Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising Preview

VideoGamer.com: What competitive multiplayer features will the game support?

TB: There is competitive multiplayer. We have two different modes. One is called Annihilation, and that is kind of different areas around the main island map. We’ve chosen some choke points where it’s basically big engagements and lots of people fighting.

And then there’s Infiltration, which is a very cool mode where you either choose to play as the United States Marine Corp on a smaller sized team, so there’s only ten people in that – there’s three fire teams, a sniper team, and two spec ops teams – and they have an objective to get in and destroy. However they’ve got to play against 22 PLA, so it’s an unbalanced but balanced game mode. They can choose whatever tactics they want. It’s quite good. It’s something we’ve been playing a lot recently at work, testing balancing, that kind of thing. It’s great fun because there are so many different tactics you can use - again, 360 degree map.

VideoGamer.com: How many players is that in total?

TB: On console it’s eight players on both modes. On PC it’s 32 players. The console game won’t suffer from lack of people though. We’re so proud of the advanced AI we’ve got in the game, that’s in the game you play on console.

VideoGamer.com: So it makes up the numbers with AI bots?

TB: Absolutely. You still have 32 people playing at the same time; just some of them are AI. That allows players to come in and either be on the same fire team, or say the three of us are playing, you come in on one fire team, you’ll be a fire team leader, I’ll be a fire team leader, he’ll be a fire team leader, so we’ve got entire fire teams below us. You also have the squad leader.

We are planning on DLC in the future. That’s about all we’re saying. We’re not just giving people the game and going that’s it, we’re off doing something else. We fully appreciate the support the community has given us, and so we’re going to be supporting the community for a long time to come with Dragon Rising while developing additional products.

VideoGamer.com: What’s the latest on the mission editor? As far as I’m aware it’s PC only. Is there any chance it might come to the console versions as well?

TB: It’s something we made a decision about a long time ago when we realised how difficult it was on the console. Never say never, but it’s a very tricky point. We’re very proud of the fact that we’re releasing the game simultaneously on PC and console, which obviously the original title didn’t do – it took a long time before it came to the console market.

In that respect, yep, it is a bit of a niggly point that the console gamers are annoyed with. Unfortunately it’s something we can’t do anything about at the moment. But never say never.

MS: The key thing with this iteration is it’s the first one we’ve developed obviously. We’ve got the EGO tech we’ve leveraged to do this. Obviously we had to change it quite a bit to achieve this level of sophistication. It’s such a big streaming world. We really wanted to make sure that the core experience is really solid. We ploughed all our time into that. The core infantry experience is as good as we can get it. It’s as close to war anyone can get. Future kind of stuff? We’ve got loads of cool ideas.

The PC mission editor is the exact same one our guys used to generate missions. It’s very strong. It’s easy to just jump in there and put some stuff down. It’s got an immensely powerful back end. So, leveraging all that on console would have been an absolutely monumental task. We wanted to concentrate on the game and making it top notch.