The Mess Hall

chrisdfa1 wrote:Multiplayer basically got torn apart by FirstPlay on there latest episode. Too similar to Battlefield and COD for my liking so not interested really.

Waiting for something different like.....Brink!

Homefront is a challenging shooter from a studio of self-made developers. Kaos Studios began as renowned mod makers for the Battlefield series before launching their first original work, Frontlines: Fuel of War, one of the first 64-player shooters on home consoles. Homefront is an equally ambitious step into advancing the possibilities of single-player shooter design. Its story comes from Red Dawn screenwriter John Milius. Kaos has cast his tale of North Korean invasion against a foreground of emotion, consequence, and violence. I recently had a chance to play the game's opening chapter and ask Lead Level Designer Rex Dickson some hard questions about the game's themes, mechanics, and improbable story concept.

IGN: One thing that strikes me about the game is the conflict between the themes of being a civilian and not a super soldier and the moment-to-moment nature of gameplay, which still seems very traditional for a shooter. There are waves of enemies coming in, a pretty standard shootout with an armored vehicle requiring C4 to blow up, and then you get a super weapon at the very end of the level to make you feel powerful. Have you tried to push back against that conflict at all?

Rex Dickson: In terms of the idea of killing off the "super soldier" we knew we couldn't dumb down the player's skill. You can't mess with the player's ability to shoot, aim, and hit targets correctly. We can't change the way that weapon works or feels because then it wouldn't feel good to people who know how to play FPS's. So we pretty much have to deliver [the themes] in the context of the fiction.


A makeshift camp shows the desperate nature of Homefront.

In terms of the end of the level with the C4 and all of that—the general theme we were going for was, rather than have this big arsenal of weapons, the player has to leech most of their weapons of the dead soldiers. The resistance has limited resources so they're forced to scrounge whatever they can off the people they kill. The Goliath at the end—what you call the big super weapon—that is all they have to level the playing field, the only weapon they have that can tip the odds in their favor. He's kind of like our version of Dog from Half-Life 2. We think of him more like a character than a feature. He does appear frequently throughout the first half of the game, but that's the only major weapon they have at their disposal.

IGN: Why can't you affect the player's ability to aim for the sake of the theme and creating emotion? Why can't you tell players this experience is going to be more about feeling than winning?

Rex Dickson: The thing is, what are you going to dumb down? Are you going to make the player's accuracy less in the beginning? For the player, if they put their crosshair on someone's head and the bullet misses because the designer's put in some function that says he hasn't learned to be accurate enough with this weapon yet--the player's going to say it's unsatisfying. Essentially the designer took control of that situation away from the player to serve a fictional need. I don't think you can do that to people.

If you put your crosshair on someone, your bullet's going to hit, that's how shooters work. It's like taking a traffic light and saying red, green, and yellow will become purple, white, and blue. Anyone who approached the traffic light wouldn't know how to interact with the situation, they wouldn't understand the language, it would break the rules that players have come to understand. I just don't think that's a good direction to go in.

IGN: But that assumes the necessary objective of any first person game has to be shooting another person. In real war, the moments where you're actually able to put an enemy in your sites and shoot them is a small fraction of one percent. It almost never happens. And that's the moment that almost never stops in shooter games. So if you're making thematic choices with the mechanics you have to also make thematic choices about the game objectives. If you're not willing to make a thematic choice with your mechanics, how can you ask the player to take the theme in the fiction seriously? Games like Killzone 2 took chances affecting the basic controls to make players feel differently.

Rex Dickson:I understand what you're saying, but I don't feel like you can take away something from an experienced player that they've already earned by nature of their history playing games like this over and over again. I do agree with your statement that if FPS's could get away from that mode where you spend 90% of your time mowing through an endless wave of enemy spawners—that's the golden chalice where we want to end up. But you need to take steps towards that. We mainly achieve those goals via our dialogue, fictional context, and what's going on in the scenes. We model ourselves after Half-Life, that feeling of being outnumbered, out-gunned, on the run. You're basically getting what you can off these dead enemies to get your next clip to fight on to the next space.

It does strike me what you say—Danny Bilson at THQ, who's the head of our label, hates core combat. He'll sit there and, as a designer I'll be like "OK, I need you to fight through about 3 minutes of core combat." After 30 seconds he'll be like, "Where's my moment? Where's my moment?" It would take us 5 years to make a game that has a moment every 30 seconds. But he's pushing us in this direction where it's like these unique moments have to counter-balance core combat fatigue or massacre fatigue.

