17-Feb-2005 Where the hell would the entertainment industry be without World War II? You only had to sit through the Christmas TV schedules to be bombarded by it. The Guns Of Navarone, The Bridge On The River Kwai, The Heroes Of Telemark - each of them eking out a couple of hours of action from some area of the conflict. As for games, you literally can't move for WWII titles. Try it. Go on. Here's one now: Brothers In Arms, now encumbered by the entirely superfluous subtitle, Road To Hill 30. Why bother? To disassociate it from the Dire Straits album of the same name? To make the free bobble hat look more/less risible?
Who knows? What we do know is that Hill 30 is in Normandy, France, and you need to get your allied arse there quick-smart. You are Sgt Matt Baker, and your elite squad of 101st Airborne Division is scattered all over the French countryside. And when we say French countryside, we don't mean some fat bloke in Texas having a guess at what the French countryside looks like. These mothers have been there, bought the T-shirt, intimidated the locals, snapped every blade of grass and studied every map and historical document available.
Morning Glory Of course, everyone says that, but we actually believe this lot. We believe it because we were flown to a bitterly cold Montreal, taken to Ubisoft's HQ at some ungodly hour and sat through a presentation only marginally less in-depth than that faced by the D-Day troops. However, while stabbing ourselves with a biro in order to stave off jetlag, we did glean some info, including: "It's really early in the morning. I'm from Dallas, I don't get up this early, I'm a games developer."
This from Gearbox president, Randy Pitchford, who - in tribute to absent military advisor colonel John Antal (retired) - began the presentation with the battle cry: "Everyone fights! Nobody quits! Always attack! Hoo-ah!"
Things could only get better from there, and Pitchford gives a convincing argument as to the game's authenticity, producing a seemingly unending series of photos, historical blueprints, aerial reconnaissance imagery, the lot. There was even somewhat tasteless mobile phone footage of a bewildered WWII veteran saying how realistic the game was and how disturbing he found it.
Hi I'm Randy By now wholly convinced of the game's anal approach to authenticity, we collar Randy Pitchford and ask him not how, but why? Surely a hedge is a hedge is a hedge. Was authenticity the initial focus?
"The focus from the beginning was to make a game that puts you in a squad of soldiers," says Pitchford. "Here's the difference: you see a movie about a squad of soldiers and it's always about the squad. You're just one of the guys. But when you play a game, you get dragged all over the world and you don't ever remember the names. I don't even remember my own character's name, let alone the names of anybody else. So we started with this idea of wanting to be in a squad of soldiers and as we figured out how to do that, we really got caught up in the history of it. Then we thought, well, this is an opportunity for us not only to tell a great story about soldiering, but also a chance to make sure people who're going to play this game are going to trust us implicitly that this is something that happened."
Pitchford asserts that when he met some of the actual veterans, he felt he had an obligation to make it right. "Some of them didn't even want to talk to us because they complained about how other games had treated the subject matter and how they're almost offensive to them. Have you ever seen a movie that's about something you know a lot about, like journalism, and when you watch it, it's almost embarrassing and horrifying? That's how soldiers feel when they play some of these games. So we wanted to make a game that could be enjoyed by gamers, but also one that a guy like the colonel could vouch for." Ah yes, the legendary colonel John Antal (retired). Drafted onto the project in an advisory capacity, he's now a full-time member of the development team. We've met him, and he's genuinely terrifying.
Pitchford is a big fan though: "This guy is something else. He's a good guy and I love him to death. This game would not be what it is without him. He has an office at Gearbox and every single day he's working with the team." For a man who once had 165,000 soldiers under him, working on a computer game is an interesting career move. However, he would appear to be ideally suited.
As Pitchford explains: "That's the thing. When we first met him, he was a gamer. He played a lot of the RTS games because he liked the strategy and he kept saying, 'Some day, somebody's got to take the strategy element and put it in a squad level.' Like, that's what we're doing! It was a really easy sell. He'd been writing books and telling narratives, he'd been training tactics."
