Conflict: Desert Storm II exclusive interview

Last year's Gulf War themed squad-based shooter Conflict Desert Storm was a surprise hit for the SCi boys. The sequel, Conflict Desert Storm II, is released tomorrow; we grabbed producer Lee Singleton for an impromptu discussion about what exactly awaits the brave boys/villainous infidels of the SAS as they go about their business of taking out bullyboy Saddam whilst striving to avoid over-zealous American friendly fire.

First up, what's the story - how does this follow on from the previous game?

Singleton: Basically the story is SAS and Delta Force-based missions in the Gulf War at the same time as the first games, but these missions tend to be a bit further behind enemy lines. We wanted to set the game in the same first conflict as the first game, the Iraq Gulf War; we didn't think there was any point in moving away from our original setting.

Originally we were going to have different characters, but people reacted so well to the original team that we thought we should stick with them.

What we found in some of the research we did for this title was that in the first game, what would happen is that you'd have four members in your squad still, and if one of them, two of them or three of them died, you could carry onto the next mission and you'd get replacement characters for the squad-members you'd lost.

Now what we found was that if that happened to people, rather than carry on they'd go back and reload the game, to try and finish the game with the four original characters. So we thought, you know, we had to create seventy odd different characters and nobody's using them!

So what we decided to do this time was to change the rules a little bit, which adds to the authenticity actually, because the SAS don't leave anyone behind - so all your characters have to survive to complete a mission now.

Presumably that's made the game a bit trickier as well?

Singleton: I guess you could say it's a little bit trickier, but the flipside is, you know, if you lost two of your people halfway through a mission, it's not really very easy to finish with two.

Characters can still go missing in action and you can still heal them, it's just that if they get killed in action, the game's over.

So does that mean the game's got a more strategic approach?

Singleton: I think potentially it could slow down the pace a bit for some people, but the nice thing about Desert Storm II is that you can actually play the game how you want to play it.

If you want to you can run in all guns blazing, go crazy and just shoot lots of stuff. Alternatively, if you like you can tiptoe around, peep round the corner have a look what's there, rather than just running around, which is a slower, more calculated approach really.

How authentic is this game? Do you use real situations as a jump-off point for the action?

Singleton: It's a bit of both really, reality and fantasy. It is based around things that really did happen, but gameplay is king, we know we've got to deliver a fun product for the public to play, so in places we do stretch the truth a little bit, because it wouldn't necessarily be fun making the game play exactly as those situations did in real life - planning planning planning and after a couple of minutes action it's all over, that sort of thing.

So it is obviously different, especially when you get to the end of the game, you'll see we've stretched things a little bit there. I won't spoil it but when you get to the end you'll see what I mean, but it's quite nice really.

So what kind of situations will you find yourself in?

Singleton: There's a level called Besieged, where you've got to try and escort a US Delta Force sergeant to safety, running him through sewers and things like that, and you get to a large opening which is a telecommunications centre, and there's a helicopter coming in to pick him up and take him out.

You've got to escape, but you're actually pretty much surrounded. You've got tanks, the Republican Guard coming at you from all directions...

There's all sorts of things really, a variety of different levels. There's one level where all of your guys get captured, and basically the Kurdish forces drop a big bomb in Baghdad where you're being held in a prison camp - the camp is damaged, giving you a chance to get out and rescue the rest of your colleagues, but obviously you start with nothing, so you find a pistol and a flair gun and a health pack, and eventually find more enemy weapons and things like that in your bid to bust your way out.

We guess that part of the game is more stealth driven?

Singleton: Right; to start with you really want to tiptoe around there because the enemy's got lost of big guns and you've got nothing, you've got searchlights going off and it's at night; at the end of the level there's a huge bridge out of Baghdad that you have to negotiate, with a great big tank on the other side, just to add that bit more challenge.

So do other Allied forces figure in the game?

Singleton: Yep, you get support - you can do things like call in air supports, so there might be an anti aircraft gun blocking your way, call in an air strike and an Apache helicopter comes in and attacks it with rockets to blow it up. There are a few moments like that, when you can call on help.

How important is the squad-based approach to the gameplay?