You mention Killzone—I think it's a great example where you can go on for 5 minutes of killing and killing and killing. You're just waiting for the death counter to trip so you can move up to the next fight and it's 4 more minutes of the same thing. It's polished and it looks great, but man, it's exhausting. We call that massacre fatigue. It's something we talked to the designers about. This is going on too long, we're getting massacre fatigue, let's turn back the kill counter and get the player through this more quickly.

IGN: So how did that affect your approach to level design and objective design? It still feels like there are a lot of really familiar set pieces and objectives here.

Rex Dickson: I think most of the focus is on what's going on around you and what's happening to these civilians, how they're affected by this war, and your squad mates. I think this is a key point—if you look at any nation that's been occupied, you usually get segmentation into three groups. You get those who passively accept they've been occupied and this is their new life and just want to deal with it. There are those who choose to pick up arms and fight back. Then you have this other population that's kind of stuck in the middle. They don't want to choose either way, but they're inevitably affected by it.


What if this was your home?

What you'll see in our game is each character represents one of those different factions. The Connor character [the gung-ho rebel who rescues the player at the start] represents the more extremist side. He feels that if thousands of civilians need to die in order to get the Koreans out, so be it. The Boon character, who you meet later in the level, he is more focused on protecting American society. He feels that it's not worth civilian lives, his motivation is not killing Koreans but restoring American society. Rianna represents the human reaction to violence. She's not a trained soldier, she's not used to killing so she has very human responses when she sees all this violence. It's more about those elements and how they conflict with each other.

The other thing we're interested in expressing is this isn't a trained squad. They don't take orders from each other, they're just people working together. When one person says they're giving an order the other says, "You can't order me, I'm going to do what I need to do to stay alive." There's a lot of tension between them because nobody's in command. I get asked a lot if we have squad commands in the game. Absolutely not, we're all on the level with each other. It's not a traditional military structure and that's one of the things that's so unique about this game.

IGN: One of the things I was impressed by in the demo is how much detail there is in the world. Specifically the scene where you get stuck in a firefight in a woman's house and her baby is screaming throughout the whole fight. There's a great sense of how imperiled all the innocent people around you are by virtue of you making these gung-ho choices. How do you plan moments like those? Where do they come from?

Rex Dickson: It's interesting, when you have a game whose two pillars are "human cost" and "violence and consequences"—I could throw those out at you as marketing terms but when you start to think of it, those are really unique and challenging themes to bring into an FPS. If you strip that mother with the baby out of that scene, all it is is a classic defend encounter. It's got the classic ramping, enemies coming from multiple directions, guys enter the space. Adding the mother into it is a way of achieving those goals of violence and consequence and human cost in a traditional defend encounter. To us, these are the elements that push it over the top.


$19 gallons of gas could certainly lead to conflict.

You're going to get these standard FPS objectives and encounters, but this theme of violence and consequences is what makes Homefront so unique. The other thing about that scene, which I love—it points back to Half-Life, which we think did the best job of blurring story and gameplay—it was very important for us to keep the player immersed in it and not cut away to a cutscene. That whole scene where Boon is talking to the mother and reassuring her—the whole time you're in gameplay. The story is going on behind you. We're trying to blur the lines between what is story and what is gameplay. We're really giving homage to Half-Life in that regard.

IGN: You touched on ammo scarcity before, it's not something that hits you over the head, but it definitely feels conspicuous that you've only got a few reloads with each weapon, the numbers are always dwindling. How does that affect the way you thought about the levels and planning enemy encounters? It still feels like there are a lot of enemies coming at you. If you have 40 enemies coming over the horizon that's potentially 40 guns with extra clips and ammo for you to harvest, which could undercut the whole concept.

Rex Dickson: Each weapon has a certain amount of ammo left in it. It's not that we want you to stockpile weapons and ammo, it's more that we want you to use this weapon, exhaust it, pick up the next one and exhaust that. It's not so much like Half-Life where you have like 9 weapons on your list and you have to pick out which one is right for the job. This is more like you're fighting to get to the next pick-up and fighting to get to that next clip, which we feel is more how a resistance would fight. You are not in a position of power in this game. You are in a position of inferiority constantly, being chased, on the run, out-numbered and having to escape. There are moments in this chapter where you feel like a trapped rat crawling through these houses trying to stay undetected. As a designer, ammo scarcity is a very dangerous feature.

