September 28, 2009

Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising's Tim Browne and Michael Smith on What it Takes to Make a Realistic Shooter
By Louis Bedigian

“When we set out to make Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, we made a decision at the start that authenticity was key to our game.”

When you think of first-person shooters, the last thing that comes to mind is a strategy that involves careful planning. Sure, there are smart, skillful strategies that are likely to make you win and other, less intelligent options that are likely to get you killed. But if you can't go in guns blazing, what's the point, right?

Wrong. That's the way traditional, run-of-the-mill shooters and Halo clones have made us think. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising hopes to change that thinking. "The first thing you notice when you play Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is that you can't go into a fight in a John Rambo style," said Tim Browne, Senior Game Designer. "You'll get yourself and your fireteam killed straightaway. This is something we learned very early on in development when speaking to various military servicemen and advisors. We wanted the one-bullet-can-kill type of gameplay, which makes Dragon Rising at first a slightly slower-paced game than some of the more unrealistic arcade-y shooters on the market.

"One of the great things with our tactical sandbox shooter is that you're on a massive island with objectives to complete, we give you suggestions of how to complete those objectives but it really is up to the player to make the decisions. We're not a tunnel shooter, you can attack objectives from 360 degrees and use all sort of different tactics to get the job done. The player will learn that some strategies work better than others, and some may get their entire fireteam killed. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising also brings with its realism a level of authenticity that I don't think has been seen on a console before."

Vehicles are going to be a significant part of this sequel. What kinds of vehicles are being developed for the game, how often can you use them, and what separates this gameplay style from every other action game incorporating vehicles?

Tim Browne: We have a whole array of vehicles that appear in our game that the player will get to use on different missions and in the multiplayer modes. These range from basic transport vehicles, boats, armored personnel carriers to main battle tanks like the M1A2 Abrams and attack choppers such as the AH-6J "Little Bird". We model all of the positions people would take in real life to operate them so for instance if you're playing multiplayer and you want to use the M1A2, you're going to need a driver, a gunner and a commander to utilize this vehicle to its full potential.

Dragon Rising is attempting to redefine the size of a battlefield with more than 135 square miles of space. That sounds great, but a lot of these big, wide-open games end up being repetitive and boring, partly because of the travel time between locations, and also because of the lack of variety of things to do while exploring the massive space. Knowing this, I imagine Dragon Rising has been quite a challenging project, especially if you've found away around the pitfalls of massive environments…?

TB: We have a very large and dedicated art team which has helped enormously with the very lush environment that Operation Flashpont: Dragon rising takes place in. We have what we call areas of interest (or AOIs) through the whole of the island. These are things such as fishing villages, an old crumbling monastery, an air field, a quarry, and lots of other cool locations. These were placed and chosen with realism in mind so they have a much more natural feel. Unlike other wide-open games you may find yourself jumping in a DPV (desert patrol vehicle) and exploring the island for some hours.

We'd love to hear something new about the Platoon-Based Combat – you know, something that hasn't been in the fact sheets or press releases thus far. Can you give us any such details?

TB: When you're in the map screen this allows the player to give more complex commands and piece together waypoint strings. These strings can be given to individual fireteam members in your fireteam but also to separate fireteams within your squad which allows the player to do some huge and complicated strategies and realistic military maneuvers.

Dragon Rising's graphics are insanely impressive. Tell us about how you're producing these effects.

Michael Smith, Art Lead: Creating an impressive battlefield was the main focus for the art team, and also the most challenging. We used huge amounts of real world reference and data in order to authentically reproduce every aspect of our world. Everything from accurate foliage, realistic terrain, destructible buildings, right through to the soldiers camouflage patterns, vehicle weapons and hatches have been painstakingly recreated.

We also have some fantastic technology in the Ego engine, which lets us create the impressively large vistas you fight over. A key aspect was developing the streaming technology to provide varying ‘levels of detail’ this lets us use more basic objects when they are in the distance, so the game runs fast, then when those same objects are close up we switch to more detailed objects, with the awesome fidelity we are really proud of.

To bring the whole scene to life we use our advanced post-production and lighting systems to really tie the scenes together with strong color tints and lighting effects.

When modern ordnance is used in the real world, huge amounts of dust and debris is thrown into the air, vehicles burn for a long time after they are hit… In order to do the visual effects justice we spent a lot of time creating a powerful suite of tools and technology, so when the artillery and bombs start dropping you get to witness the largest explosions ever seen on a console shooter!

I've heard that a lot of time has been spent on the sound of the game, particularly in making it as realistic as possible, but also in choosing the right score.

TB: When we set out to make Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, we made a decision at the start that authenticity was key to our game. Often games come out and look pretty, have great gameplay but then often the sound is over looked. We recorded all of the weapons in the game for that extra realism hit. We also simulate the speed of sound which looks (and sounds) awesome when you call in an artillery barrage over 1km away from you. You see huge explosions going off and then after about a second the sound hits you and this is something we're very proud of at Codemasters.

The voices in the game don’t sound robotic like some other games on the market, they've also been recorded three times so we have the speech in a forced whisper, spoken normally and a shouting version all to do with the tempo of the game and if the player is being stealthy or in a massive fire fight.

Thank you for your time.

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