Yes sir mr antal! Antal has actually written a book called Combat Team, which is used to train officers about squad-level tactics. First, it gives you a fictional squad, teaches you something about tactics and then puts you in fictional situations and asks you to make a tactical decision. "It's like an adventure book," says Pitchford.
"Depending on your decision, you flip to a different part of the book. And it's great, it's like this guy's a game designer! It's paper, but he's thinking that way, and the army used his works to train soldiers. He's interested in tactical play, he loves solving tactical problems, so for him to have this infinite interactive environment - and he doesn't have to get shot at - he loves it. He's been a great resource."
Tactical Warfare The colonel, a high-profile military pundit, was also able to open a lot of doors for Gearbox in terms of access to actual weapons and so forth. His chief area is tactics though, and despite Brothers In Arms' notional similarity to other WWII FPS games, it's a highly tactical affair that follows hard and fast rules of combat. For instance, if an enemy is protected by cover, you can't simply unload your weapon at him in the hope of getting a lucky shot. What you can do is apply suppressing fire (indicated by a red meter above his head) and order your squad-mates to flank him and take him out.
Utilising your squad to the full will be a key skill, and having them react correctly is crucial to the game's success. According to Pitchford: "Having the colonel as part of our team was a big part of how that worked out. You may have played a squad game before, but they don't really have any AI, the allies. You have a bunch of complicated commands, and whenever the command is given, that's the AI - the soldiers are just waiting for a command. In Brothers In Arms, the colonel helped us program the soldiers with the actual standard operating procedures in the battlefield, just subtle things. The soldiers are trained, they know what to do, so when they encounter an enemy, they know to find the appropriate cover and return fire, and that just works in the game. This is how it works in real life - it's a chain of command. We wanted to emulate that."
It's Only A Game For all the unprecedented realism, surely there have to be some compromises to facilitate the gameplay?
"That's the hard part," agrees Pitchford. "Sometimes, authenticity and realism are at odds with interactive entertainment. For instance, Baker never has to go to the bathroom, he never has to eat and nobody in the squad does either. And we cut out all the bit about field-stripping weapons. The weapon never jams, because it's just not fun. You don't understand why that happened and you don't have a good interface for dealing with it. You certainly don't have the same interface the soldiers had for dealing with it.
"I've played games that've tried to simulate that stuff and there's 50,000 buttons, and it's just frustrating. So yeah, there are trade-offs, and they're hard trade-offs to make. But the trade-offs we make don't take away from that feeling of authenticity - they just make the game more fun to play."
We've played it, and it's certainly a unique approach. In many respects, the game has more in common with Full Spectrum Warrior than Medal Of Honor, and if you're hoping to charge in with all guns blazing, you're in for a rude awakening. We'll find out whether gamers actually want to use their brains as well as their guns with the exclusive review next month.
Suppressing fire, flanking moves, chains of command... It's all very impressive, but how is the average game-playing chimp supposed to know what he's doing? We're not soldiers. We play games to fill the yawning voids in our lives and to take our minds off the futility of existence - not to execute high-level military procedures. To our minds, if you shoot someone in the face, their head comes off - they don't lurk behind a hedge with a meter hovering above them showing the amount of suppressing fire they're taking. It would go against the entire ethos of the game and probably require a rewrite from the ground up, but how about a moron mode where you can simply steam in and stick it up Jerry? Or should we just stick to Call Of Duty?
Steve Hill: gaming chimp (official).
// Band Of Brothers In Arms
Due to the name and subject matter, Brothers In Arms has naturally been compared to the HBO series, Band Of Brothers. Gearbox president Randy Pitchford insists that development began before the programme was aired, although he's familiar with the source books and concedes that they share similar themes, namely the brotherhood of war. As he explains: "Call Of Duty or Medal Of Honor are about the honour of fighting for your country, or the sense of duty. And you talk to these guys and they're like, 'Duty? What a bunch of bullshit'. It's the guy next to them, that's who they were fighting for. When you're in the shit and there's people
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