PtP
30-08-2004, 09:16 AM
In the mud and rain of a Normandy field, Edge catches up with Gearbox Software to find out about their gritty WWII shooter
The Utah Beach Museum at Sainte-Marie-du-Mont is the answer. It's the answer to all those questions fired at developers about the morality of making wargames. The questions may be expressed in different ways but they always amount to the same thing: How do you feel about turning a painful, traumatic conflict into entertainment?
Randy Pitchford, president of Gearbox Software, uses the Spielberg defence: "We're fulfilling a fantasy, but also retelling a story as authentically as possible. I think it's important that it can remain as a reference piece. Five years ago this would have been too expensive to research, but now the audience is bigger and we can take on projects like this." His enthusiasm for the subject matter and commitment to the project (he spends at least an hour on top of a hill - Hill 30, he tells us - assessing it for the game) gives us hope that his interest in history is not just for the press releases.
The museum is three miles from Utah beach and is in the Normandy town made famous by The Longest Day, the John Wayne movie depicting the descent of paratroopers into a hail of German bullets. A life-sized facsimile of a soldier hangs by a parachute from the church steeple, providing a graphic reminder to tourists of what happened here 60 years ago. Apart from a large American bomber filling up the central hall, it's your typical museum full of artifacts, touchscreen monitors and bored schoolchildren. The kids sidle by, taking little notice of, well, anything. One of them points lazily at a Thompson sub-machine gun while another swings his bag at a fellow pupil to break the tedium. History is not alive here, and even the older visitors look like they've come purely out of a sense of duty.
Bringing this rich history to life for a new generation is only one of Pitchford's objectives; the good news is that Brothers In Arms does detail like no other war game we've encountered. Where Medal Of Honor Frontline gives you a prosaic version of the Omaha beach landing (which took place 12 miles from Utah beach) and then veers off into a Boys' Own adventure, Brothers In Arms sticks to the broad historical facts. It takes place over an eight-day period and reprises the major conflicts fought by 3rd squad, 3rd platoon of the 502nd airborne division during the invasion.
It's also odd because you get to see the invasion happen from an unusual perspective. As part of a paratrooper division, you land in the fields behind the enemy front line. Your job is to fight your way towards the allied forces, destroying and securing strategic points on the way and thus providing support to the thousands of troops fighting their way up Utah beach.
Your first task, however, is to find your scattered comrades before avoiding detection by the enemy and securing the exits of the four roads leading to the beach. The murkiness of the Normandy countryside coupled with the superb ambient sound effects make for an incredibly tense insertion. Hedgerows loom out of the dark and as you run to take cover from stray bullets pinging around you the sound of your heavy breathing ramps up the tension further. Brothers In Arms is not short on atmosphere.
CHARACTER BUILDING
Many of the higher-ranking soldiers in the game will be modelled on their historical counterparts, right down to facial features, name and accent - but the character you control, Sergeant Baker, and his men will be fictional. This was necessary to allow some artistic freedom but also out of respect for those individuals who fought and died during the Normandy invasion. "Brothers In Arms is based on a true story and it's the first action game to really put you on the real battlefields," continues Pitchford. "It's not just a corridor shooter with artwork that places it within a theme like you've played before. Brothers In Arms is the first team-based firstperson action game set in the period. It puts you in the boots of a paratrooper for eight days during the most important battle of modern history." Indeed, the 502nd parachute regiment is distinguished as the only squad to participate in every major action of the campaign.
Character texture is brought out through the conversations that take place between Baker and the dozen men under his command. Baker is at first reluctant to face the responsibility of taking young men into battle (a theme also present in Saving Private Ryan) but the other troopers also have to deal with personal issues amid the mess of war as they move from battle to battle. These vignettes are played out with subtlety and should provide even more motivation for astute tactical decision making in the field.
'Veracity' is the word of the day as Pitchford drives around Normandy from one location to another pointing out key areas that appear in the game. He rattles them off with boundless excitement: Purple Heart Lane, Hill 30, Dead Man's Corner, Carentan. Along with eyewitness accounts, delving into archives and dispatching a team to survey the local area, Gearbox also enlisted the help of Colonel John Antal, formerly of the US army. Now the company's military and historical director, he travels with us to add tactical depth to Pitchford's exposition of what, why and when.
There's little doubt that Gearbox is taking a brave decision by sticking to the historical truth, at least as far as it's outlined in the history books. "Military tactics haven't changed that dramatically over time," Antal tells us. "It's first about finding the enemy, then fixing the enemy, then flanking the enemy. Flanking really means something in this game. If you can attack an enemy from an unexpected direction then you create two things: confusion and fear."