Singleton: It's really important actually as a player that you balance the play between your squad. There's an experience system in the game where at the end of the level your characters get medals, get promoted, things like that. So if you play with just the sniper and let the AI take care of the other squad members, then his experience will accelerate much faster than the others.

You'd be better off splitting the balance between the characters, because the way it works is that with the characters, each one is a specialist in a certain field, but each character can do anything; it's just that the specialist is better at his given speciality, so it makes sense for the good of the team for everyone to be given a fair split of the play, that way you'll build them all up.

So how does Conflict II expand on last year's title?

Singleton: There's quite a lot of differences, quite a lot of them are under the hood so to speak. We've done lots of little things, removed some of the niggly little things, the inventory is now sort of semi-transparent, it scrolls smoothly, there's a top and a bottom so you're not endlessly cycling through.

There's a fast restart, so if you want to start again you can do it directly from the game pause screen, you don't have to go back to the main menu.

We've got a screen-shake effect for when the explosives go off, things like that. Graphically we've got a higher texture quality, I think we're using twice as many polygons as before.

We've done a lot of optimisation of the engine code, we've got a solid frame rate. The AI's had a huge overhaul too - now the enemy demonstrates investigative behaviour, where they're looking around for you, rather than moving directly to you - now it's real line of sight stuff.

They can communicate with each other as well. So if you walk round the corner and find an enemy by himself, the chances are he'll run off and get his friends, or shout if he's within earshot of them.

Sometimes, when one of your characters is downed, the enemy will use that guy as a kind of cover point effectively, making it tough to get to your guy to heal him, because there are three Iraqi guys there covering the body.

Cover points play a big part in the game; in quite an open fire fight, for instance, there might be a burnt out car, there might be a rock or a pile of sandbags, you'll see the enemies running from these kinds of cover points, firing at you as they do so.

They'll look at the available cover points, and they'll count how many dead bodies are by them and work out what's a good place to use.

There are also white phosperous grenades, which can be used to set the enemy on fire - pretty nasty. But if you get set on fire by one, you can roll around on the ground to put it out, which is a cool touch.

Tell us about some of the new graphical effects - we hear there's a new ragdoll effect you're particularly proud of?

Singleton: What actually happens is that when there's a blast from a grenade or C4, something like that, the explosive emits a blast radius, so if there's a body in that radius it'll move the body a significant distance.

So throw a grenade in a group of enemy soldiers and they'll obviously try to get away but BOOM - great big blast, they'll go tumbling all over the place.

You can send them up into the air so that they land on roofs, or they might hit the roof, then slide down and end up hanging over it - basically the bodies conform perfectly to the environment.

You never get glitches where there's just a pair of shoes sticking out of a wall, that kind of thing. If you shoot a guy hanging out of a window, he'll slump down with his arm hanging out the window.

The ragdoll effect looks really cool - even on staircases, you shoot an enemy on a staircase and they'll fall down the stairs, which looks really good.

Are there plans for online play in the future?

Singleton: It's something we'd really like to do with the franchise, but it's not something that can be done really easily - this engine isn't designed for that style of game, so it would take a huge overhaul to make that possible.

You'd need another team sitting there doing the multiplayer game. It's a whole other thing. We'd pretty much have to double the size of our development team. I'm sure it's something we'll do in the future.

What kind of multiplayer modes are in the game?

Singleton: These are the same as the single-player level but you're playing co-operatively. On the Xbox and GameCube we support up to four-player co-op play, on PS2 2 player, so you can jump into an existing single player game and start playing co-operatively with a friend or else go right through from the start in co-op mode.

How about vehicles?

Singleton: There's quite a lot of vehicle-based levels now. We got a lot of feedback from the last game about vehicles; the way we made the game, we read as many online and printed reviews, as well as customer feedback, that we could get, took it all on board, and we're trying to give people more of what they liked.

That's pretty much the basis for the game, and the vehicles are one of the things that people really enjoyed, so we put more of those in the game.

In one of the levels, Chemical Warfare, you're trying to make a chemical weapons factory ineffective, and there's quite a lot of tanks about as you make your way up to the factory, but once you get inside you can actually drive around neutralising SCUD launchers in these huge corridors, which is quite good fun.