The view from above always makes the most sense. With Medal of Honour: Airborne, industry veteran Patrick Gilmore has looked back over years of virtual war to figure out how, in this golden age of AI and physics, EA's troubled series can reinvent itself. He could be the ideal candidate for the job. Associated as much with Disney as D-Day, having produced over a dozen games starring Mickey and co, he brings a fresh perspective to a series that's long been considered stale. And despite Airborne's nonlinear nature, his solutions are surprisingly straightforward.
Aren't you a bit tired of the WWII genre by now?
Patrick Gilmore: Well, this is the first Medal of Honour game I've done since Allied Assault so I haven't been immersed in it for as long as others on the team. For some this is their fourth or fifth MoH. They're the kind of people focused on the history, the weapons, the soldiers and the events of the war. Personally, I could imagine getting tired of it someday. Actually I'd get tired of it when I discovered there was nothing new to get out of it.
Is that EA policy - keeping the same team of engineers but rotating the creative leads to keep things fresh?
Patrick: I think that might have been a big part of it. I was sitting down with one of the producers the other day and - I can't remember the exact line he said - but he was like: "I've just done debugging the weapon ini files and I fixed all the cluster patterns for the Thompson and I checked the muzzle flash is right and the reload rates..." He just spewed out this technical stuff that drilled right to the heart of the play experience.
What you often get on a franchise like this are the people who've gone on the weapon shoots and fired every single one of these weapons. They've played paintball, undergone military training or been coached by one of our military advisors to help capture the knowledge of what it's all about. You don't want to lose that, right? But at the same time we're always trying to infuse new energy into the franchise. So I guess it's not an EA policy but good practice in general for something like this.
What is it about WWII that keeps gamers coming back, that keeps MoH profitable?
Patrick: It was a world war, first of all. It touched everybody and still connects with a large variety of people. And it was a moment in history where the lines between good and evil were crisply drawn - that's never happened before or since with such clarity. In the case of Medal of Honour it's also the scope of it. These were missions on an epic scale, not with a hundred or a thousand guys but with tens of thousands. Market Garden was the largest single airdrop in history with over 20,000 drops... There's nothing else in history that compares with that - the population of an entire town jumping out of aircraft and going to war. It's a wellspring of ideas.
And yet Allied Assault is still regarded as the best MoH of all. Why is that?
Patrick: It did a couple of things, as did Frontline [its console companion] to a degree. They were the first games to feature the Normandy beach scene, made the quintessential WWII moment by Saving Private Ryan. So it was really a breakthrough that a game could actually put you on that beach. And Allied Assault was a crafted experience; it delivered the story, the characters, and the combat and non-combat scenarios. War's not just a parade of enemies, it really is about the language guys share when they're on the battlefield and the way you give orders or receive objectives. Allied Assault did a great job of delivering insight into that whole combat experience.
But do people really care about character and story in a wartime FPS?
Patrick: That used to worry me but it doesn't any more. I feel like I've learned that lesson. At some point we always have to test these games purely to see how it plays, at which time none of voiceovers, characters or cinematic moments are in there. And the feedback we got when we tested Airborne at that stage was that people didn't know who they were, why they were fighting, why they were in a given place, who they were fighting and where on Earth they were to start with. You realise the need to give personal stakes to all of this stuff.
Call of Duty 3 became a console exclusive. Can you guarantee that Airborne will be a worthy PC game?
Patrick: We're delivering a lot of stuff that's exclusive to the PC, like dedicated servers, a mod-kit for using in-game assets in your own levels and customisable PC controls. A lot of the guys on the multiplayer team are PC gamers so they're very mindful of that audience. Allied Assault unlocked a huge PC fan base which is an important part of our community; it's not something we've forgotten about. Our community manager, for that matter, is always talking with those people. What you said about CoD is right, but I don't think any of us can imagine not serving the PC market.
One of the big problems with European Assault (a PS2 MoH) seemed to be an over-reliance on incidental rewards like medal tokens. Will Airborne feature reward that's more inherent in the action?
Patrick: [pauses] Let's just say it can be very, very challenging when you have an innovative feature in a game; there's a strong temptation to celebrate it, often by putting additional icons on the HUD or whatever. And sometimes you integrate a feature but you realise it's not as well understood by the user as you thought it would be. You go to a focus group and people say, "I don't know whether I'm crouched or if I'm standing." And suddenly you've got a crouch meter on the screen. It does tend to clutter up the HUD and create a 'gameyness' to the whole thing.
One of the things we hit on over a year ago was the idea of shock versus injury, and that gave rise to Airborne's health meter. Call of Duty had that Halo-style system where you could seek cover and recharge completely, and it was really controversial. If you read the reviews there were a lot that said it was really fake and a lot that said, "It's great - I really don't want to manage my health while I'm trying to have fun."
So as we were thinking about that, we asked, "What happens to a soldier when they're hit by a bullet?" Well the first thing is that you go into shock - in your mental space you're thinking that you're way more injured than you actually are. But you can recover from that, leaving just the injury. So we created a hybrid system that was part shock and part injury - you can recover part of the damage but there are permanent thresholds. That felt as close to the real experience as we could get.
In CoD2 and 3 it became a subconscious thing to duck behind cover and recharge. You often felt immortal because of it...
Patrick: Exactly. What you have to understand about Airborne is that we had to jettison about ten years of entrenched design dogma that had to do with linear design. Designers had literally come to their jobs every day of the week, in some cases for ten years, and built linear games. So their whole concept was of a player starting there, going there and then there. The AI would be waiting for them there and there, just like a Dungeons & Dragons module.
When we started on this game we said, "We don't know where the player's going to come from, he might come from that door or he may come from the sky. We need systems that can deliver all of those options." The question we asked ourselves every time was, "What really happened? How did it really work?" So when the designers protested that "the players will just break the game if they can land anywhere - they'll just bum rush through the whole level," we asked them that question. And what really happened in WWII was that the Germans had an MG42 down there and if you tried to bum rush that you'd be in pieces.
Did you look to games from other genres for ideas? Company of Heroes, for example?
Patrick: Well, what you have to bear in mind is that destructibility [like that of CoH] is a far different thing in an RTS. For one thing the fidelity of an FPS has to be a level of magnitude higher. You can walk right up to a wall and examine the individual bricks and mortar - in an RTS you don't have that level of freedom. You tend to forgive a lot more in an RTS. That said, we absolutely don't restrict ourselves to our genre or even to WWII; we're constantly looking at all kinds of games. So FEAR was an inspiration for a lot of people on Airborne, as were Halo and HL2.
Have you ever considered that the sheer number of MoH games released might be cheapening the series?
Patrick: Sometimes, yeah. At some point we'll have to rest the franchise and I don't want to make a game I don't love. So if I personally ever reach the point where I don't have a good idea, a key innovation or such, then there goes my interest. It's really not about how many products are released; it's about making sure you deliver a great one every time.
The company's been deeply supportive of that in the case of Airborne, because it's a shift, right? It's not like the games our competitors make which are just cranked out year after year. We want to make a contribution. Ultimately that's the legacy of Allied Assault and it's something we need to get back to.
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