But won't the focus on historical accuracy compromise the player's freedom? "Actually, recreating the battlefields gives the player more freedom than he's been allowed in the corridor shooters that have come before," argues Pitchford. "On a real battlefield you aren't just funnelled down a path, but you have options about how to proceed tactically. You can charge up the middle, or you can set up for a flanking manoeuvre around one side or another. There are several things that happen by using real battlefields, but mainly it's to give you tactical freedom."
Gearbox's work with the PC version of Halo is apt because you can imagine how it could work in a WWII game. Each mission drops you into a battle area and gives you an objective. Unlike most FPSs, there's no tight path channelling you from A to B - battles in Brothers In Arms are mainly about the suppression and flanking of an enemy force. Antal explains that it's the most fundamental and powerful manoeuvre in military history. While there will be areas where you're pinned down and movement is restricted, such as Purple Heart Lane, many missions will give you the freedom to change tactics on the fly and the space to outmanoeuvre enemies across large expanses of land. At least that's the theory.
Interestingly, there's also an overhead tactical view that can be triggered by pausing the game. The camera slowly pans out from your position to give you an overview of the field of battle, highlighting both enemy and allied forces. It's a feature that may appear at odds with Gearbox's staunch approach to historical accuracy and tactical realism, but after playtesting Pitchford believes it improves gameplay dramatically. It's reassuring to find a developer keen to incorporate a mechanic for the good of the game even if it does threaten to impinge on the original formula.
INTELLIGENCE CORPS
But is the AI up to the job? There are four levels of sophistication. The first is Simulated Intelligence, based on standard military tactical procedure; the second is Expert Systems, which reacts to environmental obstacles; the third is Situational AI, a state that alters depending on what the enemy is doing and the tactics they employ. The fourth is the most basic: Scripted AI. This doesn't answer anything, of course, until it can be seen working in-game, but hopefully Gearbox's experience with Halo should deliver a canny enemy, not afraid to take cover and organise attacks. Pitchford is confident, noting a little wryly that Halo's AI was good "at manoeuvring around boulders and trees."
It's the specificity of Brothers In Arms that sets it apart from any other wargame on the market. The forensic approach to data gathering may enhance the experience and make Brothers In Arms educational as well as deeply engrossing. It might also prove to be its Achilles' heel. There are two worries with the Gearbox approach: first, the focus on historical accuracy is necessarily time-consuming - will it be a distraction from building balanced and interesting gameplay features? After all, it's much easier to recreate real-world locations and real objectives than it is to make its inhabitants behave in a clever way in combat situations. Second, there's the suspicion that it could turn into a history lecture wrapped up in a FPS engine.
So far, we've made little reference to the working game itself, and this is because, so far, there's only been a one-level demo available to play. Yet already there's enough spark and excitement in the situations we've seen to convince us that this is no feeble FPS bolstered by a few extravagant cut-scenes. The tactical directions are not dissimilar to those employed in Freedom Fighters: the left trigger brings up context-sensitive commands that you can issue to your two fire teams, while the white button switches between them. You then issue the relevant commands - fall back, engage, suppress, etc. The soldiers under your command will snap to their tasks quickly, and the controls never feel clumsy.
Gearbox also has a broadly realistic view of character mortality. There will be no health bars, magical medical canteens lying conveniently around, or multiple lives. If you do something stupid, you die. Warnings will be given: bullets whizz by your ears followed by flecks of red blood splashing across your vision if you stay out in the open. Failing to respond to these obvious signs by not taking cover and you'll inevitably keel over and die. There are checkpoint markers during each mission but the game teaches you the importance of self-preservation very quickly.
The only thing at odds with Gearbox's approach to 'realism' during battles is its use of suppression meters. Take shots at the Germans and bright red circles appear above their heads. Each red pie is eaten away, Pikmin-style, as the enemy come under more fire to indicate that they're pinned down. It's clear and concise shorthand for a new player, but probably too lurid for tactical purists. Fortunately, Brothers In Arms does give you the option to switch them off.
But is Pitchford worried that the interest in WWII is waning? After all, just when most other developers have moved on to the Gulf War, Vietnam or fictional conflicts in North Korea, Gearbox is back where the likes of EA was several years ago. "With programmes like Band Of Brothers the mindshare has increased and just a few days ago the D-Day commemorations were happening here," he says confidently. "We want to build games that we can't find anywhere else. Brothers In Arms is something Gearbox has been working on for years - we just didn't talk about it until it was getting close to being done."
War and videogames have always been close partners but the relationship has rarely been one of mutual respect. Brothers In Arms could change all that, delivering an entertaining and - dare we say the dreaded word - educational videogame. Whatever the case, it's likely to have more impact and be more relevant to a generation of teenagers left cold by relics in a museum. And that can't be a bad thing.
