"One of the things Milius said to us when he came on was that the resistance has to be absolutely ruthless. They can't be politically correct. They can't be second guessing what they're doing all the time. So the phosphorus you see in the demo is pretty nasty stuff. It's against the Geneva Convention."
In the key action sequence we saw in our demo, the resistance squad is attempting to take a big hardware store (think Bunnings) to capture much needed supplies. But it's heavily guarded by the Korean forces.
"We knew we wanted to do a raid on a big box store. But we wanted to figure out what the tactics would be," says Votypka. "So we talked to John about it and he said it's got to be very guerrilla. They're going to be outnumbered, they can't come in there guns blazing and take down everybody with no problem. You have to do something that gives them sort of a leg up and even the odds. And that's where the phosphorus idea came from. It's a brutal weapon and it matches the resistance's 'whatever it takes' attitude."
As this raid suggests, the game puts you on the wrong side of controlling important resources. You will be able to pick up enemy hardware along the way, but there will always be a sense of scrounging for necessities as you progress.
"We want it to feel a lot like you are the resistance, and you are under resourced quite a bit," says Votypka. "We'll be taking advantage of enemy weapon drops and stashes and that type of thing. The resistance will also be using older weapons while the military will be using some of the newer stuff. In this dystopian future where things have crumbled a little bit, all sorts of resources are scarce."
The hardware of 2027On the technical side, Brian Burrell, Lead Skeletal Asset Artist for Kaos Studios, points out they've worked hard to get this sense of scarcity into the weapons you'll find in the game.
"We can't just say 'let's make 50 weapons'. You've got to balance it all out," says Burrell. "We need to be very careful about what we put in. We think about what a resistance fighter in this particular world could find. Maybe grandpa's old shotgun, so they'll use that. The main weapon used in the single player is the Type 3 AK."
Thankfully it won't all be old school guns. We're still talking about 17 years in the future, and with Kaos Studios pedigree you can expect to enjoy working with some land and air drones.
In our demo, the assault on the hardware store was assisted by a chunky land drone friend, the Goliath. There was a tactical play to contend with, as an enemy EMP was being fired on us to keep the goliath out of action. So we had to focus on taking out the EMP shooter to then get our main weapon back in the game and taking out major enemy combatants - like a gunship that turned up part way through the battle.
"You can think of it as kind of your sidekick in single player," says Votypka. "You captured it from a military base that had sort of been abandoned or undergone combat in the initial invasion. It is an autonomous vehicle, so it can act on its own but you can still control its rockets."
There's also still a few ideas up in the air for how the drones may operate when the game goes gold.
"We're debating whether the drone weapons will be modifiable," says Burrell. "What would it be like to have a sniper type drone? Currently they are designed in a modular fashion so we can attach different weapons. We just need to figure out where we draw the line, and ask ourselves how does that make the game better?"
For larger hardware that we'll mostly be seeing in the multiplayer game, like Abrams tanks, Kaos has gone into serious detail to add more strategic depth to large arms combat. Key to this is a location-based armour system.
"If you start taking damage on one side of your tank you can get finished off a lot faster if you get attacked there again," says Burrell. "Or if you shoot the back of a tank you're going to kill it a lot faster. So it's basically introducing more strategy. Visuals are going to show you what's going on, but it's really a strategic element for how quickly you can take someone down, or how you can defend yourself from being taken down too quickly."
Issue: 137 | June, 2012