Interview: Shadow Ops Red Mercury - better red than dead!

We recently sat down with Zombie Studios' Shadow Ops: Red Mercury, and suffice to say it's a little on the hectic side. Of course bullet-riddled chaos isn't a new idea in a shooting title, but the ferocity of the action took us by surprise - stepping around a corner on the first level and narrowly missing a rocket to the face is always an eye-opener.

Shadow Ops may be set in the near future, but this feels like an utterly contemporary evocation of brain-meltingly intense warfare; bedazzling first person action that doesn't let up for a nanosecond. We grabbed a word with Zombie CEO and candidate for the most foul mouthed man in videogames, Mark "f*$%in'" Long, who told us all...

What's the background to the game?

Long: Well, Atari came to me over two years ago at the Game Developers Conference, and they had a vision for a contemporary special forces shooter, and I got really buzzed by this idea.

A lot of people use the term convergence, but if you look at how we put the game together we've used almost all Hollywood special effects, voice acting, sound effects, we recorded almost an hour of original orchestral music in the game. The music I think is exceptional, it changes, it's got the local music or singing that's associated with the country you're in.

So I just thought this sounds really cool, they're not trying to go for any angle, they just trying to make a really over the top, big game where a lot happens. If I look at my favourite games right now like Call of Duty, you've got some epic battles, cool set pieces, that's the feel we're going for all the way through.

Could you give us an idea of the story?

Long: You are Captain Frank Hayden, and in the beginning of the game you're told you have to get into this hostile Syrian city to stop a nuclear weapon from escaping. And it's like a near suicide mission, one helicopter shot down on the way in, another one shot down just as soon as you fast-rope out of it.

And even in the beginning of the game, in the first two minutes, the nuke actually goes off, rolls this aircraft carrier in this unbelievable cinematic.

Then the screen goes black and says "72 hours earlier". As a player this is all designed to make you go "what the f***, man, what is going to happen now?" Then you find yourself in the Congo jungle on a hostage rescue mission, and at the end of that mission a black helicopter arrives and a CIA agent and a Russian Special Forces agent tell you you've got to come with them, you're under their command to stop this nuclear weapon from getting out of Kazakhstan.

Then you to halo out of a B2 bomber which is pretty cool, into Kazakhstan where you have this GoldenEye-style level, lots of surveillance towers, and at the end of the level you meet up with a third main character, this woman you've had a relationship with in the past, and you team up with her in the rest of the game to chase this weapon.

After that you go on to Chechnya, you're introduced to the terrorist leader that's trying to assemble this weapon, and then finally into Syria where you started the game, the question being what's going to happen when you get back to the future, are you going to be able to change things. And of course we have a twist in the storyline.

What have you done with the artificial intelligence, both in terms of the enemy and the soldiers on your side?

Long: Unreal's got a great AI scripting system, but what we did was created the idea of combat nodes that you can place inside the level, and then the AI responds in the enemy characters in that they try to find the closest node to you, or if they take damage they'll retreat to the node the farthest away, but they take cover naturally anyway.

You can see they lean out, they shoot around or over the top, and they'll put a lot of pressure on you. As the game advances they'll just keep trying to close you down, get as close to you as possible.

And your team takes advantage of the nodes too; you naturally will gravitate towards their combat nodes, and will actually fight for you, which is kind of fun, and allows you to play the game in a lot of different ways.

You can hang back and let them do a lot of fighting, or if you want to get in front of them, either way it's a lot of fun. You play a soldier in a regiment called Delta Force, and in Delta Force they get rid of rank, everybody just has a name.

Even though you're a captain, and this sergeant is yelling instructions at you, in the story, you are the team leader; it's just natural in the game that you need to have other characters giving you instructions.

I really hate the stop-load screen, instructions coming up telling you what needs to be done; we try to integrate the storyline and level objectives into the actual game.

You mentioned GoldenEye as a reference point?

Long: Shadow Ops mixes really intense and frenetic urban combat with some sneaky jungle stuff and stealthy alpine action; we try to give you a little of everything. It's easy to hit one note in a game and do it well, like a lot of military shooters do. But I really like the combination of different styles.

I wouldn't call our gameplay stealthy though, I'd call it sneaky. Sometimes when a games designer tries to be too many things in one game, they end up making none of the games good.

You've seen, you can take them out with a silenced weapon, and if you don't if they hear you they'll race up and set off an alarm, and then they'll just spawn infinite enemies, you'll realize you can't run and gun, you've got to be more stealthy in certain areas.

You have stun grenades, as does the enemy; if they catch you with one the screen goes white for almost twenty seconds.

What other weapons do you have?

Long:You have these things called "SLAMS", special forces SeLectable Attack MunitionS, which is like an all-purpose-blow-stuff-up explosive.

You have the full spectrum of assault rifles, pistols, enemy weapons like AKs, Dragonovs, you get to shoot an RPG, you get to shoot emplaced machine guns, and there's a weapon in there called a Riz which is a Russian Flamethrower Rocket; it hits and it splashes napalm. You can even call in your own airstrike.

Everything in the environment is interactive too, you can shoot crates and they pop and explode, there's always destructible objects in the environment that are carefully integrated into the environment, that'll help you defeat enemies too. It's your classic exploding red barrel to begin with, but they become more subtle as you progress.

There are certain areas where you can shoot out lighting; we'd love to make the entire game like that with the Splinter Cell environments, but this is our first time out and we weren't able to do everything that we wanted to. That said I think the game really is beautiful.

There seems to be a good illusion of freedom in the action we've seen, but we're guessing the game still follows a fairly linear path?

Long: It does, and you know I don't have anything against that. It's like a rollercoaster ride, we're trying to take you somewhere emotionally, and we've really got to be able to control where you go to be able to do that.

There is the illusion that there's a lot of freedom, and there's certainly a lot of replayability; some of these levels I never get tired of playing because there are so many ways that you can tackle them; but in the end it really is all about doing something that surprises the player, scares the player, and gives the player a buzz.

Obviously the FPS market is hugely competitive - what does this offer that the other FPS games don't?

Long: I think the FPS market on the console is just growing and growing, it would be ridiculous to say "you've got all these other FPSs" - yeah, there's a lot you can do with the FPS!

I love FPS games and I'll play all of them, all the good ones at least, and I just think what's different about this one is that it's really fun to play. There's nothing revolutionary in this, but there's a lot that's evolutionary. We took Medal of Honor meets Black Hawk Down, crossed those two together and this is what we got.

Onto multiplayer mode then; what can we expect?

Long: There's Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and VIP/Escort. There's ten maps, that are completely unique, explicitly for multiplayer, and there's also ten co-op maps which are also completely unique. I love co-op in Halo, so we created ten brand new co-op maps.

The PC version will be totally ramped up with gorgeous lighting effects; we're just starting to work on the PC version right now; the Xbox version is out in June, and the PC one will come out a couple of months later. I think if the game does really well, there's a chance we could see other versions on PS2 and GameCube too.

Shadow Ops: Red Mercury is published by Atari in June on Xbox, with a PC version to follow a few months later.