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Frontlines: Fuel Of War Q&A Feature
Jon Wilcox
07/12/2007
TVG heads off to NYC to check out KAOS Studios' upcoming title and speak with Senior Producer, Joe Halper...
Due for launch in February 2008 on Xbox 360, PlayStation3 and PC, Frontlines: Fuel of War is the first title from the New York City-based KAOS Studios, formerly Trauma Studios. Set in a prophetic world of terminal oil shortages and conflict between the Western Coalition and the combined forces of Russia and China, the game aims to provide a solid and epic multiplayer experience, coupled with a rounded single-player campaign.
At a recent event held by publisher THQ at KAOS' midtown Manhattan studio, TVG sat down with the game's Senior Producer Joe Halper to ask about (amongst other things) Frontlines' origins and the difficulties behind trying to balance a phenomenal amount of weapons and vehicles...
TVG: First of all, can you explain how the origins of Frontlines come about?
Well we wanted to do something that would be familiar to the player, something that was speculative fiction. We had the experience of Desert Combat, which was based on the Desert Storm period of the Gulf War. It was a modification, but it started to get really popular - and then the Iraqi War kicked off. At that time, the modification was basically the US and Iraq, and it got a lot of attention from that, and it was very interesting.
With Frontlines, we wanted to do something close to what people know like the peak oil - you've got $100 barrels of oil now - it drops but then it goes up to a hundred again. So we began to research it like hell, asking what the possibilities were if the supply ran out, or came close to running out. In our research we found a lot of scary things; you get all these hypothetical theories that come out and basically a lot of them are very realistic. One of them is the Shanghai Co-operative, the relationship between Russia and China. They actually do military exercises every year. China has a huge dependency on oil; their population is exploding and it's a very, very powerful country. Russia as you know is also very powerful, and then you've got the United States and the European Union too.
My background is more to do with military training; I've created a lot of training for every branch in the US, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and even stuff for the FBI and the Department of Defence. All the designs I would put into a training applications were based on games. You've got all these young guys in the military and you don't want a page-turner, you want to keep their attention span, so looking at games I myself got addicted to playing the games. Battlefield 1942? I was hooked.
After 9/11 too, anything to do with the military training took a steep dive. As far as Desert Combat, that consumed me and everybody else, and I started that with Frank [Delise - KAOS Studios Manager/Lead Designer]. His passion was the same as my passion and from that, Frontlines seemed to be the game that wasn't out there. You take games that are big open worlds, and then you have games that are very cinematic but that you have on rails like an interactive movie - we wanted to take both of those and put them together. You have open world games that have 'bot wars' where the bots aren't as intelligent as you'd see as human playing in a multiplayer game - that's why we knew the Frontlines game mechanic would work in a big open world with objectives. It keeps you where the action is at, so it's like a real battle is playing out. You want to take that front, but once your reach that, you have that territory, as well as the toys that come with that territory. The more that the frontline gets pushed forward, the enemy becomes less territory and more desperate. It really intensifies either way, and paces really well.
But the story of Frontlines was very intriguing. People talk about the peak oil, but I think we went into a deep hole with it - we wanted it to be believable and it does kinda help having the news talk about it all the time. There's a lot of things that we learnt from it; we're pretty happy how the story turned out and the inclusion of the embedded reporter. There are always the reporters in real wars telling you know what's going on, and for us it also moves the story along. It's like an Axis and Allies story, two desperate superpowers fighting over the actual reserve that are out there.
TVG: Between KAOS, Free Radical and Ubisoft Shanghai, their three respective titles (Frontlines, HAZE, and EndWar) all deal with dystopian futures and seem political and geo-political. Do you feel that their development has been provoked by the likes of the current wars?
Well you touch upon a lot of theories out there. There are a lot of corporate structures who say 'Nah, oil is fine!' and then you have Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize for talking about how the world is going to fall apart. It's something that you don't speak about at the water-cooler; it's something that people tend to yell about. We didn't intend to make anything political, it was more about getting a reaction. There's a lot of military power behind things that entire countries depend upon. People have ideas as to why we're in places like Iraq - it invokes a lot of passion from people - and the fact that it does that is why it's one of the themes that Frontlines pans out...it's plausible, but what then happens?
There have been a couple of times when I've been interviewed and asked, "Why are you taking this political move..." and I've replied that it's a plausible possibility. It's an entertaining way to figure out the setting; it was a base setting that we put a lot of time into, but then allowed us to figure out the vehicles and the weapons - it was a good backdrop.
TVG: Frontlines features plausible future weapons based on current military technology; how involved have military advisors been during the development of the game?
Well we have a lot of connections, even as Trauma Studios and DICE New York. We've worked with utilising game engines to do [military] training applications so it opened our eyes as to what is really out there. Even with the things you see on the TV, there are a lot of things that you don't see that they're working on. There are people that I've spoken to who are in certain fields - there are a lot of fields in the military that are very boring - but we've pretty much done all of the research ourselves. We're inspired by what's out there; we're inspired by some really cool designs. There are actual weapons that are cool to use and cool to look at, but once they were tested in the game they were not much fun to play - like 'Fire and Forget' weapons. When you fire a weapon, you don't want to forget about them in a game. You want to feel it, you want to shoot it, and you don't want to forget too much about it. There's a little more than that during the designs of the weapons - though it happened when we were talking about anti-aircraft [weaponry]. Anti-aircraft in the future won't be like a bunch of guns tearing away at a plane with metal; it's pretty much you'll fire one missile and take it out...fire and forget.
