Interview: Raven Shield - the real McCoy

There's a certain irony floating somewhere around here. Raven Shield, the most realistic title yet in the Rainbow Six series, is being built on Unreal technology. Okay, so it's playing on words just a little, but you can see the point. Can't you?

Hotter than a polar bear soaked in cooking oil and sunbathing in the Sahara desert, Raven Shield's had us effervescing with excitement ever since we saw it briefly at E3. Graphically it's far superior to any of its predecessors, boasting brilliant character animation, texture work and environments. And coming with an impressive number of game-play updates, it's very much a tactical shooter fan's dreams come true.

Updates aside, the title will see Rainbow Six aficionados on familiar ground as they lead a squad of Special Forces soldiers on different operations around the globe. While the plot of Raven Shield is being kept under wraps, we do know that you'll be ploughing through 15 single-player missions, neutralising terrorists, defusing bombs and rescuing hostages.

We recently had the chance to sit down with Raven Shield's lead designer Mike McCoy. Seeing as he's a man in the know, we took the opportunity to quiz him to find out what's in store.

Rainbow Six: Raven Shield marks a major change in the series because you're moving over to a new engine - you're using next-generation Unreal technology. Can you explain the thinking behind the move?

McCoy: Our first objective when we started was to basically make Rogue Spear in Unreal, and if we could make Rogue Spear in Unreal then we could add a lot of things to it. Rainbow Six has a very distinct feel to it, a very distinct flavour, and if you can't hit that, then there's no point in doing anything else. So that was our first experiment and everybody thought, "Yeah, that looks really good". However, you'll notice that a lot of it looks exactly the same. It's updated, it's changed, but it's the same. People will know it's the same and they'll be comfortable with it.

How has using the Unreal technology influenced the development of Raven Shield?

McCoy: Well, Unreal is such a good engine. The main thing that it allowed us to do is... well, from day one we were set up with a baseline of powerful features. So we started from day one creating the game: we didn't have to worry about rendering to the screen, about inputting keyboard and all these other things. We've had 18 months worth of pure game development, where usually an 18 months schedule would be like nine months on the engine and then nine months on the game.

It's got a powerful shadow engine and such. For the death animations we're actually using the Karma physics engine. These technologies are great, and we didn't want to start off by reinventing the wheel. We're making the game, we're making Rainbow Six, and if there's an engine out there that will do what we need, then we'll take that. Especially when the engine's Unreal, which has great modding tools. A lot of people know how to mod Unreal - they're instantly in, they know exactly what they're doing.

We've haven't heard much about Raven Shield's storyline. Can you give us any details, or are you keeping things firmly under wraps as far as the plot's concerned?

McCoy: I can't really tell you exactly, but it's a typical Clancy storyline. It's broken into three acts. In the first act you're going on different missions and you're not sure how they're all related - it doesn't make any sense. There are certain things that you may see in certain missions that'll give you clues however, so you can figure ahead if you want. As you get through the first act, you suddenly realise that everything might be connected. In the next act you begin to find out how everything's connected, who the major players are and then in act three you go after these players and take them down. If I tell you what their reasoning is, it'll just spoil it for you. We're not letting that out yet. It won't be let out to anybody until the game's released.

How many missions and levels will there be in the game, and can you give us some details about the different locales on offer?

McCoy: There're 15 missions across 12 maps, and then we have six multiplayer maps, making a total of 18 unique maps.

The locations include Argentina, Brazil, Cayman Islands, Norway, Switzerland, London, Venezuela - pretty much all around the world. Rainbow is multinational, so they go everywhere. Mission objectives are basically the same as you had before - neutralise terrorists, defuse bombs and rescue hostages - the same set that you're used to when playing Rainbow. Rainbow doesn't go into a bank in London - which we have in one of the missions - if it's just a bank hold up, they'd go in if it's an international bank with international hostages. Other than that, the SAS would sort it out. They're supposed to be a level above those guys.

At the beginning you don't really know what's going on as I said, so in the first mission in Venezuela you keep thinking, "Why are we dealing with this?" But as you start to play it out you'll see how things are connected.

How many Rainbow members will we be able to have in each squad? Will these be broken down into teams as usual?

McCoy: When selecting the guys you want to take on a mission, you can sort them by their different specialities - you can pick what you want. You have three teams and a total of eight operatives spread over these teams. Once you have your teams sorted, you can click on a guy, click on equipment and then assign different equipment.

Rainbow Six lays heavy emphasis on weapons and weapon realism. But obviously with Raven Shield coming to console as well as PC, it's possible that a large portion of the potential audience will be put off by having to wade through reams of gun statistics, or the thought that they may need prior knowledge in this area. How are you getting around this issue?

McCoy: It's not implemented yet, but we'll have five bars that tell you everything you need to know about a gun - accuracy, range, damage, weapon jump and the reticule recovery time. So it tells you what the weapon does in layman's terms, so if you know nothing about the gun then you can say, "Hey, this is really accurate, but the range is short. But that's okay because I'm going to be inside so I'll go with that gun".

If you know about the gun, you won't need to read this of course. There'll be a text section that'll tell you a little bit about the weapon, about its history. With the bars in place you can quickly tell what the differences are between the weapons that you might want to take with you on a mission.