Brothers In Arms will be flanking the Germans on PS2, Xbox and PC early in 2005
The Utah Beach Museum at Sainte-Marie-du-Mont is the answer. It's the answer to all those questions fired at developers about the morality of making wargames. The questions may be expressed in different ways but they always amount to the same thing: How do you feel about turning a painful, traumatic conflict into entertainment?
Randy Pitchford, president of Gearbox Software, uses the Spielberg defence: "We're fulfilling a fantasy, but also retelling a story as authentically as possible. I think it's important that it can remain as a reference piece. Five years ago this would have been too expensive to research, but now the audience is bigger and we can take on projects like this." His enthusiasm for the subject matter and commitment to the project (he spends at least an hour on top of a hill - Hill 30, he tells us - assessing it for the game) gives us hope that his interest in history is not just for the press releases.
The museum is three miles from Utah beach and is in the Normandy town made famous by The Longest Day, the John Wayne movie depicting the descent of paratroopers into a hail of German bullets. A life-sized facsimile of a soldier hangs by a parachute from the church steeple, providing a graphic reminder to tourists of what happened here 60 years ago. Apart from a large American bomber filling up the central hall, it's your typical museum full of artifacts, touchscreen monitors and bored schoolchildren. The kids sidle by, taking little notice of, well, anything. One of them points lazily at a Thompson sub-machine gun while another swings his bag at a fellow pupil to break the tedium. History is not alive here, and even the older visitors look like they've come purely out of a sense of duty.
Bringing this rich history to life for a new generation is only one of Pitchford's objectives; the good news is that Brothers In Arms does detail like no other war game we've encountered. Where Medal Of Honor Frontline gives you a prosaic version of the Omaha beach landing (which took place 12 miles from Utah beach) and then veers off into a Boys' Own adventure, Brothers In Arms sticks to the broad historical facts. It takes place over an eight-day period and reprises the major conflicts fought by 3rd squad, 3rd platoon of the 502nd airborne division during the invasion.
It's also odd because you get to see the invasion happen from an unusual perspective. As part of a paratrooper division, you land in the fields behind the enemy front line. Your job is to fight your way towards the allied forces, destroying and securing strategic points on the way and thus providing support to the thousands of troops fighting their way up Utah beach.
Your first task, however, is to find your scattered comrades before avoiding detection by the enemy and securing the exits of the four roads leading to the beach. The murkiness of the Normandy countryside coupled with the superb ambient sound effects make for an incredibly tense insertion. Hedgerows loom out of the dark and as you run to take cover from stray bullets pinging around you the sound of your heavy breathing ramps up the tension further. Brothers In Arms is not short on atmosphere.
CHARACTER BUILDING
Many of the higher-ranking soldiers in the game will be modelled on their historical counterparts, right down to facial features, name and accent - but the character you control, Sergeant Baker, and his men will be fictional. This was necessary to allow some artistic freedom but also out of respect for those individuals who fought and died during the Normandy invasion. "Brothers In Arms is based on a true story and it's the first action game to really put you on the real battlefields," continues Pitchford. "It's not just a corridor shooter with artwork that places it within a theme like you've played before. Brothers In Arms is the first team-based firstperson action game set in the period. It puts you in the boots of a paratrooper for eight days during the most important battle of modern history." Indeed, the 502nd parachute regiment is distinguished as the only squad to participate in every major action of the campaign.
Character texture is brought out through the conversations that take place between Baker and the dozen men under his command. Baker is at first reluctant to face the responsibility of taking young men into battle (a theme also present in Saving Private Ryan) but the other troopers also have to deal with personal issues amid the mess of war as they move from battle to battle. These vignettes are played out with subtlety and should provide even more motivation for astute tactical decision making in the field.
'Veracity' is the word of the day as Pitchford drives around Normandy from one location to another pointing out key areas that appear in the game. He rattles them off with boundless excitement: Purple Heart Lane, Hill 30, Dead Man's Corner, Carentan. Along with eyewitness accounts, delving into archives and dispatching a team to survey the local area, Gearbox also enlisted the help of Colonel John Antal, formerly of the US army. Now the company's military and historical director, he travels with us to add tactical depth to Pitchford's exposition of what, why and when.
There's little doubt that Gearbox is taking a brave decision by sticking to the historical truth, at least as far as it's outlined in the history books. "Military tactics haven't changed that dramatically over time," Antal tells us. "It's first about finding the enemy, then fixing the enemy, then flanking the enemy. Flanking really means something in this game. If you can attack an enemy from an unexpected direction then you create two things: confusion and fear."