I could easily call out examples—I believe Medal of Honor just shipped with an unlimited pistol. I think a lot of games do that because god forbid the player ever runs out of ammo. It happens a lot in our review sessions where we're playing as a group of leads and someone runs out of ammo. They're looking out and see a weapon somewhere out there and they're thinking about going for it, they sprint out to get it, and just as they're coming up they die—everyone goes, "Ooooh!" You realize how much gameplay and drama you get out of just that one decision to not ensure the player always has ammo. It really came out of trying to deliver on the core theme of the game, which is that you're at a disadvantage and every resource is valuable to you.

IGN: I want to ask you about one of the bigger things that stood out to me with the theme, and it's another kind of dissonance between the fiction and what it feels inspired by. It's America that's being occupied in this game; Americans are the ones being victimized by a country that, right now, is among the poorest in the world. Being invaded and occupied is such a resonant idea right now, with Afghanistan and Iraq, but also similar tensions over the last couple of decades, in places like the Balkans, Georgia, Chechnya, Congo, Sudan, western China, Gaza, Lebanon, and a lot of other places.

Why use such an implausible fantasy like North Korea invading America, making Americans victims when there are such an incredible number of real world situations to draw from? I think of that shootout with the baby and how much more powerful if it might have been if it was, say, an American soldier trapped in an Afghani house, being shot at by the Taliban, and having to hear the shrieking of a poor Afghani baby and his or her mother.

Rex Dickson: The thing is, a soldier is there to do a job. They're trained to be killers, they're trained to be exposed to this stuff. I think Medal of Honor did a great job achieving this authentic experience but I can't relate to these guys. I'm looking at these Tier-1 guys and how emotionless they are when they kill—as a human being who's never experienced combat, I can't relate to this person. I make no connection with them.

The reason we chose to do it the way we did is—if we portray you and the people around you as civilians our hope is that people will register more with that than they will be by a bunch of emotionless killers. Our characters go out of their way to express feelings about what they're doing and seeing and the violence all around them. If you did put it in Iraq or you did a World War II game where you're a person in the Warsaw Uprising or whatever, there's a part of it that would separate from people because they can't relate to what happened there. If it's in your home country and it's a place you can imagine—I think our ultimate goal is to have people playing this game ask themselves the question, "If this happened here would I have the balls to pick up a weapon and fight?" If we can get that emotion out of people, I think we've achieved our goal.

IGN: But still, you could have gone somewhere where that theme actually resonates and has a real, current precedent. You look at Kurdistan, the war in Georgia in 2008, the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan—these really are real world incidents of people who had to figure out how to become soldiers themselves, and fight through really severe resource limitations to preserve themselves. Everything you're talking about really happened, and it usually happens to the poorer people of the world, not the richest. There are so many things going on in the world and to chose North Korea as the one country that'll become a new empire and America it's victim—it's almost exactly the least probable of all possible scenarios.

Rex Dickson: I think, if you look at history, you look at after World War I, people would say World War II should never have happened—how broken Germany was, and how cut off and isolated they were. History is filled with these empires that were indestructible and fell, and countries that had no right rose quickly—


Could North Korean helicopters really fly over American soil?

IGN: It's actually the opposite. World War II was, in large part, a consequence of how little of Germany had been decimated. They went into a recession and were isolated diplomatically, but their core infrastructure and economy was left intact. They were able to rebound very quickly, which was a big part of why the Allies were so intent on absolutely destroying the major German cities at the end of World War II. World War I ended in an armistice and the German Revolution overthrowing the Kaiser, it wasn't the total firebombing and civilian-targeted ruination that happened at the end of World War II.

Rex Dickson: Let me answer it another way. The reason we chose America and Americans is because—if you look at Eastern Europe, Africa, or Iraq, they're used to violence. There have been wars in these countries, they're exposed to it. America is unique in that we have this mentality that we're almost indestructible. We're the kings, we're dominant. We live this life of excess and convenience that most people don't have. Ripping that away from average Americans is a key theme in Homefront. Of all the cultures on the planet Americans are perhaps the least equipped to deal with something like this. Most people wouldn't imagine that it could happen, let alone how they would react to it if it did happen. Some of these other cultures are hardened by this stuff and have seen it for years. Americans have almost never seen it, and wouldn't it be interesting to explore how they would react if it did happen here?

IGN: Fair enough. Thanks for answering my questions!