We liked that idea of an anti-aircraft gun and tearing it apart; it's a good feeling when you have a menacing high-tech helicopter coming at you - or jet - and if you shoot a rocket, you really want to watch it hit the enemy. It's a good feeling, but with the designs we've had from the vehicles to the weapons to the drones, we wanted something that people would be familiar with like a rifle that's already out but with a twist. It's cool to actually design that so people think it's like a regular tank but with those extra features. We went through so many concepts; we had some really radical stuff that we were trying to put together, but then there were other things that came together really quickly.
TVG: Sticking with weapons, Frontlines will also feature sixty weapons and vehicles; how difficult has it been to ensure that they're well balanced?
It's been difficult; it's an advanced 'Rock, Paper, Scissors' because we have the Load Outs and the Roles - like other first-person shooters you have the assault rifles, the rocket launchers, the sniper rifles. Then you have the special weapons like Air Burst Grenades, which are something the military already has now - you can shoot it so it explodes on contact or time it so it explodes above somebody if they're hiding behind a wall. That's a real good advantage to have.
There is a lot of balance going on - we're lucky that we have really good balance right now. The play testing is a lot of fun. [Besides weapons and vehicles] there's the Role system, which we put a lot of time into figuring out how each of the four roles would react to each other.
We thought that everybody would be using the drones, which didn't turn out to be the case. People did start using the drones because they're cool, but in certain giant open environments you want air support because you've got the planes coming in to blow stuff up. You can do some really good carpet bombs, or fuel air bombs, or cluster bombs - that was something cool to see how people would begin to play it. But team-orientated role-playing is cool too; we've had games where the counter-measures like the EMP and thought that nobody would play it - but the EMP counters all the vehicles, the drones, and you can't do air drops. That person can be very effective on the field.
When you have a counter-measures guy taking out a helicopter with an Electro-Magnetic Pulse, that helicopter is coming down. I've been playing it with guys that have timed it right so that as soon as the helicopter hits the ground an explosive drone is sent over and detonates, and you're talking about it over the VoIP and you're like "C'mon, time it right!" If you make it just right, it's very cool and creates a very good time-orientated feeling in knowing that it's been defeated with two different roles. It is a lot of balancing, but we have a lot of experience in doing that, and it's panning out really well. We try to cater for everybody to have their own choice, but all these weapons and vehicles and everything really do balance out.
It's also the balance of the maps that you play on - we're really happy with the single-player maps. We put a lot of time into that to make it as exciting and cinematic and open as possible, but it's also about balancing the size of the maps. There's small city maps to large open maps with jets and helicopters - and you've got to balance the Roles and how the weapons fit in each of the maps. I could go on and on...
TVG: We understand that there were tactical nukes in the game about eighteen months ago?
Yeah, we did and there still is a nuke in the game at one point.
TVG: Yeah, I came across that...
But a nuke is a nuke - it blows the whole thing up. There's a Fuel Air bomb, which works but exploding, filling the air with fuel before igniting it. It doesn't have a centre point that blows everything up; it actually fills the area with an entire mass of fuel and then blows it that way. Then there's the MOLAB, which is the 'Mother of All Bombs' - that's like psychological warfare. They've tested that [the US military], but they've never used it. The fact that they have it - the States - is intimidating to another fighting force to see that thing and think "Oh my gosh, are you going to drop that?" It's as close to a nuclear bomb as you can get...
TVG: So it's like a Daisy Cutter or Bunker Buster?
Exactly, it's the next step. It's used for clearing - and then it's used for 'clearing'.
TVG: Are there any plans for PC/Xbox 360 cross-play?
Well that's something that we were looking at when we first started putting the game together. We'd love to have the 360 and PC play together; there's the whole balancing thing about the keyboard and mouse, and the controller - but you can do things to make it work. The thing is that it came too late for us; it's something that we can do in our development environment - we have done it just to see how it is, and it's a lot of fun. I can't say as far as what may happen down the pipeline, but we already have a large challenge with the server hosting on Xbox 360.
We're chewing off an area that we think is less beneficial compared to launching with 32-players on Xbox 360. It's definitely something we looked at, but we felt it better to focus on the guns that we had...
TVG: One last quick question. Frontlines is due for launch in February, and your former colleagues at DICE will be releasing Battlefield: Bad Company around a similar time. Is that a daunting thing to face up to given the established brand name of Battlefield?
Nah, it's like there's always a McDonalds and a Burger King; everybody likes their burgers. We like those guys - they make good games. We helped them out with Battlefield 2 pretty immensely. There'll always been competition out there, we really are confident about Frontlines- you've seen how it plays - you know how their games play out there. People will like that game - people will really love our game. It's something that you can't get away from, there's always going to be one game after another that comes out and challenges what you have going out there. We're really confident and I'm really excited as far as we've got going out there on Xbox 360, especially the multiplayer and the single-player. People are going to get excited.
TVG: Thanks very much Joe.
TVG would like to thank Joe Halper for taking the time to sit down and discussing Frontlines: Fuel of War with us, together with the rest of the team at KAOS Studio and THQ's Greg Jones. Frontlines: Fuel of War is due out in early 2008 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, and you can check out our hands on preview with the title right here.
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Date Added:Wed 23rd Apr 2008 10:54
masterofgamesfu
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biggest Half-Life fan!
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Date Added:Fri 29th Feb 2008 11:54
Its all medicore in this game.. the visuals, the infantry - vehicle - movement.. etc. I could live with a weak presentation, but Frontlines also ... [ Read full comment... ]
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Date Added:Wed 27th Feb 2008 13:21