But won't the focus on historical accuracy compromise the player's freedom? "Actually, recreating the battlefields gives the player more freedom than he's been allowed in the corridor shooters that have come before," argues Pitchford. "On a real battlefield you aren't just funnelled down a path, but you have options about how to proceed tactically. You can charge up the middle, or you can set up for a flanking manoeuvre around one side or another. There are several things that happen by using real battlefields, but mainly it's to give you tactical freedom."
Gearbox's work with the PC version of Halo is apt because you can imagine how it could work in a WWII game. Each mission drops you into a battle area and gives you an objective. Unlike most FPSs, there's no tight path channelling you from A to B - battles in Brothers In Arms are mainly about the suppression and flanking of an enemy force. Antal explains that it's the most fundamental and powerful manoeuvre in military history. While there will be areas where you're pinned down and movement is restricted, such as Purple Heart Lane, many missions will give you the freedom to change tactics on the fly and the space to outmanoeuvre enemies across large expanses of land. At least that's the theory.
Interestingly, there's also an overhead tactical view that can be triggered by pausing the game. The camera slowly pans out from your position to give you an overview of the field of battle, highlighting both enemy and allied forces. It's a feature that may appear at odds with Gearbox's staunch approach to historical accuracy and tactical realism, but after playtesting Pitchford believes it improves gameplay dramatically. It's reassuring to find a developer keen to incorporate a mechanic for the good of the game even if it does threaten to impinge on the original formula.
INTELLIGENCE CORPS
But is the AI up to the job? There are four levels of sophistication. The first is Simulated Intelligence, based on standard military tactical procedure; the second is Expert Systems, which reacts to environmental obstacles; the third is Situational AI, a state that alters depending on what the enemy is doing and the tactics they employ. The fourth is the most basic: Scripted AI. This doesn't answer anything, of course, until it can be seen working in-game, but hopefully Gearbox's experience with Halo should deliver a canny enemy, not afraid to take cover and organise attacks. Pitchford is confident, noting a little wryly that Halo's AI was good "at manoeuvring around boulders and trees."
It's the specificity of Brothers In Arms that sets it apart from any other wargame on the market. The forensic approach to data gathering may enhance the experience and make Brothers In Arms educational as well as deeply engrossing. It might also prove to be its Achilles' heel. There are two worries with the Gearbox approach: first, the focus on historical accuracy is necessarily time-consuming - will it be a distraction from building balanced and interesting gameplay features? After all, it's much easier to recreate real-world locations and real objectives than it is to make its inhabitants behave in a clever way in combat situations. Second, there's the suspicion that it could turn into a history lecture wrapped up in a FPS engine.
So far, we've made little reference to the working game itself, and this is because, so far, there's only been a one-level demo available to play. Yet already there's enough spark and excitement in the situations we've seen to convince us that this is no feeble FPS bolstered by a few extravagant cut-scenes. The tactical directions are not dissimilar to those employed in Freedom Fighters: the left trigger brings up context-sensitive commands that you can issue to your two fire teams, while the white button switches between them. You then issue the relevant commands - fall back, engage, suppress, etc. The soldiers under your command will snap to their tasks quickly, and the controls never feel clumsy.
Gearbox also has a broadly realistic view of character mortality. There will be no health bars, magical medical canteens lying conveniently around, or multiple lives. If you do something stupid, you die. Warnings will be given: bullets whizz by your ears followed by flecks of red blood splashing across your vision if you stay out in the open. Failing to respond to these obvious signs by not taking cover and you'll inevitably keel over and die. There are checkpoint markers during each mission but the game teaches you the importance of self-preservation very quickly.
The only thing at odds with Gearbox's approach to 'realism' during battles is its use of suppression meters. Take shots at the Germans and bright red circles appear above their heads. Each red pie is eaten away, Pikmin-style, as the enemy come under more fire to indicate that they're pinned down. It's clear and concise shorthand for a new player, but probably too lurid for tactical purists. Fortunately, Brothers In Arms does give you the option to switch them off.
But is Pitchford worried that the interest in WWII is waning? After all, just when most other developers have moved on to the Gulf War, Vietnam or fictional conflicts in North Korea, Gearbox is back where the likes of EA was several years ago. "With programmes like Band Of Brothers the mindshare has increased and just a few days ago the D-Day commemorations were happening here," he says confidently. "We want to build games that we can't find anywhere else. Brothers In Arms is something Gearbox has been working on for years - we just didn't talk about it until it was getting close to being done."
War and videogames have always been close partners but the relationship has rarely been one of mutual respect. Brothers In Arms could change all that, delivering an entertaining and - dare we say the dreaded word - educational videogame. Whatever the case, it's likely to have more impact and be more relevant to a generation of teenagers left cold by relics in a museum. And that can't be a bad thing.
Brothers In Arms will be flanking the Germans on PS2, Xbox and PC early in 2005