For the first ever in the Rainbow Six games, we're actually going to be able to see the guns that are carried when in the first-person view. Why do this now rather than earlier?

McCoy: It was one of the big things that Red Storm always wanted to do and it made different attempts on the way, but never had the time or resources to do it right. So its premise or idea - as is ours - was that if you can't do it 100 percent then don't do it at all. So when we started the project we said, "We're doing it, we're doing it right, and here's a huge block of resources to do it.".

As a series Rainbow Six has a huge number of fans. What's been their response to the introduction of the weapon view?

McCoy: The fans were dying for first-person weapons. Actually, that was another big thing that we did. Rainbow Six has such a hardcore following and fan base and we looked at all the things we thought they wanted by searching message boards, fan websites and such. Then we said, "Okay, these are confirmed, these are 'maybes', these are 'nos'". For things that were maybes we did focus groups to make sure that we weren't going to upset the fans. That's who we're making the game for. If we can't make it for them then what's the point. It wasn't about what we wanted, it was about what they wanted.

Will you be able to turn the weapon view on and off?

McCoy: Yes, if you don't won't it, get rid of it. In fact, everything in the HUD can be turned off independently. You can play with a completely HUD-less screen if it makes you happy.

When talking about the Unreal engine earlier, you mentioned modding. Is modding important to you, do you see it as an important part of the whole Raven Shield venture?

McCoy: With the original Rainbow there wasn't an awful lot of modding. We looked at Raven Shield and thought, "Wow, we have a great story line and great game and all this," but because it's so easy to mod, and because we created things to be so easy to do, it'll just explode. People will say, "Hey, I want to have a mission in Boulder, Colorado," and they'll go and make it. Then they'll put that on the Web which is good for them, good for us and good for the community. It makes everything easy for everyone. That was a big reason we went for Unreal, because it was so well-known.

How much work has gone into the AI of the Rainbow team? What can you tell us about this area of Raven Shield?

McCoy: We spent a ton of time just on Rainbow AI. It's much more intelligent, they'll actually sweep now and look for targets. The guy at the back of your team, he'll be checking around to make sure you don't get jumped. They'll actually crouch now if there's nothing to do, they'll hold position. They won't stand there like statues - these guys want to live.

In the original Rainbow series, a lot of players used the AI as extra lives. You'd go in, tell the three guys behind you to hold up, get popped and then go to number two, then to number three and so on. We really wanted to change that, we really wanted to make it feel like you've got the best Rainbow guy behind you. You won't want him to die because he kicks ass. There're so many times that I've gone into a room and I've heard them say "contact" and they've killed somebody, and I'd look, and I'd see an enemy there who was waiting with a shotgun.

There're no more defend waypoints, so you don't have to tell your team to defend - they'll always defend. Again, they'll always clear when they go into a room. They're smart enough to know these things and it's what you'd expect.

Have you concentrated on enemy and hostage AI as much as you have on that of the Rainbow team members?

McCoy: Oh yeah, definitely. The enemy AI works in teams, will try to flank you, or a guy might just unload his whole clip at you in panic fire. Sometimes an enemy might see you and just throw his gun down and surrender. Hostages have their own reactions as well. Sometimes they'll freeze in panic when you show up, or sometimes they'll run to you, and you're thinking, "Get down on the floor," because the terrorist will have no problem with shooting them.

Ghost Recon had a kind of RPG element to it and you were allowed to increase the skills of the different characters after completing missions. Does Raven Shield have a similar system in place?

McCoy: We have something very simple, which is the more guys are used in missions, the more their skills go up. But when a guy's not used, his skills continue to go up because he's training - they go up at a slower rate though. After a while, you've got a guy you've used for five missions and you don't want him to die because he's really good. But what we didn't do is allow players to place points - we made it an automatic thing. It was a choice, and we'll have to see if it's a good one or not.

So you think it's incredibly important for players to be emotionally attached to the team members under their control?

McCoy: Absolutely. If you have a personal attachment to the characters, it makes losing them that much harder, and that's one of the things we're trying to encourage - these are real people, you don't want them to die. You have a team, and once you lose all your snipers for example, you get recruit snipers and they're nowhere near as good as the regular snipers.

Raven Shield is the most realistic title in the Rainbow Six series to date. Have you gone as far as you can in the realism stakes, or are there still things that you can add to make it even more like the real thing?

McCoy: Oh yeah, there's always stuff we could do. Repelling for example, and more weapon options, more movement options - that's what repelling is. There's more interaction we could do with the environment, and we could introduce more equipment and Tazers.

Right now we have a fundamental rule that says, if you have to capture someone then they cannot have a gun, because if they have a gun you have to make a split-second decision - you can't wait for him to throw the gun down and surrender. You might go in, see someone with a gun who you're not supposed to kill, kill them by because they're carrying a weapon and then it's mission over. That sucks. But think about if we had Tazers. You would have a non-lethal way of shooting people, which would bring an entirely different aspect to the game-play.

Tazers might not have made it into Raven Shield, but it's top of the list for Rainbow 4.

Stuart Bishop