Bad Company 2? For the full feature get X360 issue 54, on sale now!
